Dev-squad GitHubGitHubGitHub 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/ triage: Thursdays 07:00 UTC
The Training Team nominated and voted on a number of motivated and dedicated contributors to the team. The new Team Representative nomination, voting, and vetting period is a special time where folks in the community affirm work ethic and confidence, and the outcome of these votes ensure fresh leadership and new perspectives guide the team.
It’s been amazing to watch the growth the team has experienced last year, and the rise in leadership in various individuals. This year, the Training Team keeps 2023 Team Representatives Benjamin Evans and Destiny Kanno, and adds one new Team Representative; Laura Adamonis.
This is a post to share more about your newly nominated Team Reps!
Laura Adamonis lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with her husband and has two kids. Laura got started in WordPress in 2022 after looking for a career change that would provide a flexible and remote work environment. She started her agency, Add A Little Digital Services, in 2022. Laura started contributing to the training team in 2022 by co-hosting. She continued to co-host and then became a content creator in 2023.
Laura has a background in design and education that she brings to the training team. She is a previous Montessori teacher and was the robotics coordinator for the Greensboro Science Center where she taught robotics, engineering and coding.
Laura is a co-organizer for the Triad WordPress MeetupMeetupAll local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. and is a contributor to the DEIB, photo, and coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. teams.
Benjamin Evans is from Fukuoka, Japan, where he lives happily with his wife and puppy. Ben started making sites with WordPress in 2014. After teaching technical subjects to both undergraduate and postgraduate students for 5 years, Ben made a move to join Automattic in 2019. Since joining, Ben helped create a Japanese support team, created employee education curriculum, and worked on new employee training before becoming a Community Education Manager in 2022.
Ben has been a Co-organizer of a local Meetup group, has spoken at WordCamps, been a Training Team table lead for Contributor Days, and is a frequent Online Workshop facilitator on Learn WordPress.
In his non-working time, Ben likes to travel, play the flute, take long drives, and read books.
Destiny Kanno is from California, USA, and currently lives in Tokyo Japan with her husband and Formosan Mountain Dog. Destiny is currently Head of Community Education at Automattic, but she got started with WordPress in 2016 while working for the Japanese digital agency ASA Digital before joining Automattic as a Happiness Engineer in 2017. Her professional journey has allowed her to experience the various faces of WordPress inclusive of its end users and developers, enterprise customers, and open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. community.
Destiny became more involved with the WordPress community in November 2021, and began dedicating more of her time to the Training Team specifically in early 2022. Outside of the Training Team, Destiny is also a BlackPress Co-Organizer, a Japanese WordPress community member, and the Sponsors Team lead for WordCampWordCampWordCamps 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 2024.
In her free time Destiny enjoys traveling, making music, watching films, and dancing.
Nomination Results
Over the course of three weeks the Training Team voted for their three nominees. Below are the results of the vote.
While the voting helps inform the vetting and final decision process, it is not the only way the current representatives evaluate the candidates. As noted in our Team Rep handbook page, the 2023 reps evaluated the three candidates using the following criteria as a guide:
After the voting period is over, the current team reps will review the candidates in descending order from the highest votes and evaluate their eligibility based on the following criteria:
Whether or not they have been a Training Team Representative within the last 2 years.
Diversity of the team repTeam RepA Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. group as evaluated through the Team Values.
Based on the above, we jointly decided that Laura Adamonis best fits the above criteria.
Within the past year Laura has moved from the Performing step in our contributor Ladder to the Leading step, and continues to contribute to the team as a Content Creator Faculty Member who creates video tutorials and hosts Online Workshops for the wider WordPress Community. With her outstanding commitment, the 2023 Team Representatives are excited to invite her to the team and look forward to working alongside her in this capacity.
Once again, we give huge thanks to our offboarding 2023 Team Representative @webtechpooja for her amazing dedication to the team and thoughtful collaboration with her fellow co-representatives.
The new Training Team Representatives are delighted to be serving the community in this capacity this year and look forward to what we will all accomplish together.
You can reach out to the Reps in the #training channel in the Make WordPress SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
GitHubGitHubGitHub 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/ labels have been reduced from over 120 to just 27.
Issue templates have been reduced from 9 to 5.
3 workflows have been set up to automate tasks:
Anyone can now self-assign issues by typing //assign in a issue comment.
Anyone can send their issue to the relevant project board by typing either //dev, //content, or //handbook when submitting feedback.
Faculty members can add content development checklists to their issues by typing either //tutorial, //online-workshop, //lesson-plan, or //course in either the issue itself or in a comment.
