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.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:
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.