Time to Set Team Goals for 2019

It’s that time of year when we need to evaluate how we did against our goals for this year and make new goals for the upcoming year.

In 2018 our goals were to:

1. Create handbook
2. Move lesson plans to 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 be the repository owner. https://github.com/
3. Restructure make.wordpress.orgWordPress.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//training
4. Fix broken images
5. Update lesson plans for 4.8-4.9/GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/
6. Make workshop recommendations
7. AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) workshop

In fact, 2018 was a year where the team underwent a major restructuring of its tool and processes and we accomplished goals we hadn’t imagined when the year started. So our accomplishments for the year can be summed up as:

1. Create handbook (expected by the end of the year)
2. Move lesson plans to GitHub
3. Restructure make.wordpress.org/training
4. Fix broken images (perhaps not all are fixed, but moving to GitHub addressed the problem)
5. Make workshop recommendations
plus
6. Onboarding improvements including a PDF and videos
7. Team management on TrelloTrello Project 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. and in Waffle.io
8. Creation of the https://wptrainingteam.github.io/ page
9. Work towards the relaunch of the learn.wordpress.org site including collaboration with the #design, #marketing, and #meta teams.

Goals that we didn’t quite accomplish include:

1. Update lesson plans for Gutenberg
2. Accessibility workshop

So, for 2019 what should our new goals be? I’d propose a couple to begin with:

1. Launch learn.wordpress.org
2. Create several lesson plans to combine into an accessibility workshop (the ARIA session from WordCampWordCamp 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. US has caught my eye…)
3. Use resources from WordPress.tv more often as a basis for lesson plans
4. Collaborate with other efforts such as the diversity speaker training and Kids Camp to get their material available from the learn.wordpress.org site
5. Increase the number of regular contributors to the team

These all seem very do-able. What else should the team be working towards? What should we have for stretch goals? All comments and ideas welcome!

We’ll also be discussing this during our meeting this week. Everyone is invited to join in the discussion!!!

Recap of May 10, 2018 Meeting

@juliekuehl: First up today is the Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. info.

https://trello.com/c/XK6lfmsm. That is a card that should be useful to anyone who wants to help with the training team during a contributor day. The marketing team graciously helped to create a Training Team specific onboarding document, which is uploaded to that card.

@juliekuehl: It has just basic info on which accounts would be needed to help the team (WordPress.orgWordPress.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/, TrelloTrello Project 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., 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 be the repository owner. https://github.com/, 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/.…)

@juliekuehl: The other Trello card related to Contributor Days is this one https://trello.com/c/cxKWo7KC, which is specific to WordCampWordCamp 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. EU in June.

@chetan200891 @davidneeham is there anything else that you would need to lead that effort? I know we’ll need a list of lesson plans that would be good ones to work one. That’s a rolling list though.

@juliekuehl: This document is also meant for Contributor Days, but it’s going to be helpful for anyone new to the team: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mh0vGq075pH-CqyUbMNdrOz9AVaEUm9ofli0YrNaFsg/edit?usp=sharing.

@juliekuehl: There are several options there on how to jump in and get started.

@juliekuehl: So with that Google Doc in place (and it should move to the Make site before WCEU) I think we have what we need for Contributor Days now. So I think if anyone wants to represent the Training Team at any Contributor Day, we have materials to help them do so.

Slides

@juliekuehl: Slides have been a hot topic for years and the issues surrounding them have been documented here https://trello.com/c/jpp5ob7t. We had talked about using Reveal.js as our solution for slides, but recently had the #accessibility team recommend Show-er. I did run it by a 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. team person as to whether that would work on the learn.wordpress.org site and got a thumbs up.

@juliekuehl: So I wanted to be clear that our slide solution at this point is Show-er, not Reveal and we’ll get some documentation and workflows put together around that.

@pbrocks: https://github.com/wptrainingteam/shower.

@juliekuehl: Ideally we would have one stylesheet for all the slide decks that could be updated and all that would be needed is the markup (HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites.?, md?) file.

Learn.WordPress.Org Site

@juliekuehl: So that’s it for item 2 on the agenda, but it leads into item 3 – the learn.wordpress.org site

The Trello card https://trello.com/c/ck3UjgcA has some information on it as to how we can get started to design and actually start using that domain.

@juliekuehl: We need to create a TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket for the #meta team and alert #design and #marketing to get their input too. There are some wireframes on that Trello card too as a rough concept of what that site could look like. But the idea would be to be able to push lesson plans from GitHub to the Learn siteLearn site The Training Team publishes its completed lesson plans at https://learn.wordpress.org/ which is often referred to as the "Learn" site.. (which may mean we need to slightly adjust how we are working with the master branches).

