Polyglots Global Mentors and Team Reps

The WordPress Polyglots Team consists of culturally and geographically diverse contributors. Sometimes the difference creates misunderstandings or conflicts, that’s why we have a group of mentors to provide support. 

The Polyglots leadership team helps new contributors get started, connects the team to the other contributor teams, pushes development improvements in the tools for translation contributors, and handles various locale and editor requests.

What is a lead/team mentor?

Below we will try and define the different roles team mentors have. The terms “global” designates that the role is not limited to a specific local community but aimed at helping anyone who would like to translate WordPress.

Community leads and team mentors

Essentially, this role is non-technical and involves working with people. Here’s a list of a lot of responsibilities included in this role. (There may be more!)

• Review and answer “people”-based P2 comments and requests
• Answer requests for new locales (research and process requests following the established process) and help create new sites
• Weekly meetings (organize, take notes, post updates on how locales are doing)
• Moderate disputes between General Translation Editors and translators
• Mentorships – Connect GTEs with other GTEs who can help and give pointers
• Help to expand teams – find and approve GTEs; communicate with current GTEs
• Interface with the other non-technical teams (community, wordpress.tv, marketing, etc.)
• Review Rosetta sites to ensure they meet expectations, and contact locale managers if necessary
• Help lead the effort to write and maintain documentation
• Aggregate ideas for new tools and features to help the team
• Organize events and remote contributor days
• Create and maintain policies (like the Rosetta expectations; new things may be needed in the future)
• Compile and post stats (on the P2)
• Generally, find people to do things

Technical leads

Technical leads are responsible for doing everything needed technically. Here’s a list of things that they may need to do:

• Answer technical questions on the P2 on deployment and other relevant topic
• Create locales (after community lead approves)
• GlotPress – interface with the GlotPress team, including discussing future needs and helping implement those needs where applicable
• Interface with the core team about upcoming core changes
• Interface with the meta team about necessary wordpress.org changes
• Work on technical problems that local translations have
• Create and compile stats (with community leads)
• Write and maintain technical documentation

How do we find/appoint leads?

Because of its global and diverse nature, the Polyglots team doesn’t just have one or two leads. It has a leadership team that helps cover timezones and collaborates for better understanding of issues across languages and cultures. The leadership team can work together to ensure no one gets burnt out and that no knowledge gets lost along the way. 

Team leads are people who are trusted by the global community and have an established history of helping contributors across different channels. The leadership team is open to everyone who would like to join and help on a global level.

Polyglots team representatives

Team representatives are different from global mentors, though they can – and often do – overlap with one another. All current Polyglots global mentors have previously been team reps!

A team representative is a project-wide role, and reps are typically selected each year. All WordPress contributor teams are required to have a minimum of two representatives who fulfill duties such as:

• Posting weekly updates to the Make WordPress Updates blog
• Raising issues or sharing important information across contributor teams and/or with other team reps
• Leading team meetings
• Generally acting as a liaison between WordPress contributor teams to represent Polyglots

You can read more about the team rep role and responsibilities on the Team Updates site.

How are team reps selected?

Each year, around November, a post is published on the Make/Polyglots blog calling for team rep nominations. Any active Polyglots contributor can be nominated, regardless of whether they are active globally or locally.

Depending on the number of nominations, determining the team reps for the upcoming year can be decided by:

• Selecting everyone, if only two to three of the nominees are interested and able to fulfill the role
• Creating a poll or survey for global Polyglots team members to cast their vote
• Allowing Polyglots global mentors to weigh in on results to ensure team reps are diverse, represent the global Polyglots community, and meet the expectations for the role

It is also possible to have multiple people nominated for the role who aren’t available at that time. As needs and availability change throughout the year, it is always an option to request backup from one of the other nominees at a later point. Ultimately, it’s about ensuring the Polyglots team is appropriately and fully respresented across the WordPress community.

Current Polyglots global mentors and team reps

The current list of global mentors can be seen in the sidebar of our blog. On narrow screens, the “sidebar” is located below the main content.