Category Archives: Meeting Recap

Melinda 8:04 pm on August 22, 2017  

Recap of August 2, 2017 Meeting

@aimeegc is working on the content flow audit process and is working to have something by the end of September.

@conradhallauthor has completed the first stage of content inventory and will now begin to identify the state of each piece with the help of @coachwp and incorporate testing feedback

@bethsoderberg and @melindahelt will take a look at SupportFlow and see what needs to happen there.

@coachwp reminded us about https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PPb9Y9eXhdZXS7QJYCcWXzyMZRVVoVDLXrEbYyTHfnY/edit#gid=0 which will be helpful to the inventory that @conradhallauthor is working on

@aimeegc mentioned in regards to processing lesson plan testing feedback (Google Spreadsheet) “This may or may not be helpful, but the name for what we’re starting to veer into is actually a whole thing called Program Evaluation (taking feedback, results, questions, etc, and making sense of it to determine whether something is working well or not, as well as turning all that data and results into actionable next steps) so it was smart to have a person working on this only, and we may want to come back to that once we have a content flow to discuss. Just stating it for the record at this point. There are people who devote their career solely to this part of what we’re endeavoring to do”

@bethsoderberg brought up a topic from our last video call that we determined that folks are not actually using our lesson plans as a script when delivering the lessons. People are not reading them word for word (which we agreed is a good thing!)

We will not be ditching the current lesson plans, but would like to brainstorm, over the long run, what format we want our lessons to have.

Once we determine a format, we will reformulate one or two plans and test those, in order to confirm the new format. THEN we may work on refactoring existing plans to fit the new, tested format.

We discussed an outline format, similar to something that could be converted to slides by the instructor.

We also discussed the original assumption that instructors didn’t already know everything (and didn’t need to) in order to pick up a lesson plan and teach it.

@aaimeeg shared a sample lesson plan format: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JDgl8BJ9c7Q2moaUkyG075RD5wlX0Yb0xsEZlME4aYI/edit

@aimeegc shared the following from WordCamp for Publishers:

A lot of what I heard was about the frustration that WordPress developers aren’t ramped up enough for the kinds of developer positions open (in Publishing, but I bet this is true elsewhere), and it would be great to channel people’s desire to learn and get good at WordPress specific to goals and industry. WordPress developing is context-specific, so it would be great to see more support or direction being applied to what people want to do with what they’re learning about WordPress.

I’m not entirely sure how that should fit into our scope as it currently exists, but if our goal is to provide official training and skill building to become professional wordpress developers, through helping teachers of WordPress teach others, then it might be worthwhile to entertain how we might consider this need from our wider WordPress community

@bethsoderberg mentioned that this could potentially be addressed in the future workshop plans rather than individual lesson plans themselves.

gonza166 8:26 pm on August 8, 2017  

Recap of August 8, 2017 meeting

1. Content flow and process (see Aimee’s post on this for quick reference)

  • Talked about item 1 and 4 in the post first
  • Item 1:
    • David’s share—copyediting a lesson used to be what group meant by “content flow.” Content flow is slightly bigger now to include the idea generating and pitching of lessons, then testing lessons and getting/using that feedback
  • Item 4:
    • Beth: general consensus on what the process should be or is, but implementation is where we’re getting stuck. Different people come and go, and they interpret the process differently. This creates inconsistency and confusion around what is most recent and up to date and the final choice
    • Scott and Melissa: Yes. We need to just state what is, and include that as a handbook page to clarify how to implement/improve documentation
    • Julie: we need to lock down a process to be THE process. We suffer from the open source collective action inertia. The process can serve as a president/decision maker
  • Item 3:
    • Have tried all the ways to manage/own steps
    • From what I am hearing, this is closely intertwined with volunteer management and expectations in open source community
    • Content management and documentation closely linked
  • Clues to track down existing information to help with getting this endeavor to have a definitive process underway:
    • Trello board won’t work, but may have most up to date information/data
      • Consider Github—then:
        • wordpress.org = handbook only
        • wordpress.org = lessons
        • Github = in between
      • Copywriting plugins to manage who is managing steps is a nixed idea
      • Constrained by Make site (its reorganization disoriented many). Anything else we use must be free and open source
    • Five buckets make the top level flow
      • Vetting ideas
      • Create lesson plans + edit
      • Test
      • Combine into workshops (curricula)
      • Maintenance
      • Onboarding/Welcome wagon/who writes a lesson plan and how?

