jordesign 2:38 am on June 18, 2024
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20th June Support Team meeting

The support meeting will be held on Thursday, June 20 2024, 20:00 UTC (20:00 UTC, June 20) in #forums on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. (a Slack account is required) or at https://make.wordpress.org/support/chat/.

In Matt’s post about WP’s 21st birthday, and also at the WCEU keynote, the Forums were called out specifically as an area to improve and focus on.

“Forums should be front and center in the community.”

This fits well with discussions we’ve been having over the past month or two regarding challenges and opportunities in the Support Forums/Team. In this week’s meeting I’d suggest we try and organise these thoughts into some proposed actions we can publish publicly to address the proposed focus on improvement.

This can probably be a pretty free-flowing discussion – but I’m keen for us to come up with a concrete list of actions. A few thoughts as starting points…

  • How can we address the issues we’ve discussed previously? dwindling volunteers, entitled users, how to make sure we unflag as much as we flag, continued improvement in handling sockpuppets.
  • What ways could we encourage more people to search for answers, and ask questions, in the forums?
  • What tooling improvements should we prioritise asking MetaMeta 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 help with?

Checking in with international liaisons

This is the section where we reach out to the non-English speaking parts of our community, to see how they are doing, if there’s anything we can help each other with, or just interesting things going on that it would be nice to share with others.

There’s no requirements for previous participation or “fame” to share here, anyone is welcome, and we encourage newcomers to participate!

Unable to make the meeting, or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing? We would still love to hear how things are going in other non-English speaking parts of our community. Please feel free to let us know via the comment section below, in your own time, if there is anything you’d like to share, any questions or concerns you have, or just to let us know you’re doing OK!

We will make a habit of putting this callout with every agenda post going forward, so that everyone has a chance to join in.

For any other items to discuss, please add them to the comments below, or bring them up in the meeting.

#forums

jordesign 10:28 am on June 5, 2024
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6th June Support Team meeting

The support meeting will be held on Thursday, June 6 2024, 20:00 UTC (20:00 UTC, June 6) in #forums on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. (a Slack account is required) or at https://make.wordpress.org/support/chat/.

Just a little reminder that this is a new time. We’d love to see you there – but if the timing means you are unable to attend – feel free to leave any thoughts or discussion in in the comments of this post.

Support Team challenges

Let’s spend a little time sharing and discussing the challenges we see in the forums, and in the tasks performed by the Support Team.

Support ForumSupport Forum WordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations. opportunities

Let’s also have a little think about opportunities we see to make the Support Forum experience better, more helpful, or more compelling to WordPress users.

Checking in with international liaisons

This is the section where we reach out to the non-English speaking parts of our community, to see how they are doing, if there’s anything we can help each other with, or just interesting things going on that it would be nice to share with others.

There’s no requirements for previous participation or “fame” to share here, anyone is welcome, and we encourage newcomers to participate!

Unable to make the meeting, or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing? We would still love to hear how things are going in other non-English speaking parts of our community. Please feel free to let us know via the comment section below, in your own time, if there is anything you’d like to share, any questions or concerns you have, or just to let us know you’re doing OK!

We will make a habit of putting this callout with every agenda post going forward, so that everyone has a chance to join in.

For any other items to discuss, please add them to the comments below, or bring them up in the meeting.

#forums

jordesign 12:39 pm on May 13, 2024
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16th May Support Team meeting

The support meeting will be held on Thursday, May 16 2024, 20:00 UTC in #forums on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.(a Slack account is required) or at https://make.wordpress.org/support/chat/.

Just a little reminder that this is a new time. We’d love to see you there – but if the timing means you are unable to attend – feel free to leave any thoughts or discussion in in the comments of this post.

Automated Support Badges

There’s been plenty of discussion about this both in TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. and in past meetings. But with a proposal to have this worked on at the WCEU 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/. – it’s time to some to some final decisions and clarity around what we’d like. Please keep in mind that getting anything in place and automated would be good – so we can make recommendations for the purposes of the work being done, and then course-correct later on if needed.

Encouraging more Forum contributors/contributing

Let’s continue our brainstorm from last meeting about how we can be more open and inviting, and celebrate/encourage contributors who are regularly helping others in the Forums.

Proposal for a Support Trac bug scrub

This has been discussed a little already – but lets further discuss the potential of having a Bug Scrub on the week’s we don’t have a meeting. Would this be useful? When should we hold it? What would we expect the outcomes to be? Let’s talk about it.

Checking in with international liaisons

This is the section where we reach out to the non-English speaking parts of our community, to see how they are doing, if there’s anything we can help each other with, or just interesting things going on that it would be nice to share with others.

