I am pleased to announce that the Training Team has launched a new Onboarding Program today! Go ahead, and check out the new onboarding program below:
Program overview
The onboarding program will lead you down one of 5 paths corresponding to 5 “areas of contribution” in the Training Team. Regardless of which path you choose, you will be guided through:
- The Training Team’s mission
- Creating a WordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/, Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., and GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ account and understanding what each are used for in the Training Team
- Completing your first contribution (quick tasks that can be completed within 30-60 minutes)
- Further contribution opportunities beyond onboarding
- Introduction to team meeting times
At the end of each path, there is a Google form inviting you to leave your name as a contributor interested in continuing to contribute to the team. The team has long wanted a better way to track active contributors in the team, and this is our most recent attempt to do this.
Project timeline summary
The team identified a need to improve the onboarding process for new contributors back in June 2022. Since then, multiple discussions have happened both on this blog and in Slack as to what that onboarding process would look like.
- A formal proposal was published in October 2022: Proposal: Create a new onboarding experience to the Training Team.
- Volunteers assembled to start working on this in November 2022.
- Drafts for were made public for review in January 2023. Feedback was received both in the project thread above, and in GitHub issues tracking the creation of each new handbook page: GitHub label – 2023 Onboarding Paths.
- The new Onboarding Project was launched in February 2023 – in time for WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Asia!
What’s next?
Try it out!
As a team, we will be promoting this new Onboarding Program to all new contributors. During onboarding, contributors are encouraged to reach out in Slack for any help they may need. In order to provide the best support to them, we invite all current Training Team members to walk through this onboarding program, too! Test the path you’re currently involved in first. And test the other paths out, too!
We’re open to feedback!
As the team continues to grow and evolve, so should the onboarding program. If you have feedback about the program, please leave your thoughts in the #training Slack channel at any time.
What are some “quick wins” for new contributors?
As part of this project, we’ve created a new handbook page titled Quick contributions you can make now. The intention is to list quick contributions one can do that take no more than 30-60 minutes.
Content creation generally take hours, days, or weeks to complete. This makes it difficult for (new) contributors to find what they can do exactly with smaller pockets of time. We hope this new page will help people who just have small amounts of time to identify areas they can contribute to easily.
At the moment, the page links to the initial contributions mentioned in the onboarding program. If Training Team members have any ideas about other quick wins (tasks no longer than 30-60 minutes) people could contribute to, please comment on this post with those ideas.
Finally, a big “Thank You” go to all Training Team members who have been involved in this project! Special thanks go to @webtechpooja @digitalchild @amitpatelmd who volunteered as project members, and reviewers @nomadskateboarding @askdesign who went through and reviewed the program before it was published.
