Attendees

AMER: @arasae, @courtneypk, @courane01, @azhiyadev, Chris B, @onealtr

APAC: @piyopiyofox @bsanevans @onealtr @webtechpooja @west7 @amitpatelmd

Recap notes

• Proposal to make Faculty meetings more public 
  • The team will continue working in the open
  • everything that isn’t a privacy concern should go into a public channel of some sort. 
  • The private channel is intended for logins, incident concerns, etc.
  • https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C03B11FA16D/p1659098737136069?thread_ts=1658970512.900959&cid=C03B11FA16D 
  • Amer Notes: Does this mean more conversation in the #training channel instead of the #training-faculty channel? Yes. TL;DR – Have conversations we have been having in #faculty-training in #training itself. We can use the SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ groups in different roles if we need attention of specific groups (such as subject matter experts)
    • PingPing The 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.” Groups: @faculty and it pings everyone in the faculty or if you want to ping a separate group. It’s something similar to @faculty-smes; it’s pinned to the private faculty channel.
    • If people have access to things like Learn’s wp-admin dashboard, these links can still be put into the #training channel – user permissions will keep things under wraps as far as strangers being able to access sensitive things while also allowing us to work in the open. 
  • APAC: The intention of this message was asking if we should open the faculty meeting up to the wider training team or keep these calls for faculty only?
    • Yes, keep the faculty meeting for faculty only, but continue to post agenda and notes publicly.
    • When we post the agenda for faculty meetings, we should more widely share with the training team that they can contribute to the agenda items async on the agenda post.
    • The admin will monitor the questions/comments on these posts and reroute them to the applicable faculty member
• announcing new channel joinees
  • Is there a benefit in announcing these still to someone?
    • Amer Notes: Meant to acknowledge the team; the original purpose was to pull folks in and make them feel welcome. Marketing provides a, “Here is a good next step action item that you can do”.
      • Encourages people to step out of “lurker” mode; encourages people to join the meeting live. Alerts people to a meeting happening now.
      • Having this drop-in for faculty is useful; in terms of good “next of action” items, someone does contact them. 
    • Feels possibly like duplicated work; there’s a welcome committee. Is this just for faculty or just for joining training? Understanding is for everyone. 
    • TL;DR – People are being welcomed both in DM’s and in public.
  • Or are meeting facilitators (team reps) tracking these some other way anyway?
    • This has been helpful for team reps. Team reps go back through the week to try and see who has joined; if that exists somewhere and someone pings them, they can pick up. It’s helpful to know that someone else has already reached out.
    • Conclusion: We will continue to do this as it is helpful for the team reps.
  • APAC: One of the Welcome Wranglers will add the new channel joinee list directly to the meeting agenda which will cut the duplication of efforts.
• Zoom disruptions
  • turned a few more security features on in our shared Zoom account
  • https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C03B11FA16D/p1659733286494459 
  • Changed:
    • Annotation to “Only the user who is sharing can annotate”
  • Turned off:
    • Whiteboard (Classic)
    • Remote control
    • Gesture Recognition
    • Allow users to change their name when joining a meeting
    • Allow participants to rename themselves
    • Show participant profile cards in a meeting
  • Turned on:
    • Mute all participants when they join a meeting
    • Hide participant profile pictures in a meeting
    • requiring authentication to join a meeting.
      • APAC: If this is a requirement, we should document the process for joining.
      • We shared feedback that this particular item feels like a barrier to entry.
      • Perhaps this could be the final step if the other changes we made are not effective.
  • APAC: Is the fact that not many people are unmuting or turning on their video detracting from the “social learning space” aspect of our Online Workshops?
    •  
• Faculty Meeting Calendar
  • Hi, I was just wondering if we can edit link and add directly to calendar for Monthly call section, so that any faculty member can jump into this page and add this event into their calendar.
  • I’m all for automation! Let me see how we could do this.
    • Amer Notes: I think it’s a button that adds the weekly SME meeting into a calendar with a click of a button. Download it? Click a button and add it to whatever calendar you use?
      • Issue seemed to be the last call of the month; a decision was made to have it on the 4th Tuesday of every month, we’d run the call. Would that help this issue? Talking about this calendar.
      • There are some limitations that make this challenging. 
      • Suggestion: Always have it on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of the month. Yes or no? We think we should agree to do it every 4th week to accommodate this at the end of the month. Does APAC agree? When will we make that change? APAC AGREES and it is done 🎉
    • Updated the Zoom link to use the Learn WordPress account, so one person must volunteer to host either meeting
• Workflow (SME’s)
  • Difficult to jump in on things like reviewing new topics because the workflow may not be clear or simple enough to manage at the moment.
  • https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C03B11FA16D/p1660112243025129 
  • https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/getting-started/how-we-work-together/#development-workflows
  • pull our GitHub issues into a spreadsheet to help SMEs better assess priority and “staleness
    • My first guess would be to use the GitHubGitHub 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 by the repository owner. https://github.com/ APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.
    • https://docs.github.com/en/rest/issues
    • More specifically https://docs.github.com/en/rest/issues/issues#list-repository-issues
  • Amer Notes:
    • SME’s weren’t aware of the topics; there was concern that topics were being duplicated because there were multiple elements. We have tutorials, lesson plans, online workshops, and courses, so topics looked duplicated – it’s a different learning format that the topic is being 