@juliekuehl: I can get that Trac ticket started as I would think it would be weeks/months before all the details would be worked out and we’d be able to actually get things together for that.

Thoughts?

chetan200891replied to a thread: But the idea would be to be able to push lesson plans from GitGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/.: You mean embed. Correct?

@juliekuehl: That’s some of the details that would have to be worked out by the #meta team.

@juliekuehl: Just so everyone is aware, both the Make blog site and the Learn site are not your typical WordPress installs and they have quirks and restrictions that we have to work within. The #meta team are the ones that can help us navigate that.

@juliekuehl: I wanted to wait until after today’s meeting to get that Trac ticket started. So if you have any thoughts about it, please either DM me or drop your thoughts on the Trello card or here in the #training channel. I’m sure it will take me a few days to write it up and get it submitted.

Team Survey

@juliekuehl: We have gone through so many changes in the past few months and there are many new faces here in the channel. I will admit to having lost track of who is all here and what brings them to the team.

@juliekuehl: Apologies, since I know I’ve chatted with several of you. But I think it’s time to get a little more information from folks regarding interests and skill.

@juliekuehl: I would like to ask everyone to consider filling out the information here https://goo.gl/forms/Tuus9yo3yWXRZgqA3 just so we have a better understanding of what you are interested in and able to help with. This is an optional form. You are not required to participate, but it would sure be helpful , to get the work of the team moving forward. Currently the info is restricted to just team leadership (there’s about five of us).

@tmichellemoore: @juliekuehl Would you be able to summarize the changes? I understand the team has been around for a while but am just curious as to why so many changes in the short time I have been here. I am not averse to change, just trying to gauge is it constant or was there something that happened recently?

@juliekuehl: The underlying big change was the move to GitHub. There were many reasons behind it: the loss of our image assets on the Make site, the difficulty in managing the lesson plan workflow, the difficulty in maintaining them and keeping them up to date, and there was no “workspace” everything was publicly available as it was being worked on (people were finding old, half-written info and that’s not good), and last, the Make site was intended to be a handbook (like every other team) – not the place lesson plans were actually published.

@juliekuehl: We made the decision to move probably around the time of WordCamp US and started in earnest around the first of the year.

@juliekuehl: And we had two of the three meeting leaders step away for a few months so there were changes due to that too (meaning I had no idea how it was supposed to be done, so I just made something up)

@pbrocks: Really, we have been talking about this for close to a year, it seems, and we all agreed that what we had wasn’t working and at WCUS, i was able to get FINAL confirmation that the images weren’t ever coming back. so in our meeting that Sunday we went forward full steam.

@juliekuehl: Thank you for asking @tmichellemoore. I really should put that in a blog post for the record.

Trello and LP Workflow

@juliekuehl: After looking at scores of lesson plans, I realized what a wide variation we have in approaches and quality. I think we need a QA step before copyediting. I added a “Lesson Plans Needing Instructional Review” list to the board.

@juliekuehl: Before having folks go through with a fine-toothed comb looking for typos, grammar, and style, I think we need a forest and not tree review to make sure the lesson plan fits the team’s goals. For instance, @Taylor found two duplicates already. No sense in pushing both of them forward.

@juliekuehl: And if there are any instructional designers here today, BloomBloom's Taxonomy Bloom's Taxonomy is a way of writing lesson plan objectives using specific words so that the objectives can be measured. See https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/guidelines/blooms-taxonomy/ for more details.’s TaxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. standards are lax and objective – assessment connection is practically non-existent in some of them.

@juliekuehl: Now that I think of it, there’s a new role for the team that’s not listed on the Trello board. So if you have any education / instructional design background, that would be a very good place to help out.

@tmichellemoore: I actually have a masters in instructional design.

@tmichellemoore appointed to take control of the list.

Many LP’s lacking Owners

@juliekuehl: Some need to be written from scratch while others need to be updated/rewritten – or possibly just quickly reviewed and pushed forward.

@juliekuehl: Just add yourself to the card as a Member and type your name in as Current Owner on the card and have at it. If you need any help with any part of the process, this is the place to ask!

@juliekuehl: I know it took us a while to get the GitHub workflow sorted out (and we may have just changed it slightly this morning) but we should be good to go now.

@chetan200891: I have worked on this https://github.com/wptrainingteam/widget-areas so in Trello work flow https://trello.com/c/8dd1RKWd/130-widget-areas. Can i check first 3 development checklist?

@juliekuehl: I would say only the first one.

@tmichellemoore: I have a few questions on process: I got a merge notice. I needed to add one more thing to the lesson.
If I had anything I needed to add, could I have added it before the merge or should I wait until the merge request goes through?
Who does copyedit #2?
What do I do with the card once I finish copyedit #1?

