I was asked by Rocío Valdivia (@_dorsvenabili) to lead WordPress.tv team in 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/. at WCEU this year. How could I say no? I contribute actively to WordPress.tv for exactly one year (since I visited WCEU 2015) and it was a nice occasion for celebrate 🎉

Below are some notes and stories that I collected with the help of various participants during the WCEU 2016 and the Contributor Day. Thank you all!

• There were 14 people attending, from 19 signed up to the WPTV team through Contributor Day form.
• I presented my slides, introducing our WPTV team and explained the workflow of producing and publishing videos for WordPress.tv to all the participants in the room.

Olegs Belousovs presenting the WordPress TV team at 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. Europe 2016 Contributor Day

• We discussed the WordPress video hardware and how to be better on setting it up for WordCamp or WordPress MeetupMeetup All 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. sessions registration.
• We discussed the complicated uploading process and it turned out that it discourages people to participate with contributions. I also discussed on this point with Andrew Ozz (@azaozz) during the second day of WordCamp Europe 2016, where I had pleasure to met him thanks to the introduction from Konstantin Kovshenin (@kovshenin). I discovered that Andrew was the developer of uploading functionality on “Submit a video” page some years ago, but actually he is not on this project anymore. He was really nice and available and said that if we need some sort of help on improvements we can 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.” him. Should we create some ticket maybe? 😛

• We discussed the responsive design of WordPress.tv, because questions from the people were raised (I know that we are a content management and editing team, but we need a better tools and people who want to visit WPTV form mobile should have a good user experience too!). The state of work and recent posts on this topic are here https://make.wordpress.org/tv/?s=redesign
• I replied to some questions from Kyung Munneke on WordCamp video/audio management and on where to recruit people for this role. I said to ask for help in the local WordPress Community or local photo/video school and leave the hiring of a video firm as a last resort (this suggestion is also written in the WordCamp Planning Handbook).
• Leo Tulipan asked questions about the audio equipment to use at Meetups and WordCamps and he and Florian Gottschall were also made some recommendations on an external microphone to attach to your mobile device like this RØDE smartLav+ lavalier microphone. My suggestion for a quality audio registration was to use an external recorder like the Zoom H4n or to attach your laptop directly to a mixer and recording inside Audacity open sourceOpen Source Open 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. software.

• Florian Gottschall (@floriang) illustrated his video editing 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 (wp-video-editor.com), but we can’t use it on WordPress.tv due the WP.com platform limitations on installing plugins. If you want to help our team with the video post-production and don’t have the right software, you could easily use this plugin for post-production of videos from WordCamps directly in your browser. You can upload a logo, add Intro/Outro and the Audio Mastering is done automatically. Afterwards you receive a ready branded video which you can upload to WordPress TV.
• Some good guys from Germany (Sven Wagener, Sören Wrede and Florian Gottschall) shared their WordCamp setup experience, gently offered by German Joomla! association. In this blog post you can find all the setup details. I really enjoyed this story and was impressed on the quality and a speed of the WordCamp Nuremberg 2016 videos appeared on WordPress.tv in one week after the event (definitely at the level of a WCEU or WCUS). Really loved this type of collaboration between tech communities!

• Morten Rand-Hendriksen (@mor10) pointed out that the actual WordPress.tv structure is limiting the contributions to grow and maybe WPTV should be completely a community project? … and I agree! WordPress.tv is hosted on WordPress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/ and using the VideoPress service for all the videos and it’s still an Automattic project. WordPress.tv theme was open sourced in meta-environment 9 months ago but still no changes were made. Morten will provide more info when he comes back from vacation and will join one of our meetings.
• Some questions were made about why just not using only YouTube and embed videos directly in the content. This makes a lot of sense because now we are making a double work of cross-posting the same videos. Michael (@roseapplemedia) wrote something about this idea here but not exactly the same.
• Lesley Molecke (@eckandgrumble) was interested in subtitling videos after seen the Rian Rietveld (@rianrietveld) talk on WordPress 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) team and this Tweet by @mor10 that made her show up to Contributor Day.

The state of subtitles on http://WordPress.tv could use some improvement.

Source: Morten the Northman (@mor10) June 25, 2016

• Annette Voelckner (@onthisearth) and another person asked about what types of post-production we happen to do and I explained that mainly are the simplest intro & outro placements and the second ones (more difficult) are with slides to cut-in.
• Before the Contributor Day I had a discussion with @kovshenin on subtitles file formats and if we can use the YouTube formats (.sbv, .srt & .vtt) directly on WordPress.tv, without converting them to a .ttml through the actual complicated process involving Amara web service. At this point, we are also discouraging people to help due to the complicated workflow and for the lack of updated tools at our disposal. The solution? YouTube subtitling system of course!
• I left the team before lunch, because I had to return to Torino by car… and the team continued to work on the project and created their versions of a mockups and also made some wireframes for WordPress.tv website redesign, which is not responsive yet. This will be a proposal for the WordPress.tv redesign. We had a lot off discussions on this topic in the past months 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/. and here on P2P2 “P2” is the name of the theme the blogs of make.wordpress.org use. When asked to post or view something “on the p2” by a member of the WPTV team, that usually means you’re asked to check https://make.wordpress.org/tv. and some work was already done. Actually, all the discussions are in freeze mode… some posts on this topic are here https://make.wordpress.org/tv/?s=redesign

A mockup proposal for WordPress.tv website created by the WPTV team at the WordCamp Europe 2016 Contributor Day

Picture by Sven Wagener (@mahype)

• Some general questions on Slack setup and w.org accounts where made and I pointed people to the right direction.

We have still some unresolved tickets for WordPress.tv project: https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=accepted&status=assigned&status=new&status=reopened&status=reviewing&component=WordPress.tv&col=id&col=summary&col=component&col=status&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=keywords&order=priority

Most of the pictures was taken from the video shooted by Florian Gottschall (@floriang) and his team during WCEU 2016.

I would like to say THANK YOU to the WordCamp Europe 2016 organizers, volunteers, sponsors, attendees and to all the people who showed up on Sunday at the WPTV room 😉
Thanks a lot to Rocío Valdivia (@_dorsvenabili) for pinged me and asked to lead the WordPress TV team at this Contributor Day and to Alex Kirk (@akirk) for tech support during the day.

I was sad that my team members could not come to this WCEU, 🙁 but I’ll try to be at WCUS 2016. 😉

Please, share your thoughts in the comments below and if something is missing from these notes or if I forgot to mention someone please write it.

#contributor-day, #wceu, #wordcamp, #wordcamp-europe