2. Inventory of what we have

  • A bit of clarifying Q&A around observations so far
    • Theme lessons are not necessarily how to develop themes that meet WP standards, they are meant to teach people how to use themes
    • WP handbook versus our team—don’t match, but we’re teaching to a simplified bar
    • To include or not include plugin lessons—there is a moratorium on them so maybe put them to the side for now
  • Observation on lack of clarity around learner levels and lack of connection to pre-requisite knowledge assets
  • Style guide says to write a script (dialogue) for the lesson plan instead of the information to cover — conversation around script v. no script
    • Verdict: we are not about scripted lessons—if you do not know what you’re doing (yet), don’t teach it!
  • Conrad suggests another section in the lesson plan template on prerequisites for the teacher as well as the learner

3. Team goals

  • Not covered today

4. Next steps

  • Conrad will continue with preliminary inventory. Should be done by Monday next week (14). Next stage is an estimated further 3 weeks
  • Aimee will continue to move forward with content flow work. Will also need to take time because of client deadlines and speaking at WordCamp for Publishers next week
  • Other next steps rest of group can be working on:
    • How lesson plans are structured, reformulated
    • What are our goals around a usable lesson plan? (Based on experiences and insights from testing)

 

Beth Soderberg 9:37 pm on May 23, 2017  

Recap for May 22, 2017 Meeting

Slack Log (Requires Slack login to view. Set one up if you don’t have a Slack account)

Special Announcement

@chanthaboune will be stepping away from the team as she’s been asked to lead a second team at work. Very special thanks to @chanthaboune for the spirit, insights, support, and contributions to this team. We appreciate everything you’ve done and will miss you (but will see you soon!).

We will need a new backup for @bethsoderberg moving forward.

Lesson Plan Updates

  • @jenwill is working on Enqueuing Scripts and Styles after a productive conversation in the Slack channel over the last week or so where the team decided to keep this plan simple, with room to expand into other plans as necessary later.
  • @donkiely is working on an updated version of the Child Themes lesson plan and it needs one more round of feedback before it heads into copyediting. Everyone is encouraged to take a look and leave their feedback in Slack.
  • We are not able to audit the lesson plans for the 4.8 release until our issue with images not showing up in our lesson plans is fixed. We’ve submitted a ticket with systems and are waiting for a response.

Copyediting Updates

  • @mike_piercy is going through and making edits for grammar, punctuation, etc.
  • Some of the image issues were fixed last week, but not all.

Testing Updates

  • @chanthaboune tried to do a 101 workshop with the beginner lesson plans last weekend but it didn’t work out for totally unpredictable reasons.
  • @chanthaboune reports that Hack the Hood is going to use some of the theme lessons and will implement them in their summer boot camp.
  • @mikepiercy asked about database syncing in workshop settings. We had a productive conversation about how hard this is to do and outlined a few different options. You can read the whole thing at this time stamp.
mike_piercy 6:34 am on April 27, 2017  

Recap of April 25, 2017 Meeting

@coachwp took the lead on this meeting in @chanthaboune‘s absence, welcoming some new and returning attendees.

Lesson Plan Updates

@jenwill mentioned that she may soon be looking for feedback on the progress of the Enqueuing Scripts and Styles Lesson Plan she’s working on.

No other updates on new/assigned Lesson Plans.

 

@donkiely asked if there was any update on why the images are returning 404 errors. No-one on the meeting had any additional information and agreed to wait for an update from @chanthaboune.

@coffee2code later responded with an update: Images have to be restored and a request sits with Systems to look into it.

Copyediting Updates

@mike_piercy noticed some grammatical errors on some pages and @juliekuehl granted access edit to update.

@awakekat noticed some editing required on the Child-Theme quiz questions. @donkiely confirmed that this was marked as needing revision.

Q&A and Announcements

@juliekuehl asked if anyone knew if there was anything happening at Summit regarding Training. No-one on the meeting knew and @coachwp reverts this question back to @chanthaboune

donkiely 4:40 am on April 21, 2017  

Recap of April 18, 2017 Meeting

Lesson Plan Updates

Per @chanthaboune, these are lesson plans started but may need taking over:

  • Theme Internationalization
  • Enqueueing Scripts
  • Basic Theme Config
  • Speaker Lesson Plans
  • Finding and Using Theme Documentation
  • Theme Documentation

@donkiely gave an update on the Enqueuing Scripts and Styles lesson plan

@jenwill offered to take on completing the Enqueuing Scripts and Styles lesson plan. Yay!

@donkiely updated on his lesson plan reviews.

  • Conditional Tags – good shape, although uses theme files from Twenty Fourteen. Worth it to update those?
  • Custom Post Types – I just copyedited that in January, so it’s still good
  • Customizer: Taglines – did some light copyediting, but couldn’t finish since images are broken

@chanthaboune will give @donkiely access to the spreadsheet to directly update (and expanded all the rows so that he knows just how much work he’s gotten himself into!)
Led to a quick discussion about the missing images in P2. @chanthaboune will ping Scott-not-@coachwp about it.

