Francesca Marano 9:41 am on April 25, 2018
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Community Team Chats – April 5th 2018

The Community Team meets twice a month, first and third Thursday, at two different times to cover different timezones.

Slack logs from April the 5th: 11:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC

Deputies check-in

No roadblocks, everyone is doing the best they can with the amount of time they can dedicate to the Community team.

We started reaching out to dormant Meetup groups so we’re likely receiving an influx of meetup applications, as we had reached out to groups that appeared inactive, and we’ve invited interested members to apply to organize. We are calling all deputies to vet at least a couple of applications to help with the backlog!

Proposals/Discussions

WordPress 15th Anniversary Parties

The WordPress 15th anniversary will be on May 27, 2018 — let’s get ready to celebrate!

We have a new page in the handbook with all the information and a website. Meetups that are in the WordPress chapter can ask for special swag and help with a venue.

Community table at WordCamp Europe 2018 Contributor Day

Contributor Day at WCEU is always busy so we need people to lead the table. We have two people at the moment and it would be great to have also a third one. We will post in our blog ideas about projects we want to tackle on the day and will go on from that.

At WCEU this year there will be also a “Community Room”, a place during the conference for all the other attendees who are not familiar with contributing to get in touch with the different teams. We need more info on this from the WCEU community team, to include it in our plan.

New WordCamp ticket registration fields

Three new fields were added in the ticket registration questions, regarding life-threatening allergies, special accommodation needs and Code of Conduct.

The questions have different flows that were designed to minimise the amount of information with store and, in the CoC case, block the user to purchase a ticket if they don’t specifically agree with it.

Moving WordCamp Ticket Sales from PayPal to Stripe

We are discussing the feasibility of switching to Stripe as the default gateway while using PayPal as an optional alternative, with a view to eventually deprecating PayPal entirely and switching to Stripe as the only core gateway in use.

A decisions hasn’t been made right now.

Code of Conduct Survey

The survey went live after months of hard work done by the CCoC working group. It was open for ten days. After it was published there were a number of comments in the post, unfortunately we can’t change the survey after people have answered it because it will invalidate the results.

Want to Help Organize a WordCamp for Organizers?

WordCamp for WordCamp organisers is a go!

Call for WordCamp Mentors!

In 2017 there were 127 WordCamps, the number will likely grow in 2018. If:

  • You’ve been the lead organizer of a WordCamp from application through completion of the event in the last 5 years.
  • You have 2-3 hours available per month per event you’re actively mentoring

Please consider joining the group of WordCamp Mentors!

WordCamp Nordic Proposal

Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden put together a proposal for a regional WordCamp to be held in Helsinki in 2019. The deadline for this discussion is Friday, 27 April – at that stage we will summarise the comments and move forward with the best decision based on what we have discussed.

 

#community, #community-team

Francesca Marano 5:31 pm on April 24, 2018
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Community Team Chats – March 15th 2018

The Community Team meets twice a month, first and third Thursday, at two different times to cover different timezones.

Slack logs from March the 15th: 11:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC

Deputies Check-in

We are facing some work overload. We have lots of applications for WordCamps and Meetups (yay!) coming in every day: all the deputies are busy and we hope we can have more people in our team soon.

Proposals/Discussions

WordCamp Volunteer Guidelines relating to GPL

The issue is around “a person works for a marketplace that sells non-GPL WordPress products. They want to help organize or volunteer at a WordCamp.”

In general, we would like to able to have these volunteers, as long as they don’t represent the non-GPL compliant company they work for during the event, but this seems to be difficult to implement during the event itself.

The comments are now closed and they will be summarised soon.

WordPress Community Code of Conduct Survey Draft

Final draft of the survey about the Code of conduct was presented to the team, there were no objections so the the group working on this will go on and schedule it.

WordCamp Fundraising Research

A new working group is coming up! The scope is to research the methods and practices of organizing teams that have been successful in their fundraising and then report back to the global community team with the results. The project is ongoing.

Guidelines for Speaker Thank Yous

Speaker dinners and speaker thank yous have become commonplace components of the WordCamp model. The origin of the speaker dinner was twofold: to ensure that all speakers were in town and ready to speak, and to thank them.

We discussed how we feel about a proposed guideline of the per day ticket price for speaker gifts, and other concerns or ideas.

The discussion is now closed, will be summarised soon and, if needed, new guidelines will be posted.