    • Link to SME notes (when SMEs are supposed to jump in, when supposed to pass on to the content creators)
      • We should reach out to SMEs to figure out how they would best like to work with us.
      • Could use time during former training meetings (since they’re rotating) to work with SMEs when the meetings.
        • Go through an update notes on Github from a more synchronous setting.
    • Github session – need to know how this works in order to run a session for SMEs, then use that to generate automations. As long as a flow exists, it’s easier for SMEs to work with.
      • We would like to have more Github automations, and we can do that with the new version of Github projects
        • Code approach of automations was discouraged; it was pretty challenging. CER will reach out to Micah and Github representatives around that issue of automation in order to leverage more things.
        • All content is in one project board; still figuring out how this works. We moved into Github to make sure we can leverage the tech to better track – we want to track contributions. 
• Hugh has secured a Crowdsignal premium account for us to use
  • https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C03B11FA16D/p1660872225211179 
  • you can create unlimited  surveys and polls of all types with it 
• Contributor badges
  • I’m not quite sure how our contributor badges are distributed– will @Tahmid ul Karim receive a badge for this merged PR? https://github.com/WordPress/Learn/pull/890
  • Here is the process mentioned to provide a badge: Team Profile Badges – Make WordPress Training
    • Amer Notes:
      • What are the steps? What are the requirements? Discussed in today’s meeting. There is a process, but it’s outdated; one of the new elements to it is because we’ve started using Github. With the pilot we’re doing with metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress., that may be another way we don’t have to manually add badges. Meeting notes, pull requests… we actually do pull requests on the development side. We didn’t previously have a development board, so that is new. Pooja has made some updates to it.
        • Get faculty to approve it; need the training team to approve the badges and process there.
        • Do we have a badge for faculty? No; we should present it back to the training team, based on the updates and some of the discussions, what do you think in terms of the process?
        • We think that Pooja is working on a P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org post about this (correct us if we’re wrong!) – Check with Pooja to see if she needs anything here, but no other action item needed if this is true. 🙂 Pooja is not working on a P2 post. She is only updating the Handbook page. 
• Individual learn survey –
  • Related to Crowdsignal above, I already talked about it.
  • Courtney Robertson is working on this. She’s working on it (some login issues, need to do a password reset)
  • Make use of this for WCUS, get some good data back.
  • APAC: Should be ready to go within a week just in time for WCUS!
• Faculty Meeting September 2022 – 5 weeks in September
  • Amer Notes: Change this in early September to 2nd and 4th weeks, fixes that issue.
  • Also, can we make sure to include zoom links integrated with the meeting calendar event, so that any faculty member can join in the meeting by following the event and zoom link
    • Amer Notes:
    • We should use our standard Zoom link
    • We may want to not have this on the main calendar because if it’s just for Faculty, we don’t want all the WordPress community. We may get flooded with folks who just want to jump in who aren’t faculty folks.
    • We could instead send invite details ahead of time, but use the general Learn training account.
    • Where is the repeating event? If that’s a private invite, we can replace the link in there (Action Item: ask Destiny to replace the link with one scheduled on Zoom) – Destiny replaced this, but note that the event is modifiable by any guest on the invite so no need to wait for any one person to make changes.
      • Have the date in the general team calendar
      • Zoom link should just be on the invite.
• Content Errors
  • Hi @faculty! I’ve been looking at the slow but steady number of content error reports that come into Help Scout, and am considering how we can make these more “public” so that folks get the help they need sooner. Ideally, anybody (regardless of their access to Help Scout) should be able to help these folks out.…
  • I’ve now updated the content error report page.
  • https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RW657Q/p1661580388948569
  • In the thread above It was suggested that we add additional info for folks who’d like to learn about GitHub to the error report page.
  • While the SLS recording mentioned in the thread was good, it didn’t address reporting content errors specifically. Maybe we could make a quick video specifically about submitting error reports on GitHub, and add that instead? I’m happy to hear what  @faculty-content-creators think about that.
  • At the same time, another thought was adding more content before the error report form might discourage people from actually submitting their error report. The heading right now is pretty wordy as-is. I added a bit of color to break the text up a little.
    • Amer Notes:
      • If there is an issue that someone can just go in and do, there might be a solution to this. Action item: Follow up with Jamie to see where he’s at with this.
      • Topic discussion for next time: Next meeting, we should look at content updates for courses – not errors, just outdated things, how do we revise them? Is this process different from the one for lesson plans? Why or why not?
      • Courtney will send a video on how she finds outdated content; we don’t have a way to do that with courses, so it sounds to me like course outlines with content descriptions, proper tags, etc. might help solve that issue.
• WordCamp Asia Call for Speakers – Do we want to do a session where we promote the Training Team, the Learn WordPress site, and explain how folks could get involved? (Original Slack convo)
  • Oneal and Pooja are on the speaker’s selection team; they’re trying to get more speakers to apply. Call for speakers is yielding a lower return. Focus on speakers from Asia. A lot of applications may come in at the last minute.
  • Some folks who might be interested: Jamie, Mike Schroeder, Destiny, Ben, and others are all living in Asia. They will probably have more to say on this. 
• APAC walk on: Pooja is working on a process improvement for first time WordPress contributors.
  • We suggested Pooja connects with Courtney PK around this

#faculty-meeting