Training Team Update – 3 May 2018

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/. Onboarding

The information requested by the WordCamp EU Team for Contributor Day info can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mh0vGq075pH-CqyUbMNdrOz9AVaEUm9ofli0YrNaFsg/edit?usp=sharing. It outlines how contributors can help the Training Team during a Contributor Day event, but it is also helpful for the team in general. The Marketing Team is also helping to create a handout specific to the Training Team that can be used to help people get started.

The learn.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/ site

That site has always been the end game for the team’s lesson plans. So in this whole workflow revamp an attempt to reverse engineer our product/processes based on that being the end game was attempted. This Trello card (https://trello.com/c/ck3UjgcA) has a PDF with a few wireframes of what perhaps that site could look like. It has identified a couple of things missing from our lesson plans/workflow. We need to gather more information regarding the learn.wordpress.org site.

There was a big takeaway from that exercise: we need to be writing lesson plans with time constraints in mind. So we should be writing lesson plans that identify:

  1. Length: < 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, 8 hours, possibly multi-day
  2. Audience: Speaker, User, Themer, Plugins, Developers
  3. Level: beginner, intermediate, advanced

Update on slides (Shower – show-er)

The Slides card on the TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. board has the original discussion regarding slides including the requirements and pros/cons of the various alternatives. The #accessibility team suggested https://github.com/shower/shower / https://shwr.me/

So we need to do some work on whether there are pros/cons to Reveal.js (which is what we had been considering as a solution) versus Shower (pronounced show-er). But HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites./CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site./JS still seems the best “official” alternative. Unofficial alternatives, such as Google Slides or PPT files, could be shared, hosted, used for drafting and linked to on the GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ /slides/README.md files.

May not be the most friendly solution, but we can still allow people to create their slides using whatever tool they like best. Then one of the final tasks before publishing a lesson plan to learn.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/ would be to convert the slides to Reveal or Show-er. Either way the actual slides are just HTML lists divided by sections and has the ability to “theme” the slides. Just like WordPress itself we can keep presentation separate from content.

It’s probable that it won’t be the authors creating these slides (but they can if they want to!), but perhaps a“specialized” role on team to do before “official” publishing.

Team members, roles, meetings

Random thoughts:

  • First random thought: There’s a feeling of a desperate need for a nearly all-day “summit” to talk through things and or make decisions.
  • Second random thought: A survey of members to see what their skills and interests are might be something we need to do.
  • Third random thought: Perhaps a few GitHub help sessions would be good to schedule.
  • Fourth random thought: Our meetings are a bit one-sided at the moment. It should be more of a team event.
  • Fifth random thought: We are missing quality control in our lesson plans – there’s wide variance in what we have.
  • Sixth random thought: We may need another Trello list/job description/step in our workflow to take care of that.
  • Seventh random thought: All these random thoughts reiterate the first random thought.