Community Team Catch-up

A lot of moving and shaking on the community team, and we’ll be posting weekly updates moving forward.

  • Good intentions with the deputies program as created at the WCSF Summit in October 2014 did not pan out as expected. While more people were involved with 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. oversight, some additional bottlenecks were introduced, some volunteers left for various reasons, and the email queue for WCs and meetups was backed up so far that the average response time was more than 60 days.
  • As of 2 weeks ago, Andrea Middleton and I are returning to the community team (we had stepped back at the beginning of the year).
  • We are reviewing all team processes and ruthlessly tearing them apart in an effort to reduce bottlenecks, increase transparency, and give deputies more independent authority.
  • We are starting to post daily updates from deputies on the team blog to make it easier for people to know what’s happening within the team.
  • We are adding more deputies, including people whose employers are donating their time a certain number of hours. The goal is to especially flesh out our deputy ranks in past of the world other than North America.
  • We are revamping documentation.
  • We are experimenting with supportflow to replace supportpress. It is so buggy it took almost 2 weeks just to get it working, and it caused some problems with our meetup.com account during a massive email spree bug incident.
  • There are currently 22 WordCamps on the schedule between now and the end of the year, and another 31 on the pending list waiting to announce a date (based on signing venue contract/budget approval).
  • Applications for hosting WCUS close at the end of the month and a location will be chosen by Matt in early July.
  • The wordpress.tv team has spun off into its own team at https://make.wordpress.org/tv.

That’s the gist of it.

It looks like a bunch of other teams have also stopped posting here, so we may reach out and try to get other teams going again.

#community

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

Community Team Update, 1/30

Jen posted a big post on Mentorship Programs earlier this week. The plan with internal mentorship programs is to pilot both one-on-one and small group mentorships for new contributors to different teams within the project. Cool!

It’s also time to plan for external programs for this summer: the GSoC application is coming up in mid-February, and Jen’s looking for a volunteer to help manage the program: add a comment to the mentorship post if you’re interested in helping out. We’re still undecided on whether to participate in the Gnome Outreach Program for Women again — we’ll be gathering feedback as well as looking for fundraising sources.

In 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. news: This is the last week to nominate your city for the next WordCamp Europe or join the team.

#community

Community Team Update, January 17

The community team didn’t meet this week, as Andrea, Jen and I were all on the road (or in the air) at our regular meeting time. The following updates come from Jen:

Past Week:

  • Chatted with Matt re community expectations doc, doing a revamp based on his input.
  • Posted re definitions of WCs/event naming for comment, next step will be to chat with Matt about it.
  • We have 52 Meetups on the central account now. An additional 17 are on the list waiting for meetup.com to add them to the account, including Seattle, Orlando, Miami, Milwaukee, and Beijing. With the exception of 2 new group applications that have some issues re trademark pending, all new group applications are caught up.
  • Talked with Scott re profiles project, notes on /meta
  • Talked with Joseph from 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) group about using WP to publish their test reports rather than 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/+dropbox.

Coming Week:

  • Will circulate expectation doc to the volunteer group to review changes based on talk with Matt before bringing to Matt for comment and publishing here for community feedback. Target timing end of week for getting to volunteers, next week for Matt/community.
  • Andrea and I are headed to WC Phoenix this week/end.
  • Send out the 1st annual 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. member survey.
  • Send invites to join the central account to active WordPress meetups.
  • Send out swag packs to meetups.
  • Schedule the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. dev leads meetup.
  • Send out 3.8 core contributor feedback survey.
  • Publish 2013 in Review post on .org news blog

#community

Community Team update: January 10

We have important ongoing discussions! If you haven’t weighed in, please do.

On speaker diversity at WordCamps: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2014/01/07/women-speakers-at-wordcamps/

On having more variety of events: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2014/01/07/wordcamps-meetups-and-everything-in-between/

Updates from Jen:

  • Rolled in several more meetups, in talks with the organizers of several large existing ones about rolling in, started 2 new ones, and have a queue of about 12 applications to get through.
  • @iandunn is working on adding folder access by role to SupportPress so we can divvy up tasks around applications and management of programs.
  • Working on a wrap-up of contributor activity in 2013.
  • Tallied women speakers at WCs for 2013 and 2012. Overall, no increase. Will post full stats soon (need to spreadsheet it since right now it’s on paper).
  • Working with @coffee2code on profiles improvements.

Updates from Andrea:

  • scheduled and held inaugural 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. organizers’ orientation hangout
  • approved for pre-planning: Wellington, Omaha, Denmark, Sheffield
  • still working on those IRS sponsorship details
  • met with BadgeOS to discuss their sponsorship
  • met with WCNYC lead org
  • wrote some tl;drs to help make plan.wordcamp.org easier to read/understand

IRC meeting highlights from 9 January.

    More 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. news: planning a working group, looking a pilot to cover expenses with foundation funds, planning a survey of existing meetup members

  • There’s a new page on make/community for meetup planners: https://make.wordpress.org/community/meetups/ — look for a similar page on WordCamps to come
  • Tracy Levesque (@liljimmi) and Jen are talking about turning Tracy’s Girl Develop It Philadelphia class into a GDI/WP co-production. As a GDI instructor myself, I’d already been looking into offering her curriculum at my local chapter — making it available for WordPress workshops as well is exciting (plus, it’s a cool connection with another organization I love!)
  • Community expectations working group finished up; a draft will be published soon
  • Discussion on event types
  • The complete IRC Log is here.

