Sorry for taking so long with these. I got sick last week and lost a few days.
Attendees: Someone from every official product team except theme review and polyglots. Theme folks said the time would be an issue, but no word from polyglots. Will reach out to them to see what’s up, has been no activity here from them in general.
Agenda: Reps/Leads/[Advisors] Roles, Elections/Appointments, Summit Planning, Team Stats, New Contributor Materials, 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/ Landing Page
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/Elections
Proposed changes to team reps role/process based on the experiences of the first term:
- Term of 3 months for a rep rather than 6 months for 2 reps that swap halfway through.
- Have outgoing rep recommend the next rep, like with release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release. on coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. Recommend to their team, get general acceptance from the team before recommending to team reps. Each team can handle the internal decision process however works best for them (poll, just propose a couple names, ask for volunteers, whatever), but the outgoing team rep will make the decision on the recommendation. Other outgoing team reps would only object to a recommendation if it was someone not active on the team or someone operating outside the general .org rules (someone selling proprietary themes wouldn’t be okay, for example). If a team can’t agree on who to make the rep, the larger team reps group will arbitrate.
- As before, we are iterating on something that was brand new last time around. It’s all an experiment with good intentions. If something doesn’t work, we can fix it.
- Next round of rep would be chosen in December. Each team take a week to decide who will go from now until then.
Discussion points:
- Some felt 3 months too short. Others felt it was a more realistic time commitment.
- Several team reps dropped out during the course of the six month term this time.
- Possible lack of continuity with shorter terms something to keep an eye on.
- What about term limits?
- Tiny teams that don’t have enough people can’t really rotate very frequently/adhere to term limits.
- Shorter term makes it possible to share the responsibility among more people, also helping to identify who steps up and is reliable and could be ready for more leadership in areas other than administration.
- Some people still wanted 2 reps all the time. Main reason for proposing just having one active rep at a time and having a backup that isn’t actively participating in meetings has to do with process management. It was noted that backups should participate in everything so that if they need to step in for the main rep they’ll know what’s going on, but that touches on the problem that reps currently are not really doing the job as originally laid out. Reps should be filling in the whole team regularly on what’s going on with team reps/other teams, so almost any team member should be able to act as a backup if needed without special ramp-up information passing.
- Some disagreement about what to do re Docs/Support rep(s). Again, slightly misses the idea of a team rep being a conduit/liaison rather than a subject matter expert or lead. Any team rep should be able to represent their team by talking to the people running various projects/components in their team. Some teams will have more disparate subgroups than others. For now, docs and support will have two active. Community team will try to be an example as it grows in the coming term of how the different-projects-in-one-one-team could work.
Lead Role
Sam, Jen, Drew and Pippin agreed on a proposal for creating an official lead role for teams analogous to the lead developer role and separate from team reps, but all agreed to table the discussion until new reps were rolled in. Of note, whatever happens with that, it would not be the job of reps to choose leads, but an internal team matter signed off on by Matt, same as with the core role.
Summit Planning
Going to post on wordpress.org and allow the community to suggest locations. Jen will also do continued research on possible locations. We’ll shoot to choose a place by Sept 15, acknowledging that date can’t be chosen without venue. Shooting for Februaryish or May, depending on location/weather.
Contributor Stats
No specifics here, just a heads up that it’s on Sam’s radar and we’ll need the help of all teams to start gathering useful participation stats so we can watch trends around contributor engagement.
make.wordpress.org home page
Getting worked on, with an upcoming surge (hopefully to launch) during/immediately following WC Birmingham when Jen, Sam, Otto, and others will be together.
Project Queue
Sam published https://make.wordpress.org/meta/project-queue/ to keep track of priorities on .org site projects.