#community, #community-team

Josepha 4:13 pm on April 24, 2018  

Quarterly Updates | Q1 2018

To keep everyone aware of big projects and efforts across WordPress volunteer teams, I’ve reached out each team’s listed representatives. I asked each of them to share their top priority (and when they hope for it to be completed), as well as their biggest Wins and Worries. Have questions? I’ve included a link to each team’s site in the headings.

Accessibility

  • Contacted: @rianrietveld, @joedolson, @afercia
  • Priority: Getting the minimum accessibility requirements for Gutenberg done prior to merge. ETA is before 5.0
  • Struggle: Would like better accessibility knowledge/awareness in the project (here are a few training options for those who want to learn more)
  • Big Win: A lot of support from the community to make WordPress as accessible as it can be. All the designers, testers, a lot of developers and team leads are making an effort.

CLI

  • Contacted: @danielbachhuber, @schlessera
  • Priority: New major version v2.0.0 which restructures the packaging system to improve the developer experience (esp contributor onboarding). ETA is beginning of July.
  • Struggle: Assembling a larger team of regular contributors/committers (which informed the team’s priority).
  • Big Win: Version 1.5.0 released at the end of January was full of useful new features and bug fixes.

Community

Core

  • Contacted: @jeffpaul
  • Priority: Gutenberg polishing and GDPR preparations
  • Struggle: Timelines are in flux, but the new editor is getting into refinement phases. GDPR is being coordinated among a number of teams, so that’s taking significant time, but the next steps are clear.
  • Big Win: Got a number of new contributors to help lead releases. A few debrief posts about learnings and possible improvements are coming.

Design

  • Contacted: @melchoyce, @karmatosed, @boemedia, @joshuawold, @mizejewski
  • Priority: Team building, empowering designers to contribute, and continued focus on supporting Core.
  • Struggle: Making the path to contribution clearer (no designated tasks for designers to perform and contributing through Trac tickets is very technical/can be overwhelming).
  • Big Win: A bit of new involvement on the Design team and some partnering with people on other teams as well.

Documentation

  • Contacted: @kenshino
    Priority: Releasing HelpHub (background: https://make.wordpress.org/docs/2018/02/26/state-of-helphub-february-2018/) by May 30
    Struggle: A lot of work is short term or project-based, so it’s hard to keep volunteer engaged over long periods of time

Hosting

Marketing

  • Contacted: @bridgetwillard
  • Priority: Top priority is finishing the handbook, ETA June 2018
  • Struggle: Need a more streamlined onboarding process for Contributor Days
  • Big Win: We’re proud of quite a bit but the Trac onboarding Guide, jargon glossary, and keywords for new landing pages for wordpress.org.

Meta (WordPress.org Site)

  • Contacted: @coffee2code
  • Priority: GDPR, Council-requested updates, supporting teams where we can.
  • Struggle: 2 people on leave at the moment
  • Big Win: Got the About Page launched

Mobile

  • Contacted: @astralbodies, @catehstn
  • Priority: Getting Gutenberg on mobile
  • Big Win: Nailed what they hoped to ship in Q1, and excited to see what 2018 brings

Plugins

  • Contacted: @ipstenu
  • Priority: Getting off SupportPress so that more nuanced access is easy to give.
  • Big Win: Have moved to a new review system (even though it has some weird quirks).

Polyglots

  • Contacted: @petya, @ocean90, @nao, @chantalc, @deconf, @casiepa
  • Priority: Translate WP to 100% and then concentrate on the top 100 plugins and themes
  • Struggle: Getting new PTEs fast enough, and complex tools/systems. Overall, the volume of strings awaiting approval.

Support

  • Contacted: @clorith
  • Priority: Preparing for an increase in Gutenberg support (due to the potential callout, and 5.0 itself)
  • Big Win: Have been providing new workshops recently, focusing on various parts of support, as seen from various plugin and theme related perspectives and roles.

Training

  • Contacted: @bethsoderberg, @juliek
  • Priority: Finish audit and updates to lesson plans. ETA is May 2018
  • Struggle: Onboarding to new systems, but there are some trainings planned in the near future.
  • Big Win: Moved lessons to GitHub
Rian Rietveld 1:47 pm on April 24, 2018  

Accessibility Team Update – April 23, 2018

Transcript in Slack

Meeting notes

Time for next meetings

We picked a new time for the weekly a11y bugscrub and team meeting:

During the daylight saving time (as in now):

  • Accessibility bug scrub: Wednesday 14:00 UTC
  • Accessibility Team meeting: Wednesday 15:00 UTC

Starting next week, May 2, so the meeting on Monday 30th will be cancelled.

