During the Hallway Hangout: What’s next to the outreach program, the idea came up to create a GitHub group called “outreach” that can be pinged when a PR, a discussion, or an issue needs some further input from the outreach group. Sometimes developer or designers would like a few more voices to chime in on an issue, a solution or on a new feature. Or they are ready to have more people test a PR or a new feature. Now there is a group of contributors you can ping 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.” to alert them to your work.
It works from any GitHub 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/ Repo in the WordPress organization
For now, its active contributors are listed, but it’s open to anyone who would like to be alerted when developers on the WordPress project request additional feedback or testing. The only requirement is to have a GitHub account.
For developers or designers
Ping @WordPress/outreach
PRs can be work in progress or already merged. For merged ones that are part of a set of PRs for a feature, we might also create a call for testing for a broader reach in collaboration with the #core-test team.
Ideally, a ping should point to a set of testing instructions, maybe additional questions and a time frame in which the feedback would be expected.
If there are discussion posts on the GitHub’s repo that need to be amplified, a ping certainly is welcome here too.
Depending on the PR/feature the ping could also be used to request a call for testing that we collaborate on with the Test team, that goes out to more users
For contributors:
If you want to participate in a request for feedback, please contact @bph or @fabian to be added to the group. Or just post in the #outreach channel, that you would like to join.
Props to @fabiankaegy and @greenshady for review
#github, #test