@juliekuehl: The reason there are two copy edits (and three testing rounds) is to simply have more eyeballs on the lesson plan. We’ll need to address the whole multiple branches / rebasing / etc. issue (hint hint @pbrocks).

@juliekuehl: But as far as copyediting goes, when you’re finished (meaning the pull request has been merged) we’ll need someone else to step up for the second round and do the same.

@pbrocks: When you have a branch and you do a Pull Request which is a request to merge, like @tmichellemoore is asking about they will get applied to the original pull request. IF you want them to be separate, then ou create another branch.

@juliekuehl: A video is needed to demonstrate / explain

Meeting Time

@juliekuehl: I have one final question before I have to bolt out the door… would moving this meeting up 30 minutes be a problem? Then I wouldn’t have to leave so quickly every time. I may schedule it a half hour earlier next week and see what happens.

Recap of April 12, 2018 meeting

Please note I didn’t attend this meeting and did my best to combine distilling with verbatim discussion. If anyone sees a need to change anything, please feel free to do so.

@juliekuehl: The first thing I want to say is that these weekly meetings don’t seem to be long enough to cover everything lately. We may need to explore something else to help get through all the changes we are in the middle of. It could be our blog over at https://make.wordpress.org/training/ or it could be another video meeting or it could be a series of screencasts or it could be more like a Contributor Day where we schedule a few hours to get together (perhaps by video) to get through several topics all at once. I don’t want to answer this today, but just raise the question so that we can think through options.
One hour hasn’t been enough!

So today’s agenda is:
1. Welcome
2. Discussion on verification workflow in 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 be the repository owner. https://github.com/
3. Discussion on lesson plan development in GitHub
4. Updates on other current projects
5. Open announcements/discussions

Discussion on verification workflow in GitHub

We have been moving our lesson plans from our Make site at https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/ to GitHub https://github.com/wptrainingteam.

WordPress Training Team

The WordPress training team creates downloadable lesson plans and related materials for instructors to use in live workshop environments.

URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org
https://make.wordpress.org/training/

Repositories
121

All of the lesson plans have been migrated over, but not all of them have been verified that they are complete “copies” in GitHub.

The list at https://wptrainingteam.github.io/ is the complete list of lesson plans that were on Make and those with links are those that have been completely verified.

As you can see there’s a long list of lesson plans still needing verification.

@tmichellemoore: @juliekuehl Can you define complete copies? Does it mean it is the exact thing that was on the Make site?

@juliekuehl: It sounds simple, and it mostly is, but there are several steps to that process that aren’t well documented at this point.

@Lisa: Hey @juliekuehl what is the process of verification?

@juliekuehl: Complete copies means that all the spacing, icons, and as many images as we can recover have been duplicated on GitHub.

@Lisa: That’s what I need to document. It took me awhile to work out the process and there are several steps to it. I need to put together a screencast and a step-by-step document so that others can duplicate the process. That’s on me.

@Dess: Hi @juliekuehl I tested the Getting Started with WordPress Workshop https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xm2DI0CtF-QKeb6uH8YCZSGmc8YCwscFASm1HrFBiaY/edit. Also translated it to Spanish

@juliekuehl: So for folks wanting to jump in and help with that process, know that nearly all the “how to help” documents right now probably aren’t accurate.

@Dess: I would like to help migrate that Workshop. And maybe we could also add a space for Spanish in Github?

@juliekuehl: @Dess, that’s terriffic! And also something we’re not quite sure what to do with at the moment. Translations aren’t something that we had considered, to be honest. Do you have any ideas on what that space in GitHub would look like? A branch of the lesson plan?

@bethsoderberg: We’ve always wanted to enable translations, I think a branch would make total sense.

@Dess: We could replicate the page in Spanish.

@Lisa: Isn’t there a translation pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party you can install to WordPress.

@pbrocks: Translations, I think need to be a branch. I should consult with the Docs team first before claiming that.

@juliekuehl: If we created new reposrepos The Training Team uses GitHub for working copies of lesson plans. You can find them at https://github.com/wptrainingteam. for each language it could get to be a nightmare. I would like to ask some of the other WP teams how they handle translations in GitHub.

@pbrocks will help getting first timers up to speed.

@juliekuehl: Good point @pbrocks!

I think there’s not much more we can resolve around the verification workflow at the moment.
This project is where that is being recorded FYI: https://github.com/orgs/wptrainingteam/projects/2

So lets move on to the second item on the agenda

Lesson Plan Development

That would be this project https://github.com/orgs/wptrainingteam/projects/3. @chetansatasiya asked if he could help and drafting lesson plans seemed like the best fit. So there are now 36 lesson plans in that project that have nothing but placeholder text in them. All of those are available for people to assign to themselves, fork, and start working on.