Handbook

After the handbook is sort of finished we want to maintain it via GitHub. That way more people can contribute or file issues. @nicbertino will help migrating the content we have now to GitHub and we are looking for an easy way to push the GitHub pages back in the handbook pages on wordpress.org.

Kudos to WPTavern for publishing a post about the handbook and the need for help.
At the moment we don’t need writers, but we desperately need reviewers with knowledge of accessibility and native English speakers to go through the pages on Best Practice we have published or are in draft on Google Docs.

@samikeijonen will post a series of tweets on @WPAccessibility to promote finished content in the Best Practice section. Which already gave discussion on Twitter, so that works well 🙂

Gutenberg

AT WordCamp London @karmatosed joined the a11y table and we discussed the issues on GitHub that have priority.
They are 13 issues labeled Accessibility and Milestoned Merge proposal: Accessibility. Some are also labeled High Priority.
@abrightclearweb researched the blocks – keyboard interaction (Tab, Shift+Tab) and added that info to the issue Simplify and streamline keyboard navigation through blocks.

These issues need to be worked on. The team is worried those issues can not be addressed before the merge proposal.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 4:28 pm on April 23, 2018
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Plugin Team Update – 23 April 2018

Plugin Status Change Stats

  • Plugins requested : 184
  • Plugins rejected : 8
  • Plugins closed : 23
  • Plugins approved : 85

Plugin Queue Stats (current)

  • Plugins in the queue (new and pending) : 731
  • → (older than 7 days ago) : 635
  • → (2018-04-16 – 2018-04-23) : 72
  • → (new; not processed or replied to yet) : 39
  • → (pending; replied to) : 692

SupportPress Queue Stats

Total open tickets : 27

  • → (with no activity in last 7 days) : 1

Within defined 7 day time window:

  • Total : 240
  • Closed : 234
  • Open : 6

#plugins

bridgetwillard 8:17 pm on April 21, 2018  

Marketing Team Update – April 18, 2018

Our vision for the Marketing Team is to be the go-to resource on strategy and content for other WordPress teams  — that means you. We reiterate our mission each week so that everyone who is new to the team understands what our goals are. This helps with onboarding.

We use our weekly slack meeting to focus on updates to the tasks that currently exist in Trello.

There wasn’t anything published save our 1 Day Contributor Day PDF. We’re continuing to prioritize Growth Council Ops requests.

ContributorDay-OnboardingPDF-041118 (1)

We’re Here for You

As always, if you have a task request please ping either me (@gidgey on Slack) or @mcdwayne. We’ll set up a Trello card and get to work.

Our meeting notes are here.

Francesca Marano 5:25 pm on April 20, 2018
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Community Team Chats – March 1st 2018

The Community Team meets twice a month, first and third Thursday, at two different times to cover different timezones.
Slack logs from March 1st: 8:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC

Deputies check-in

Daily operations are going well for everyone, no roadblocks.

Calls for volunteers

We are looking for more people to join the team in different capacities and for different workgroups

The first three projects are ongoing, the fourth one was completed with a successful run of four online roundtables to support meetup organizers in their essential community work, especially if they are struggling or suffer from burn-out: in the link you will also find the recordings of the sessions, they are a great resource for everyone involved in the organisation of events.

Proposals for discussion

We had some posts to discuss from our blog.

Proposal to Simplify Training for WordCamp Mentors

We are in serious need of more mentors for WordCamps! The post proposes to simplify the training that potentials mentors go through, and during the chat we expanded more on the “encouragement and support” for people that are interested but might feel that mentoring is a bit intimidating.

We are therefore thinking of a marketing campaign with the following message: “mentorship is not hard, it’s a rewarding experience for people who would like to help with it and eventually we are doing a good thing spreading our knowledge to others”.

2018 goals for the global community team: suggestions time!

We kept adding suggestions to the post.The plan is to will summarise and prioritise those.

Changing the time of the Community Team Chat

Lately attendance dropped in the 8:00 AM UTC chat so we voted for a new time slot: from March 15th the chat will be at 11:00 AM UTC.