There’s no requirements for previous participation or “fame” to share here, anyone is welcome, and we encourage newcomers to participate!

Unable to make the meeting, or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing? We would still love to hear how things are going in other non-English speaking parts of our community. Please feel free to let us know via the comment section below, in your own time, if there is anything you’d like to share, any questions or concerns you have, or just to let us know you’re doing OK!

We will make a habit of putting this callout with every agenda post going forward, so that everyone has a chance to join in.

For any other items to discuss, please add them to the comments below, or bring them up in the meeting.

#forums

jordesign 12:30 am on April 9, 2024
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11th April Support Team meeting

The support meeting will be held on Thursday, April 11 2024, 20:00 UTC in #forums on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.(a Slack account is required) or at https://make.wordpress.org/support/chat/.

Just a little reminder that this is a new time. We’d love to see you there – but if the timing means you are unable to attend – feel free to leave any thoughts or discussion in in the comments of this post.

Support Team Contributor Ladder

In an effort to grow the size of contributor to the Forums – we’re going to do a short excercise which pinpoints where contributors with different levels of experience can get involved. Please read this introductory post before the meeting to learn more about this.

Changes needed for adherence to Digital Services Act

There’s been some discussion on this in the comments (feel free to catch up and add any thoughts) but it would be good to decide some actions from that. Most notably:

  • Should we include a definition of what is considered ‘Spam’ for the Forum Guidelines?
  • What tooling do we need to open TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets for?

Brainstorm and review of open Trac tickets

In addition to the above – we have a bunch of open Trac tickets (Automated Support Badges anyone?) with request for changes to improve the tooling and experience in the forums. I’m keen to hear all y’all thoughts on which of those are most urgent/valuable – so we can approach MetaMeta 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. with a prioritised list and try and get some of those moving.

Checking in with international liaisons

This is the section where we reach out to the non-English speaking parts of our community, to see how they are doing, if there’s anything we can help each other with, or just interesting things going on that it would be nice to share with others.

There’s no requirements for previous participation or “fame” to share here, anyone is welcome, and we encourage newcomers to participate!

Unable to make the meeting, or maybe meetings just aren’t your thing? We would still love to hear how things are going in other non-English speaking parts of our community. Please feel free to let us know via the comment section below, in your own time, if there is anything you’d like to share, any questions or concerns you have, or just to let us know you’re doing OK!

We will make a habit of putting this callout with every agenda post going forward, so that everyone has a chance to join in.

For any other items to discuss, please add them to the comments below, or bring them up in the meeting.

#forums

jordesign 11:19 am on April 8, 2024
Tags:   

Brainstorming a Support Team Contributor Ladder

One of the things that will help with the long-term sustainability of the Support Team is to start getting more contributors involved at different levels.

Currently we have a situation where the Support Team is made up of a small number of Mods, and then we have a handful of contributors within the forums who answer a lot of threads, but are not really involved or aligned with the team in general.

I propose that we have a great opportunity to engage and connect with Contributors in the forums in such a way that we start building them towards greater involvement and impact within the Support ecosystem of 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/. This in turn would create a funnel or pathway towards future Support Team membership.

Contributor Ladder

A Contributor Ladder is a process and tool (based on the 5 stages of volunteering) that many other Make teams have used to identify ways to involve contributors at any stage of experience, and help them ‘level up’ their involvement. It is a great way to think about how to get more people involved, but also what skills and experience Contributors would need to take on different tasks within the team.

Here’s a few examples of how other teams use a Contributor Ladder

Step 1: Identify tasks

The first thing to do is write out all the things that the Team (in our case, including the broader contributor base) does. This is my shortlist – but I’d love to hear of others we should consider:

  • Checking Pending queue, Spam queue, and Modwatch queue
  • Identifying and removing Spam
  • Answering questions in #forums
  • Handling the password reset queue
  • Taking part in fortnightly team meetings
  • Answering questions in the general forums
  • Discussing and providing input on decisions
  • Supporting end engaging other contributors
  • Strategy and planning

Step 2: Match to the 5 stages of volunteering

The next thing is to assign those different activities to the stages of volunteering. At this step we can also identify why training/experience is needed in order for a Contributor to achieve a certain level, and how we acknowledge them.

Here’s my rough first attempt here:
Table displaying details of the Support Team Contributor Ladder

Let’s discuss and workshop?

I propose that we spend 10-15 minutes going over this brainstorm/process in our next team meeting on April 11th as a helpful step towards better understanding the work of the team and how to plan for the future.