For anyone who wants to just ignore all this migrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. stuff and get on with what we do.

They are shown in no priority, but plugins would be the least important ones. If you choose to begin working on one, you can also drag it over to the Drafts column. @Dess, that might be where your Spanish version could come in

@juliekuehl: To my point that I started the meeting with, I am wondering if we should have “office hours” where new folks could stop by.

@tmichellemoore: @juliekuehl I think that would be great!

@juliekuehl: To do: document process by next week!

Current Projects

@juliekuehl: Our page at https://wptrainingteam.github.io/ is ugly, ugly, ugly.

@chetan200891 has shown interest in helping to make it better looking and probably more useful too. I have also asked the #design team to work their magic to come up with a plan for that. If they can design something, @chetan200891 is willing to build it out. He also found a tool that can help do that. Do you have that info @chetan200891? It would be using a Jekyll theme, which is supported by GitHub. https://jekyllrb.com/

@juliekuehl: We are on the design team’s TrelloTrello Project 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. board, but they did not have their meeting this week.

@Lisa volunteered to help the design team

@juliekuehl: @Lisa, if you have ideas about the design, you’re welcome to work on it!

@juliekuehl: I’m just eyeballs deep in other stuff, so design isn’t going to be my thing right now.

@Lisa and @chetan200891 will work together to make that happen.

@juliekuehl: @chetan200891 to your point about GitHub, the bigger question is what would we want to use that integration for? Pull requests seems a good place to start.

@Lisa: Maybe explain what we do and join us? With new topic suggestions?

@juliekuehl: I think the best way to proceed here is to create a couple of blog posts regarding these possibilities.

Idea Period

@tmichellemoore: It would be nice if the integration could place a notification in this 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/. channel when a lesson is assigned and then when it moves to another lane in GitHub.

@juliekuehl: Let’s save those (really great) ideas for that blog post so we don’t lose them.

@Lisa: There are so many changes going on in WordPress this year

@juliekuehl: Info flows by in Slack so quickly we lose good stuff here!

@pbrocks: I like the idea of working in Github. Which means capturing ideas in Github, whether it be a Repository or an Issue in a repository.

@juliekuehl: Explain further @pbrocks.

@pbrocks: So, I agree that things get lost in Slack too easily. Github feels like the place to capture and document.

@Lisa: I like designing visually

@juliekuehl: @pbrocks did you mean for our welcome message and such?
It sure could be set up as an issue and we could all comment

@pbrocks: So, @Lisa I wouldn’t think that you would design there, but add to the list of ideas that we may have.

@Lisa: We could try opening thread each time a topic is raised
Verification
Maybe?

@tmichellemoore: How does the blog fit in the overall picture?

@juliekuehl: The Make blog will not be going away. We will continue to use that site for a proper handbook where all the questions that everyone is asking would be answered: what do we do, how can you contribute, what’s the process, etc. It’s such a messy time for you new folks. Sorry about that!

@Lisa: I will select a lesson plan draft and arrange design time. Julie should I wait until the verification process is ready.

@juliekuehl: To-do: record screencast for @tmichellemoore to document.

@juliekuehl: I know this team is a bit chaotic at the moment with all the changes, but I really appreciate folks stepping up to help. Sometimes even before we’re ready! But we’re making great progress and should be running smoothly again soon. Thanks for hanging in there everyone!

Automated Greeting in the #training Slack Channel

It is possible that we could set up a Slackbot to send a greeting when new people join the #training channel. (Hat tip to the #design team for this idea.) What would we want to see in that message?

Proposed content (add your ideas in the comments below!):

Welcome to the WordPress Training Team! We create downloadable lesson plans and related materials for instructors to use in live workshop environments. This all-volunteer team needs people with all kinds of skills!

Here are some handy links to get started in our community:

  • The Make WordPress Training blog is where you’ll find meeting agendas and summaries https://make.wordpress.org/training/
  • We communicate in the WordPress 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/. #training channel. If you have questions, this is the best way to contact the team.
  • Check out our GitHub page to get an overview of what the Training Team is working on. https://wptrainingteam.github.io/
  • Take a look at our GitHub account where the actual work is done. You can find our in-progress lesson plans there too! https://github.com/wptrainingteam
  • We have more details in our handbook https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/
  • Finally, introduce yourself in the #training channel on Slack. It would be great to know where in the world you are located, what brings you to the training team, what your skills/background might be, and how you would like to contribute!

Great to have you onboard 🙂

(Note that the actual bot will need to be created by a WP Slack Admin.)