2 new handbook pages have been published to document these changes:
How We Use GitHub and other handbook pages have been updated to reflect these changes.
Learn more at next week’s Online Workshops
@bsanevans will be hosting two Online Workshops next week to demonstrate these changes live, and answer any question folks may have. These Online Workshops are a perfect opportunity for:
Training Team Faculty and contributors who have been contributing to the team and want to get up-to-date with these latest changes.
New contributors interested in contributing to the Training Team and wanting to know how we use GitHub.
Any contributor from other Make WordPress teams interested in implementing GitHub processes to their team, too.
Come sign up to these workshops from the links below. Times are shown in your local timezone. A recording will be published after the event for anyone who could not attend.
While these changes bring much needed refinements to the Training Team’s processes, there’s always room for further improvements. If you have any feedback, feel free to comment below, or bring them up directly in the Training Team any time.
Summary: In an effort to streamline the team’s GitHub repo, the Next steps for GitHub updates project is looking to reduce the number of GitHubGitHubGitHub 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/ issue templates in the repo from 9 to 5. The project is also looking for input as the current list of 119 labels is reassessed and reduced. Please leave your feedback on the proposed changes by October 17th (Tuesday).
Please review the new list of GitHub issue templates
Below is a table listing the current 9 issue templates, and the 5 proposed templates they’ll correspond to. Each of the new templates have already been created and can be previewed from https://github.com/WordPress/Learn/issues/new/choose. (Scroll to the bottom of the list, and you’ll see these new templates prefaced with “_do-not-use_”.) Please leave any questions, suggestions, or other comments about these templates below.
Current issue templates
Proposed issue templates
Bug Report Template Content Feedback
Feedback
Topic Idea
Content Development (general)
Lesson Plan Template Tutorial Template Online Workshop Template Course Template
Content Development (for Faculty)
Content Translation Template
Content Translation
Meeting Agenda Template
Meeting Agenda
Some points to note in these changes:
All feedback pertaining to Learn WordPress, regardless of whether it is regarding the website itself or the content, will be submitted in one issue. Automation similar to what the Docs team has will be set up, allowing any contributor (regardless of GitHub access) to triage and send these to their respective projects where they’ll be actioned on.
The current “Topic Idea” template will be renamed to clarify this is actually the issue content creators should use when creating content. These issues will be highlighted to SMEs to be prioritized in their topic vetting process.
Faculty who will immediately create content themselves may skip the vetting process. The four content templates the repo currently have are designed for this process, but weren’t labeled as such, and were therefore confusing general contributors. These will be consolidated into a single template marked “for faculty”. Automation similar to what the Docs team has will be set up, allowing Faculty to call the respective development checklist for their content type with a command.
Help us review the current list of GitHub labels
The project has exported the current list of GitHub labels into this Google Spreadsheet. We’re looking for Training Team contributors with experience in labeling issues in the team’s repo to help us document the purpose of each label.
Once completed, the project will:
Reassess labels based on their current use.
Similar labels may be consolidated.
Labels may be renamed for clarity.
Some project-specific labels may be replaced with custom fields.
Document the purpose of each label in the handbook.
Documentation will also include how new labels should be added and which labels are used in automation and, therefore, should not be modified.
Thank you for your feedback!
We’re looking for feedback on the proposed changes to issue templates and documentation regarding the repo’s current list of labels, by October 17th (Tuesday).
@webtechpooja and @jominney were co-authors of this post. Thanks also go to @yuli-yang for exporting the list of GitHub labels for the project!
Last year, the Training Team identified a need to clarify the contributor roles in the team. This post first outlines what improvements have been made over the last 12 months. It then proposes updating the team’s Contributor Ladder handbook page from a linear ladder to a five-path ladder, matching the team’s onboarding and faculty program structures.
Achievements from the last 12 months
Last year, the Training Team identified multiple needs in regards to the team roles. These were summarized in [Discussion] Reimagining the Training Team contributor roles. Many processes have since been implemented in response to these needs, and the team is seeing not just more contributors, but more engagement from contributors, too! Let’s take a moment to celebrate these wins!
Identified Need
Implemented Process
Easing the onboarding process for newcomers and beginners.
Having a few folks who can focus on sorting GitHubGitHubGitHub 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/ issues consistently would be beneficial.
Assign a point of contact for new contributors to reach out to in each role.
The use of SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. groups has made it easier for new contributors to reach out to all faculty members in a specific area of expertise at once without the need to identify and pingPingThe act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” individuals.
It would be excellent to have onboarding videos/lesson plans for each role.