The Style Guide is updated with the “built using” item in the Teacher Notes section.

Copyediting Updates

@mike_piercy is getting into copyediting and had some questions about navigation (the Next/Previous buttons that go to parent sections, not the next lesson plan; looks like the links are broken) and Online Tutorials.

@donkiely slacked off this week

Training Updates

@coachwp had some feedback about training the Dashboard lesson plan. Went very well, and it doesn’t need any changes. Next week he’ll be doing some training on themes.

Q&A and Announcements

@chanthaboune said that the WordPress Foundation intends to do some CMS agnostic, Open Source trainings this year in non-US locations. The plan is to use the lesson plans we’ve created for that, so we should probably take a look at those and see that they are all up to date/ready for use. @mike_piercy offered to help with the use of non-US English.

@jenwill pointed out that there are some contradictory times listed for the weekly Tuesday meeting. @chanthaboune is on it.

Melinda 7:39 pm on March 21, 2017  

Recap of March 21, 2017 Meeting

@donkiely finished copyediting Improving Site Performance LP and is looking for feedback. He notes: I’m not sure that it couldn’t use an overhaul. It takes a rather conceptual approach rather than a hands-on walkthrough. First I’ve seen like that, so I’m not sure if that’s what we want. I feel like it needs fleshing out. There are some steps that can be demonstrated and not just talked about. I suppose it’s okay as an overview, so maybe a follow-on lesson that digs deeper?

See LP at https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/plugin-lessons/improving-site-performance/

@bethsoderberg, can you update Trello with this information?

@coachWP reported an excellent first session of his WordPress class for high school students using training team materials.

@chanthaboune wondered if we’re at a point right now where we can maybe backburner the creation of new individual lesson plans and instead focus on really getting the workshops into a polished state. The idea being that if we have them polished up and useable, we may get more proof of concept after they are used/tested.

@melindahelt shared https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/blog-box-wordpress/ as a potential way to have some tech workshops create and install WordPress to have a local install to work on.

@donkiely will work on auditing lessons that have not been copy edited since the last release to flag any lessons that should be updated based on the new features.

Beth Soderberg 2:27 pm on February 21, 2017  

Recap of February 14, 2017 Meeting

Slack log (requires Slack login to view. Set one up if you don’t have a Slack account).

Lesson Plan Updates

Copyediting Updates

  • @donkiely finished copyediting the template tour plan and is currently working on copyediting the WooCommerce plan
  • @skarjune finished copyediting the widget areas plan and it is ready for testing.

Testing Updates

From @melindahelt: We had 5 in attendance. No real theme developers, so I presented the same information but highlighted the user side of the application (selecting H1, H2 in editor vs coding into a theme).

Overall, the content was great, but it did feel a little basic for a “theme” lesson plan.

We did have a blind software developer attendee who came specifically to learn more about WordPress. We took advantage of having a subject matter expert and launched into a larger discussion/Q&A after the presentation, which was enjoyed by all.

One specific suggestion from the software developer was to include at least a mention of form accessibility. Even though this is just a taste of accessibility, that’s an area where things can go wrong very quickly and a form can be completely un-accessable to screen readers.

A second attendee sent me the following after our meeting:
1) A skip navigation link.
Once someone has screen read the navigation/menu a number of times they no longer need to hear it. Insert near the top of the html a link <a class=”screen-reader-tex­t skip-link” href=”#MainContent” title=”Skip to content”>Skip to content</a>, and then just before the content <a name=”maincontent” id=”maincontent”><­/a>
See http://webaim.org/techniques/skipnav/­ for a more detailed explanation.

2) Include an audio file of a screen reader reading an html page.
Perhaps done by having the page with an audio button, so the user can see what the screen reader is reading.
I was already thinking a little bit about suggestion #2. We talked about screen readers and the blind developer offered to do a demo for us some day. But, perhaps a video/audio clip showing a screen reader as it navigates through a page would be a helpful resource. I know there’s way to turn that on with some operating systems, but having something ready to go for instructors would be helpful.

  • Given this feedback, we talked about expanding the plan to have a separate plan for users and one for theme developers. We also talked about pushing this out into a full workshop and will talk about this on the blog and in next week’s meeting.

Other Things

  • @donkiely noticed that the Storefront theme used in the WooCommerce plan is not included in the style guide. We decided to change the style guide to say that Storefront is “approved” for WooCommerce lesson plans, but to make sure that people know that other themes can be used with WooCommerce. We also double checked that Storefront is GPL compliant.
Beth Soderberg 3:53 am on February 8, 2017  

Recap of February 7, 2017 Meeting

Slack log (requires Slack login to view. Set one up if you don’t have a Slack account).

