How far we’ve come, how far we have to go

In today’s modchat we talked about what we accomplished in the last year as a team. It’s been pretty amazing to see everyone come together, new faces and old friends alike, to really push this team forward, and boy have we done a lot! Over the last year we have:

  • created a post-processing workflow that helps WordCamps get video to us faster, as well as open up a completely new avenue to contribution that did not exist before
  • improved our outreach to WordCamps, proactively contacting them before and after the event, to offer any any assistance we can, help improve submission quality, and reduce organizer stress
  • increased our reach, by rescuing a forgotten Twitter account, and using it to announce all videos we publish, as well as started work on a YouTube channel to increase our reach and appeal even more.
  • Put a redesign of WPTV on the community’s radar, and gotten the ball rolling for a (greatly needed) new site for WordPress lovers and learners everywhere.

There are of course many other things we did along the way that does not get captured in the above “big 4” but in total, the efforts of this team helped WPTV to reach over 1000 videos published in 2015, an amazing feat!

To do all these things in a year is humbling, and could not happen without your help, so thank you to everyone who pitched in this year. Many hands make light work! 🙂

Where do we go from here?

Another big part of our chat today was talking about 2016, and some of the goals we want to work towards for the upcoming year. Here are some of the things we discussed:

  • Transcoding/storage: Increased usage of Elastic Transcode (Amazon) and S3 storage to make raw files smaller and easier to download/work on after download. We tested this last year, this year we put it into production.
  • Automating AWS – Look for a dev to help us with Amazon’s 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. for automating tasks like transcoding, and in the meantime find a contributor(s) willing to “own” increased usage of Amazon services for WPTV
  • Captioning – This has been a tough one for us to add to our limited resources, but also a huge need. Currently looking for another community team to “own” this in the short term, around some planned contributor drives early in the year.
  • YouTube – One big way we can help with captioning efforts is to finalize our work on pushing WPTV content to YouTube, which does some heavy lifting with automated captioning (which can later be edited for accuracy.)
  • WPTV contributor drive – Editors (post processing) is our biggest need, so our efforts will be focused on growing that side of our team with an upcoming contributor drive, date TBD. We will need to smooth out our onboading flow to take advantage of this, so a few handbook sprits are in the works!

That’s a pretty good list to get us going for 2016. Thanks again everyone! We have no more scheduled meetings for 2015 (due to the winter holidays) but I hope to see you all again on the first modchat of the year: Thursday January 7th at 17:00 UTC in the #wptv channel in 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/..

Interested in helping out? Why not join us wherever you are in the world. Details are in the blue box at the top of the site!

#goals, #goals-2016, #modchat_notes