The team’s onboarding program walks users through their first contribution, regardless of which of the five areas of expertise they choose.
Continue building the handbook so contributors have more precise guidance.
The team handbook was audited, with additional resources added in particular to the How-To Guides section.
Clear guidelines for new joiners, especially for basic and Intermediate-level contributors.
There is, however, one identified need which has yet to be addressed:
Better team role implementation, so new contributors will also have a clear picture of their assigned task(s).
The Training Team’s Team Roles and Contributor Ladder, as currently seen in the handbook, were last discussed in 2020. These were laid out in a linear progression to match the structure of the Training Team at that time.
Below is an image of a proposed grid, placing 30 Training Team contributor roles (or tasks) in a five-path contributor ladder. The five paths match the areas of contribution already defined in the team’s onboarding program and Faculty program. The same data is added below the image in a table also.
Click to see a table with the same data shown in the image above.
Please share your feedback regarding this proposal by October 16th. Here are some questions to help you get started.
What are your thoughts about the five-path contributor ladder model?
How is the placement of contributor roles in the table? Should any roles be moved to another area of contribution, or to a different stage of volunteering?
Are there any other currently active roles in the Training Team that are missing from this table?
A handful of folks who regularly contribute to the Training Team attended the recent Community Summit. Anyone can read the official notes from each session on https://make.wordpress.org/summit/. With almost 30 sessions that took place, though, there is a lot of information to consume there.
Training Team reps discussed how it would be great if those who attended the Community Summit could share their observations and learnings that pertain specifically to the Training Team with the team. The goal is to highlight important information to Training Team members who were not at the summit, and may also not have the time to read through the different notes.
If you attended the Community Summit: Come leave a comment below with any observations you came home from the summit with that would pertain specifically to the Training Team.
If you did not attend the Community Summit: Follow this post from the button below to receive an email notification anytime someone comments.
Anyone is welcome to add questions or additional comments on what other people have written also. Thanks!
Summary: This post gives a brief overview of what updates have been introduced to the team’s GitHubGitHubGitHub 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/ project management system so far, and outlines the next updates being planned. If you’d like to get involved with the next round of process updates, please comment below 😃
Updates so far
The Training Team migrated its project management tool from Trello to GitHub in early 2022. Since then, different updates have been implemented to the team’s project boards. These have included:
Making use of GitHub-specific tools
Creating entirely new projects for new processes (such as content localization)
Ensuring current processes enable the growing number of contributors in the team to effectively contribute to the team goals
Triaging the backlog of issues accumulated from TrelloTrelloProject management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. days
The team handbook now also has documentation regarding the team’s GitHub repository structure, and step-by-step guides for different team processes that use GitHub. These can be found on How we use GitHub and its child pages.
Current issue – checklists
Training Team processes have relied on checklists for a long time. However, due to the way access is set up in the WordPress GitHub organization, GitHub checklists can generally only be ticked by those who added the checklist to the issue. This has made it difficult for multiple contributors to effectively collaborate on a single issue. The checklists added to issue templates have been somewhat ineffective, as the person who submits an issue is in many cases not the person who will actually work on the issue.
To get around this issue, an idea was brought forth to move GitHub checklists into the handbook, and direct contributors to copy-paste the checklists into GitHub issues when they work on an issue. This update has been implemented into the following administrative processes, and has received positive feedback so far.
It’s time to make similar changes regarding checklists to content development processes next. Here are specific tasks that need to be completed:
Move checklists currently in content development issue templates into the handbook as markdown text which contributors can copy-paste as needed
Update issue templates and project interfaces to link to the respective handbook entries
Audit handbook entries around content development processes and update to reflect the new GitHub setup
Additionally, the team’s GitHub repository currently has 114 labels, of which 20 are not being used on any open issue. I suggest we audit the current list of labels and make sure they match the current processes and tracking needs in the team.
I will be able to start implementing these updates from July 31st, and am looking for one or two other volunteers to collaborate with. If you would like to get involved, please comment below, and I’ll discuss next steps with you!
Final thoughts
Switching project management tools is not an easy feat! I appreciate the efforts of Training Team members before me who got this work started.
The team also has a desire to implement automations into the GitHub repository to automate some of the manual processes. If you have experience with GitHub automations, and would like to help implement those into the team’s repository, please comment below.
The Training Team has been discussing switching from meeting times that alternate each week to having just one set of consistent meeting times that don’t change. Thank you to everyone who provided input.