Welcome

Lesson Plan Updates

  • @bethsoderberg had a friend reach out about a plan to work on and will suggest the enqueueing scripts plan, with @pbarthmaier on point to answer questions
  • A note from @chanthaboune to review on our current focus: “When we thought about what it meant to have lessons for a certain subset of plugins, we realized it was more of an endorsement than we first thought, so we put those on hold to focus on themes and will revisit it after that.”

Copyediting Updates

  • @bethsoderberg is continuing to move information to the new Trello board and has found tons of loose ends, but since this is an intensive process to go through our archival data will come back with a full list of loose ends once she’s gone through everything.
  • @skarjune has completed copyediting of Customizer: Taglines, is almost done with Building a Sitemap, and will move on to Widget Areas after that.

Testing Updates

  • @melindahelt is doing the accessibility plan tonight at the Pittsburgh meetup
  • @chanthaboune has continued to work with Hack the Hood on our next workshop with them and it’s looking like one might happen late in March or early in April

Edit Flow

  • @chanthaboune talked to the meta team about Edit Flow and when we last talked it was very much one of those things they don’t really have the bandwidth to add + maintain for our work. It was left with sort of an open-ended “but that’s not a never” sort of sentiment, so we left the discussion fairly open as well.
  • In general, we discussed it and came to the conflusion that we can’t have a plugin right now and need to move forward with other ways of streamlining our workflow.
  • @bethsoderberg is moving archival data into Trello as a next step towards making tracking of work easier. In the meantime, please continue to add updates to the spreadsheet. We’ll talk about it as a group when it’s time to send the spreadsheet out to pasture.

Team Description on Meta Site

  • @rocio from the Community Team and she is working with the Meta team on the redesign of the make.wordpress.org page and they need a shorter version of the team descriptions. They are using this as an opportunity to re-think and update those descriptions.
  • In our meeting we voted to approve the following description of our team: We create lesson plans for instructors to use in a live workshop environment.
Beth Soderberg 3:30 am on January 27, 2017  

Recap of January 24, 2017 Meeting

Slack Log (Requires Slack login to view. Set one up if you don’t have a Slack account)

Welcome

Lesson Plan Updates

Copyediting Updates

  • @donkiely will copyedit Templates and Woocommerce
  • @estes.chris believes Site Icons and Logos is copyedited already
  • @skarjune will edit Customer: taglines, Widget Areas, Building a sitemap
  • @danstramer will edit Help Regenerate Thumbnails
  • @bethsoderberg suggested Trello for tracking copyediting and will put together a draft list of status’s by next week’s meeting. Someday this might be replaced by Edit Flow
  • We had a discussion around the capitalization of code in titles. The consensus is if the snippet isn’t capitalized in the code, don’t capitalize it in the title of a plan.

Testing Updates

  • @melindahelt will test the theme accessibility plan in February
  • @estes.chris is training a client in content management in a week or so and will try to work in some beginner plans.
  • @skarjune is assembling a focus group for Getting Started training to start mid-Feb. in a weekly format with some professionals as students that could include: writer, art critic, entrepreneur, graphic designer, corporate trainer.
Melinda 9:28 pm on January 3, 2017  

Recap of January 3, 2017 Meeting

Lessons in Progress

Speaker Lessons/ @coachwp
Intro to Common Plugins/ Carol Stambaugh
Basic Theme Config/ @chmchm
Theme Documentation/ @estes.chris
Themes/Plugin relationships/ @coachwp
Theme a11y/ @juliekuehl
Theme i18n/ @danstramer

@juliekuehl should have Theme A11Y done next week

Copyediting

Discussed proposed edits by @estes.chris to Customizer: Site Icons and Logos, Customizer: Header and Background Images. @estes.chris will update screenshots based on edits to Header and Background Images LP.

Copyediting in Progress
Content editor overview (lots of suggested changes)/ @librariancrafter
Basics of WP (lots of suggested changes)/ @patcosta
Static Front Page vs. Content Feed/ @donkiely
Managing Menus/ @donkiely

Copyediting Complete
Web Fonts/ @noplanman
Forgotten password/ @estes.chris
Dashboard overview/ @yvbrooks and Carol Stambaugh

Testing

  • @coachwp is working on an after school program for high school students that will start in February and will be using some training team materials
  • @chanthaboune will add the Theme and Accessibility lesson plans to the Ready to Test page

2017 Goals

Announcements

  • Training Team badges should now be active on profiles. If you don’t have one, let @bethsoderberg know.
  • The WCEU team is looking for someone who is attending WCEU and wants to rep the training team at contributor day. Let @bethsoderberg or @chanthaboune know if interested.