A Trello Board for the Community Team

After discussing the matter in a previous chat, we decided to go on and try Trello. We would like to open a .org workspace for all the teams, with a .org email account. We will announce it when it’s done.

Calling European WordPress Communities

WCEU had been doing a terrific job at promoting European WordCamps throughout the year: the proposal is to have a form in the global WordCamp Handbook where WordCamps can submit their request for help so the Communication WCEU Team can help.

A few objections were raised on the time frame (does the team works year round? Can they guarantee that?) and the fact that next year’s team might want to do things differently. The issue is still open.

Reminders/Announcements/Enhancements

Open Floor AM Chat

The open floor in the morning chat brought up the topic of Women’s Groups inside the WordPress Community events.

Some Meetups have Women Who WordPress or Women Of WordPress dedicated events, we discussed the idea of integrating stand-alone groups.

The topic of events focussed on women was discussed in the past: some think these events are non inclusive by definition, while others see this as a great place to start your path as a meetup attendee in an environment that feels more safe. While no one objects to an event focused on women where everyone is invited, the jury is still out on events that are women only. The plan is to post about this in our blog.

 

#community, #community-team

Julie Kuehl 12:52 pm on April 20, 2018
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Training Team Update 19 April 2018

The Training Team had a special presentation (aka webinar) to launch the new tools and process that the team will be using to develop lesson plans. Ten people attended the launch of the new Trello board that the team will be using to track lesson plan development. Trello will be used in combination with GitHub repos for working on the lesson plans themselves. The meeting was recorded and a transcript is available here: Meeting Recording and Transcript

The team is now looking for contributors to help with writing, reviewing, copy editing, and testing lesson plans! If you’re interested in helping out, join the #training Slack channel and we’ll help you get started!

Team Links:

  • Getting Started (https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/) a little out of date at the moment, so ask if you have questions!
  • Our Team Blog (https://make.wordpress.org/training/)
  • Our Roadmap (https://trello.com/b/BsfzszRM/wordpress-training-team-lesson-plan-development)
  • Our Lesson Plans (https://github.com/wptrainingteam)
Marius L. J. 6:14 pm on April 19, 2018
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Support Team Meeting Updates for April 19th

General announcements

Keep updating our public google doc about Gutenberg questions that may pop up from the average user.

Our next upcoming support volunteer orientation is scheduled for April 27th.

 

WordPress 4.9.5

No new issues have been discovered that isn’t already being tackled in one way or another!

 

Checking in with international liaisons

The Italian, Swedish, Greek, Serbian and Brazilian communities had representatives in attendance.

 

Open floor

The notice shown when a post is held for moderation has been modified, and along with this the ability for local forums to modify the moderation timeframe has been introduced.

 

Read the meeting transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)

#support

Marius L. J. 12:59 pm on April 18, 2018
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Support Team Meeting Updates for April 12th

General announcements

As with previous weeks, if you’re trying out Gutenberg, or think of questions that pop up that seem like others have/might have, please help populate the common questions document so that we can be as prepared as possible once we start introducing it to a wider audience.

Our next Volunteer Orientation will be held on April 27th at 14:00 UTC, look for a make/support post about that shortly. If you’re not sure what the Volunteer Orientation is, you can read up on it in our summary of the experiment, but in short strokes it’s a way to try and keep people up to date, and new volunteers brought in with a hand to hold)

 

WordPress 4.9.5

No new items have come up for WordPress 4.9.5 beyond the usual local cache issues we see with every release.

 

WordPress 4.9.6

The next version of WordPress will be a short turnaround because of the deadlines for what we wish to get in. Look for it near the end of April/start of May for now, but this is tentative and may change.

 

GDPR FAQ

With the upcoming GDPR, and the inevitable confusion it may lead to for end users, it may be helpful to have a document with common responses. It’s not unlikely that the answer to the majority of questions would be “Please consult a lawyer”, but it’s desirable to have something for the tools we are implementing.

The GDPR working group has this planned, and are on top of it.

 

Checking in with international liaisons

The Swedish, Hindi and Brazilian communities had representatives present for this weeks discussions.

 

Review notifications

When a post is held for moderation we currently inform users that it will be reviewed within 72 hours. Unfortunately users get hung up on “72” and don’t read the bit before it explaining that’s the longest period we expect them to wait.

In light of this, we’ll be modifying the string to instead indicate that their post will be manually reviewed by a moderator to hopefully remove the scare element of the high number.

Read the meeting transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)

#support