Overview
Starting July 10th (Mon), the Training team will be conducting four meetings each week at these times:
Global Team Meeting: Tuesdays at 07:00 UTC
APAC Coffee Hour: To be decided
Dev-squad GitHubGitHubGitHub 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/ Triage Session: Thursdays at 07:00 UTC
EMEA/Americas Coffee Hour: Fridays at 13:00 UTC
The official meeting calendar, the team handbook, the Welcome message on the team blog, and the sidebarSidebarA sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. waidgets, have all been update to reference these new times.
For reference, here is a list of when the next meetings will be held, shown in your local time:
Fill out this form with times you’d be able to attend. Form submission will close on July 21st, and the APAC Coffee Hours will resume from the week of July 24th.
Anyone can contribute to discussions asynchronously, and meeting notes will be published by the end of each week.
Coffee Hours – 1 hour
Video-based social chats. You can also attend with audio only, or via text in the SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. thread that will be created at the time of the meeting.
There is no formal agenda. These are designed for team members to connect with each other, and are also great opportunities to ask questions about contributing to the team.
Text-based meeting in the #meta-learn channel in Slack where we triage pull requests and issues regarding Learn WordPress website development.
The triage session’s focus is to help move GitHub issues forward. We will not be reviewing/verifying code, but instead reaching out to the issue submitters, helping them move their requests forward.
Summary: The Training Team is looking for community members to join the team as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)! SMEs lend their expertise by vetting content topic ideas and becoming sounding boards for the Content Creators that develop content. We’ll be hosting Online Workshops to demonstrate these tasks and answer any questions.
Online Workshop: How to vet content topic ideas for the WordPress Training Team
Learn.WordPress.org (Learn WordPress) is the WordPress project’s official learning platform. Contributors from all around the world create new content for Learn WordPress regularly.
Before a piece of content is created, the topic of that content is vetted for accuracy and relevance. Learning objectives are set, and related resources are collected. These tasks are completed by the team’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). SMEs may also be contacted by Content Creators as the content is being developed, assisting by providing additional information to create accurate and informative content.
If you are interested in sharing your expertise and contributing to the Training Team as an SME, then great! Come join one of the Online Workshops mentioned at the top of this posts, where we’ll walk you through the tasks of an SME and answer any questions you may have.
To get the most out of these Online Workshops, make sure you have:
As a team, let’s find opportunities in our content where we can actively promote the Learn WordPress platform more.
Background
I was involved in multiple conversations recently where the Training Team’s Brand Usage Guidelines and Promotional Guidelines were being discussed. As the WordPress project evolves, and as the needs of contributors/learners change, it’s good practice to approach our guidelines with curiosity – Why are the guidelines set the way they are? Are they still applicable to us today? Are revisionsRevisionsThe WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. needed to better reflect our mission?
A few concerns were being discussed in these recent conversations:
Should content on Learn WordPress link to individual/business websites or social media accounts?
Should content on Learn WordPress link to external educational websites about WordPress?
What extent (if any) of prior contributions should we seek in content creators for Learn WordPress?
I see the fact these questions were raised as a sign that the Training Team is growing! We’re seeing more contributors getting involved with content creation. And these content creators are coming from a more diverse background than we’ve historically seen in the team.
There were a few underlying trains of thought that led to the discussion points above:
What is a good balance between content creators giving “selfless contribution” and receiving “reasonable exposure” for their contributions?
What is a healthy relationship between Learn WordPress and other educational platforms that teach WordPress? What if these platforms require payment for their resources?
Is it important that content creators have a track record of making general contributions to WordPress before they make content for Learn WordPress? And if so, how can that be objectively assessed?
For each of these thoughts, there were a wide range of opinions. And since opinions varied, I tried to flip the questions around in my mind. Rather than focusing on what we don’t want to happen, is there any practice we are wanting to happen more?
Proposal
I propose that we, as a team, actively look for opportunities in our content to promote the Learn WordPress platform. For example, what about concluding every Tutorial and Online Workshop recording with an invitation for folks to come to Learn WordPress to learn more? This would be similar to what many YouTubers do at the end of a video, asking viewers to come to their channel to see more content.
Currently, the team guidelines allow presenters to make reasonable callouts to their social media accounts. How about we add, though, to always call out the Learn WordPress platform as the final call-to-action in a piece of content? I can see this being easily applied to video content (Tutorials and Online Workshops,) but we could probably do the same in Courses, too.
As a start to this discussion, a new section has been added to the team handbook on Promotional Guidelines titled Actively promote Learn WordPress and other official WordPress content. What are your thoughts of this proposal, and the new section in the handbook? Please leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.
Thank you to @angelasjin for input when writing this post.
