Jen 2:21 pm on July 21, 2013
Tags: elections! ( 2 ), team reps ( 27 )

Housekeeping: Team Reps

Hi everyone. Back in October, we said the Team RepTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. experiment would include elections every 6 months, with the term that started in January ending in June, which would mean its time (or really, a bit past time) to elect new reps. We also said we would review the system first so that if we wanted to try changing/improving anything we could do it in the next round (meaning now). I’ve been talking a lot with other 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. projects about how they organize their contributor teams to see if there are any successful models we could swipe from, and I’m sure you all have thoughts based on the past 6 months about how we could improve our community structure and support, so let’s start that discussion. In the comments, note if there’s anything you thought has been especially positive in the first round of team reps and having this site, and/or anything that you think could be improved moving forward.

#elections, #team-reps

Jen Mylo 2:23 pm on July 21, 2013
Here are some of my thoughts:
- Monthly group chats. I wanted to do these but found scheduling to be frustrating and time-consuming, and I let it slide after the first one. This one’s a negative and it’s on me. If instead of trying to accommodate everyone’s personal time requests we’d just set a time and said, “Sorry, one or two reps will have to suck it up one day a month for the next three months and then we’ll change the time so someone else has to suck it up,” it could have been a standard time and an automatic thing that didn’t require one-off individual scheduling. I vote we set up a generic standard time for a monthly reps chat like the dev chat and some team chats do, and just make it a mandatory part of being the active team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. that you need to make it a priority to attend, even if it means that you have to get up at 3am.
- Leader Labels. I’ve been rethinking the team rep vs team lead vs senior/trusted/lead [area contributor] designation. We had trouble in the last round even finding enough people to be team reps, as we were creating teams left and right, the people in more senior positions were involved with multiple teams, and some teams are really only a couple of people still, so maybe the idea should be revisited overall. Writing a weekly update is basically an administrative task. Being a person who’s been around long enough and who’s put in enough blood, sweat, and tears to know a lot of stuff and be capable of being an authoritative reviewer is basically a leadership task/designation. This gets into complicated politics, but especially since we wanted to share around the admin tasks of the rep, I’d like a way to recognize the people in active leadership positions that’s not tied to rotating administrative tasks. For example: if Mika stops being a team rep, do I introduce her as “one of the most active and senior contributors in the support forums” or can she get a shorthand title equivalent to “lead developer” for the forums — “Mika is one of the support leads.” How would it be decided who gets those designations? We’d need a ladder that’s published so contributors can see the path and expectations, something we should have for coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team designations anyway.
- New “Reps”. As part of the /community group and outreach, I want to start something similar to the Mozilla Reps program (ambassadors for the project that don’t necessarily have a specific leadership role on a product, but are trusted contributors who’ve been recognized/accepted as being to represent the project to the broader community, especially at events). So what to call these people, vs contributor team leaders (whether admin or practice or strategy leaders), could/should also be part of the discussion.
- Limited Personnel. For a lot of the contributor groups, there’s still a pretty limited number of people appropriate for the team rep role, so wanting it to rotate may be a challenge this time around. I’d vote that we consider groups keeping their current reps for the rest of the year unless they want to step down, as there has already been some turnover during the first term.
- Open voting. Last time we did voting by a basic open poll on each team blog. This meant that people who aren’t active team contributors were voting as well, which required some analysis to look at the outcome from all votes as well as the outcome from votes by verified contributors. Limiting team elections to active group contributors makes the most sense, but that implies we have a way of knowing who the active contributors are. For teams with a handful, the team reps could easily ID them and we could do the voting poll with email keys or something for access, but for more anonymous groups or those with less clear thresholds of contribution, that would be more complicated.
- Teams, Subteams, Coalititons, SIGs. Should we talk about combining the Support and Docs teams again? Any other natural overlaps where it would make sense to combine teams? Core + 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)/UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing.? We never really got to the place where we acted on the discussion we had before about the difference between contributor groups that were responsible for an end product (core, forums/docs, events, repos, etc) and groups that were coalesced around a discipline that affects multiple products rather than being responsible for a product. We should revisit that as well.
- Isaac Keyet 4:10 am on July 23, 2013
  - Monthly chats: the Mobile Group missed missed the first one so I think we’re still curious as to what they’re like. I’m +1 for having these as I know it’s hard to interact across teams unless you have some face-time – Updates posts run through fast and I think everyone in the community tends to keep their head down.
  - Leader labels: I think team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. works fine, better than “lead” since it comes with implications. I wouldn’t worry too much about labeling, we have leads for individual projects (coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. leads) and even within the mobile group for dev projects (new app updates) and it’s a completely separate thing. As Chip noted, it’s mostly an administrative task and if there’s overlap with other areas of a project where you’re a lead I think everyone gets that and are fine with it.
  - Evangelists: sure, let’s coin a name for it and launch it (maybe starting with a little badge in your .org profile and a highlight on the Make frontpage when you or your peers get elected)
  - Rotating roles: if we want to rotate people in and out eventually we should start now, being team rep is an administrative task that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have had a whole lot of experience within that team.
  - Voting: solution: make it available only to people that have a user role higher than Viewer on any one of the Make blogs.
  - Teams: no feedback
Pippin Williamson 2:52 pm on July 21, 2013

I’m all for the mandatory meetings.
Emil Uzelac 8:58 pm on July 21, 2013

I am pretty much good with all.
Ipstenu (Mika E.) 9:12 pm on July 21, 2013

One of the problems faced by, well, me over in Support Land is “What does a Rep -DO-?” I think that’s been the biggest hurdle in finding someone to be a backup/second rep for a lot of things, especially when your group is far less easy to measure/codify than others. How much of a time commitment is it past what we already do and so on.

