Note from Jane: These notes are from the team 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. summit that happened the weekend before #wpcs A public benefit corporation and a subsidiary of the WordPress Foundation, established in 2016.. More information about the outcome of this talk will be posted soon to wordpress.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/.
How were people chosen to be team reps?
Every contributor group were surveyed (via p2 and/or mailing list) to choose team reps (primary and backup). The UI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. team was slightly different in that the group was not very active at that time, so the responses were low, but the selection was Jane and Helen as second. Since Jane was organizing it, Helen was chosen as a Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team rep, and the UI team had devolved into mostly CSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. (dev), no UI team reps were assigned.
Core devs have team reps including long-time core committers, highly experienced devs with commit access, experienced devs without commit access, and devs new to contributing. This overweighted the team rep group in favor of core devs. Also, since people were voted in, roles have changed. Agreed to reduce the number of core dev reps to two, just like all other groups.
Sometimes roles change (like Mika, who’s been working on plugins as well as support). People should, ideally, just be responsible for one thing. How regularly should we revisit who the reps are? Should we time it with release cycle, or make it time-based? 6 months, timed with calendar, not release cycle seems most attractive.
After the summit, Jane will post about another voting round – whittle down the core dev reps, revisit UI/events/etc, and announce the new round of elections.
Term limits. Is it best to switch team reps every term? This can be a good way to encourage people in your team to step up. Another idea is to have a team rep and a rep-in-training, so that the alternate rep can be learning and training before they take on the team rep responsibilities.
Do you lose team rep status based on poor performance? If team reps miss weekly updates or monthly chats, should they be asked to step down? Alternate reps should represent the team if a team rep can’t make a monthly hangout or weekly update. If the whole team can’t post/represent for 2 weeks straight, then they need to re-assess the reps.
What teams are light and need to be recruited for? Mobile, international, accessibility 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), and security (new team!).
Are there any teams we don’t have that we should? WordPress.org team (Meta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.) for sure. UI could use more designers. Support could use more people and documentation writers. It would be a good idea to make documentation a separate group.
Agreed to close voting on December 14 for the next round of team reps to start on January 1, allowing for a 2-week orientation and training/getting up to speed.
It needs to be emphasized to the community that the team rep position is more about communication and project management, not necessarily prestige. Let’s keep assessing our processes and structure, and make iterative improvements.
#contributor-groups, #team-reps, #teams
