Community Team Update: March 7, 2014

Amy has gotten busy with work, so I’ll be handling our team updates for the time being. Since it’s been awhile for our team posting something, this week I’ll describe the stuff we’re working on, and go back to the more succinct bulleted lists next week.

tl;dr: Our team is growing in active members and projects, and we’re excited about it.

Meetups

There are around 70 groups on the chapter account now, with more due to roll-in at the next quarterly mark at the beginning of next month. We sent out surveys for organizers and members of all meetups in the program and will be posting the results of that next week. Some of the bigger meetups have joined lately (like Austin) and/or will be in the next roll-in (like Boston), so we should have some good momentum as we move into spring. Andy McIlwain from the Toronto community has volunteered to help with the program and started getting trained on administration this week.
The community team focuses on meetups in the team chat on the 1st Thursday of each month. 

Mentorships/Diversity

  • We were accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code. The application period opens soon, and at that point we’ll be pretty busy for about 2 weeks fielding questions, reviewing applications, handling irc chats, etc. @samuelsidler has volunteered to be the backup admin and help me wrangle it this year. Thanks, Sam!
  • Still have a few contrib groups to talk to about the in-house mentorship program, but hoping to kick off the one-month ‘contributor onramp’ set within the coming month. In the community team we’ll be doing ours in the areas of 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. organizing, WC organizing, and wordpress.tv moderation.
  • We opted not to participate in OPW this year, agreeing that getting our in-house programs in order was a higher priority and would allow us to help more people in the long run. We hope to do OPW again in the future.
  • There was a workshop in Vancouver for women to brainstorm topics and/or get comfortable with public speaking for WordCamps/WordPress meetups. Similar workshops are being planned for Seattle and Portland this month, after which we hope to post a standard workshop curriculum (to be used by anyone/everyone, not just for diversity outreach).
  • WordPress will be a sponsor for the Tech Mix It Up diversity mixer at Philly Tech Week.
  • Work continues slow but steady on workshop curriculums. The one for child theming as about done.
  • Going to work with Girl Develop It on standardizing their WP curriculums (via team member Tracy Levesque, who’s also a GDI instructor).

The community team focuses on mentorships/diversity in the team chat on the 2nd Thursday of each month. 

WordCamps

There’s a 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. in Dayton this weekend, followed by Atlanta and Mumbai next weekend. At the end of April we start “WordCamp Season,” when there are generally multiple WordCamps every weekend. In addition to the 29 WCs already on the schedule, there are a bunch more trying to nail down their dates. Full schedule at http://central.wordcamp.org/schedule/
The community team focuses on meetups in the team chat on the 3rd Thursday of each month. 

Contributor Recognition/Site Stuff

We are working on an updated version of profiles.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/. In addition to technical changes (starting from last year’s GSoC project by Mert), there’ll be some design updating as  well as a badge system to recognize contributors of all types. Hoping/planning to launch v1 next week and then do 2-week iterations moving forward to keep improving it.

Hey Team Reps: Will want to talk with you about how to tell who’s an active member on your teams so the stuff that’s manual now could hopefully be automated in the future.

The community team focuses on contributor recognition & site stuff in the team chat on the 4th Thursday of each month. 

#community