#community

Community Group Update Dec 20

  • WCSF dates have been announced for October 2014. The date shifted because the venue will be under construction over the summer.
  • Discussion of Community Summit is ongoing. Nothing has been decided yet, and it won’t be until at least after the new year.
  • Andrea posted a WordCamp update for October – December. Keep an eye out for the full end-of-year 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. update with stats extravaganza over on the WC Central blog.
  • On the meetup front, Jen is working on getting existing meetup groups into the central WP Meetup account. An overview is here: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/12/10/meetup-com-transfers-these-applications-to-join-the/
  • We’re looking for new volunteers to help coordinate training programs & materials.
  • I’ve seen a question or two in IRC lately about whether we’ll be participating inmentorship programs (GSOC and the like) for next year. So, as a general reminder in case any of you see the question come up, we do plan to participate again, but we have to apply for each program separately, usually in the spring for summer programs — so please tell any potential students that we can’t say yet that we’re participating, but there will be announcements about each program individually as soon as there’s news to report.

#community

Community Team update for October 18

It’s been too long since the last update. That’s all on me, and my apologies! But we’ve been keeping busy:

WordPress was a mentor organization at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Jen’s writeup is here: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/10/09/last-weekend-we-participated-in-the-grace-hopper/

Please take a look at the discussion of starting up a community expectations team: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/29/community-expectations/

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. Stats (since Sept 20):

  • 87 WordCamp videos published at WordPress.tv
  • 1051 WordCamp tickets sold
  • published the date for Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Paris, Lima, and Sevilla
  • approved for pre-planning Charleston, Chicago, Atlanta, Mumbai, Brighton, Asheville, NC

If you’re a WordCamp organizer, or thinking of applying, please check out this discussion on WordCamp scheduling: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/10/18/licking-the-wordcamp-cookie/

Training materials can now be found at the Training Blog: https://make.wordpress.org/training/

#community

Community Team update for September 20

This week:

  • Tagretator had a test run at two WordCamps and is now in the plugin directory: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tagregator/
  • Andrea trained a team of wordcamp centralWordCamp Central Website for all WordCamp activities globally. https://central.wordcamp.org includes a list of upcoming and past camp with links to each. volunteers to review 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. websites every week.
  • Our Gnome OPW intern Siobhan to spending her last 2 weeks working on fleshing out troubleshooting tuts. Outline: https://make.wordpress.org/community/troubleshooting-workshop-outline/
  • Courtney kicked off the Theme School project: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/19/theme-school-curriculum/
  • Jen announced a project to make better speakers
  • This week’s WC stats: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/19/anything-for-tomorrows-update/#comment-6537

Upcoming:

  • WordPress is one of the projects at the Grace Hopper Celebration’s 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. Day

#community

Community Team Update for September 13

  • The Taggregator goes live this weekend! This is the 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 that allows social media related to each 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. to be aggregated in a central place. If you saw the WP10 site, you know the idea. Testing at WordCamps Buffalo and Albuquerque.
  • Mentorships: GSOC and GOW are wrapping up soon, and interns and mentors are scheduling their final reviews.
  • Training:
    • I’m working on breaking down the troubleshooting workshops into more manageable chunks to work on them asynchronously.
    • Theme school: will be published in separate modules from the outset. Next goal: identify which piece to start with.
  • Many more Community updates: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/12/its-time-for-our-weekly-call-for-stuff/#comment-6504
  • All the nitty-gritty on WordCamps/Events: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/12/its-time-for-our-weekly-call-for-stuff/#comment-6508

#community

Community + Events update for Sept. 6

Events + Community P2 merger – latest progress is here: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/05/importing-events/

We had our first weekly meeting as a team. We’ll be meeting regularly on Thursdays. Logs for this week: https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-contribute&day=2013-09-05&sort=asc#m7335

Ongoing projects, and calls for new volunteers/projects

  • Amy coordinating troubleshooting curriculum 2.0
  • Courtney wrangling the Theme School materials
  • Jen putting out the call for new volunteers for diversity, education outreach, and community management

This week in WordCamps:

  • 17 videos published to WordPress.tv
  • 288 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. tickets sold
  • WordCamp Detroit was cancelled
  • WordCamp Baroda was approved for pre-planning
  • WordCamp Wroclaw opened ticketing
  • requested interviews with some applicants to take over Sao Paulo and an applicant in Dayton
  • Announced volunteers helping respond to WordCamp applications: https://make.wordpress.org/events/2013/08/30/wordcamp-central-now-has-a-team-of-volunteers/
  • met with the organizing team of WP Weekend PHX to discuss them coming under the WordCamp umbrella
  • re-ordered WordPress stickers for WordCamp swag
  • WordCamp Cape Town organizers wrote a payment gateway for CampTix to be able to interface with local South African payment processor PayFast

Coming week:

  • write a checklist for reviewing WordCamp web sites & recruit some volunteers for that
  • get shipping info for WordCamps to multi-event sponsors so they can ship swag
  • interview Dayton & Sao Paulo applicants
  • nag some WordCamps about posting their videos to wp.tv
  • more posts to the WordCamp CentralWordCamp Central Website for all WordCamp activities globally. https://central.wordcamp.org includes a list of upcoming and past camp with links to each. blog
  • write a spec for WordCamp ratings system on Central
  • continue to support the 20 camps in planning and 15 camps in pre-planning

#community