Office Hours

Core Performance office hours are held every 2 weeks on Tuesdays and the current meeting time is always up-to-date on the Meetings calendar. Chats are held in the #core-performance channel and last for one hour.

All are welcome to attend the weekly chats to share updates, ask questions, and learn more about the Team’s work. A meeting summary is posted there after the chat. All summaries are viewable in the #performance-chat tag.

Responsibilities and access

The office hours are typically hosted by one of the Core Performance Team Reps. In case none of the Team Reps is available for a meeting, they should coordinate finding a replacement host with other active members of the team ahead of time.

The technical requirements to be an office hours host are:

• Have a WordPress.org account and a WordPress Slack account.
• Have access to use the /here command in the #core-performance channel on Slack.
• Have access to draft and publish posts on the Make WordPress Core blog.

Running the chat

Recurring agenda

The agenda for the office hours meeting is typically very similar every time. As such, it is not necessary to publish an agenda post ahead of the meeting.

The meeting host should raise the following topics in order of priority as listed. Some topics may only be applicable to raise at certain times.

If there is nothing to discuss for a topic within 2 minutes of posting the message, the host can move on to the next topic.

If there is too much to discuss in a meeting so that not all topics can be covered, this is okay. The only topics that always need to be covered if applicable are the ones about releases upcoming soon.

1. Any blockers or updates to discuss for the upcoming WordPress Core release?
   • Only applicable while in Beta or RC phase of the upcoming WordPress Core release
2. Any blockers or updates to discuss for the upcoming Performance Lab plugin releases?
   • Only applicable when <2 weeks before a scheduled Performance Lab plugins release
3. Any blockers or updates to discuss for a priority project milestoned for the upcoming WordPress Core release?
4. Any blockers or updates to discuss for a priority issue milestoned for the upcoming Performance Lab plugins release?
5. Any general blockers or updates to discuss for anything else? (open floor)

Example messages

Feel free to copy and paste these messages, or ignore them and write your own. These examples are here only for reference and are by no means a guideline or required to be used.

Meeting start

• /here Welcome to the bi-weekly Core Performance <office-hours>!
• Who’s around today? Even if you’re only lurking, please feel free to send an emoji to indicate your attendance. 👋

Starting with the first topic

One of the following:

• Let’s start with the upcoming WordPress Core release <version>. Does anyone have any blockers or updates to discuss there?
• Let’s start with the upcoming set of Performance Lab releases which is due <release-date>. Does anyone have any blockers or updates to discuss there? Who will be running this release?
• Let’s start with priorities for the current WordPress Core milestone. Does anyone have any blockers or updates to discuss there?

Meeting end

• And that’s it for today. Thank you for attending, and see you in 2 weeks!
• </office-hours>

Posting the meeting summary

After the meeting, post a summary of the meeting to the Make WordPress Core blog. Ideally this should happen immediately afterwards, but no later than the same day.

The easiest way to get started is to clone one of the recent performance chat summaries to start the new post. You can find previous performance chat summaries under the “core-performance” tag. For example, start by copying this summary post.

In the new summary post draft, do the following:

• Update the post title to reference the correct date of the meeting.
• Update the post slug in the sidebar to also reflect the date (which unfortunately may not happen automatically after updating the title) and remove any unnecessary suffixes (like “-2”) from it
• Update the link in the first paragraph to point to the first Slack message that started the meeting (which you typically sent yourself).
  • You can get that link by right-clicking on the message in Slack and then “Copy link”.
• Update the very last paragraph (the one in bold) to reference the upcoming meeting date. This is typically two weeks after the meeting that the summary is for.
• Populate the sections for WordPress Core, Performance Lab, and Open Floor accordingly by summarizing the chat, or remove them if they were not covered in the meeting.
  • You don’t have to paraphrase what was said in the chat. It is often sufficient to copy and paste essential messages from Slack and simply adjust minor bits (e.g. instead of “I think …” use “@… thinks …”.
  • Make sure to refer to any specific people by their WordPress.org user name prefixed with “@”.
  • Note that users’ display names in Slack do not necessarily match their wordpress.org usernames. You can use the URL https://profiles.wordpress.org/SLACKMEMBERID to easily find a Slack user’s wordpress.org username. You can easily and find copy a user’s Slack Member ID by clicking on their name in Slack, selecting the three dots next to Huddle, and selecting Copy member ID.

Once you have drafted the summary, feel free to publish it right away. These summaries do not require a review. If it’s your first time and you would prefer to have someone review the draft, please ping the #core-performance channel or feel free to DM one of the previous meeting hosts that have posted summaries in the past.

Optional recommendation: Set up the summary post draft before the actual chat starts. This way you have it fully prepared and can copy and paste relevant messages from the meeting while it is ongoing. This can help speed up the process, especially once you have gained familiarity with it.