Support + Docs seems logical. We never really fully split anyway, and having a ‘doc’ rep and a ‘support’ rep makes it way easier to alternate posting chores.

Rep ends up having the implication of ‘lead’ anyway at the end of the day. Many times people have said ‘Well if you represent support, then you’re ‘senior’ and if I have a problem with another mod, I’m going to come to you.’ The language there needs to be thought over, though, since I’m not really sure either is entirely optimal.

Monthly group chats, sure 🙂
Siobhan 6:24 am on July 22, 2013
- Monthly Group Chats: monthly group chats would be excellent. Sticking to a standard time every month would make it easier to ensure that it happens. The time could be reviewed every six months to ensure that no one’s on a difficult time zone for longer than six months.
- Leader Labels – agreed on this. It also seems to vary from group to group. I would definitely back splitting the rep/administrative side of things from the leadership side of things. From the perspective of docs, I’ve seen the rep role as more of an administrative task that involves keeping an eye on what’s going on and posting weekly updates. I’d also like to see it include drawing up the weekly chat agenda and posting actions and minutes from meetings. This opens up the rep positions to a much broader group of people and means that it could be a stepping stone to taking on more responsibility in the future. If the role is properly defined I can imagine a number of docs people who would be able to take it on (as Mika says – no one really is that sure what a rep does). And if someone successfully takes on the rep role for a period of time it gives them the experience and confidence to go on to lead a project.
- Limited Personnel – if someone else from docs wants to take on the rep role I’d be more than happy for them to. Like I said above, it’s a good opportunity to give people more experience.
- Teams/Subteams etc – everyone in docs + support is happy for us to re-merge.
Chip Bennett 2:11 pm on July 22, 2013

Some very stream-of-consciousness thoughts on Team Reps:

Team RepTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. Role:

In execution, it seems that “Team Rep” has essentially meant “person who posts updates to Make/Updates”, and essentially nothing else. Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but if the role should involve more than that, we need to ensure that such additional involvement is better defined.

Leader Label:

The Theme Review Team has operated under the original assumption that “Team Rep” was a spokesperson/liaison role, and something that was a separate consideration of team leadership. I think our team is probably somewhat unique, since we have a small team of admins that share the “leadership” role – an arrangement that has worked well for us over the past three years.

I would like to see the “Team Rep” role remain that of a liaison, because I think it would facilitate the admins to solicit participation from non-admins.

As for “titles” (insofar as they matter at all), the TRT admins get labeled with “Theme Review Admin” in the WPORG forums, and that works well. But along those lines, especially now that we have close to 100 people with review privileges, it might be nice to be able to recognize the really active reviewers as “Senior Theme Reviewer” or something.

Monthly Chats

As for monthly chats: are they really necessary? IMHO we already have one great means of discussion/collaboration – the Make/Updates site – that we don’t take much advantage of. Before we look at making a potentially quite inconvenient (no day/time is going to work for everyone, with such a diverse team) monthly chat mandatory, might it be a good idea to ensure that we’re taking full advantage of the Make/Updates blog updates? Ask questions. Discuss problems. Solicit discussion and advice for resolving those issues. 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.” people with @-references when specific input is needed.

I know that we tried a (very) little bit of that with the Theme Review Team updates, but we certainly could have done better.

Collaboration

There’s a lot of cross-over between Theme Review and 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 Review. I think it would make sense for our two teams to find ways to work more closely together. There are some significant differences (Themes don’t have SVNSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/.-commit access, there’s a boatload of infrastructure/scripts running under the hood to make the Theme process work, and we have necessarily distinct approval guidelines), but our end goals are still the same. I don’t think the teams should be merged or anything, but I would like to find more opportunities to communicate.

Limited Personnel

Emil and I have shared the duties of posting to Make/Updates over the… however long Team Reps have been around. I’ve “officially” worn the “Team Rep” hat for that time, so I think it would be great for him to wear it for a while. 🙂
- Emil Uzelac 10:07 pm on July 22, 2013
  
  For our team specifically I also believe that monthly chats are not necessary. And Chip is right, I completely missed that “Theme Review Admin” was labeled while back.
- Jen Mylo 3:51 pm on July 23, 2013
  
  In execution, it seems that “Team RepTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts.” has essentially meant “person who posts updates to Make/Updates”, and essentially nothing else.
  
  It was *supposed* to mean “person brings news from the rest of the contributor groups to the team, and brings back questions/concerns/opinions from that team to the group at /updates” in addition to posting the individual team report. Hence the “rep” label. 🙂

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