Back in August, the Learn WordPress platform, in its current state, had a soft launch. Since then, both the Training and Community teams have valiantly worked towards creating new content, improving and refining what’s already present on the site, and bringing on new contributors to help in these efforts.
With the current structure, we have the Training team and the Learn Working Group, housed under the Community Team, working simultaneously on Learn WordPress. Problematically, the two teams are not officially tied and, as such, it is not always easy to know what one another is working on. While there is some overlap from volunteers who are members of both teams, that overlap is not built-in by design. For such a large project that spans teams, this seems to be an opportunity to improve how we approach this work to bolster and strengthen our shared communication channels.
With all that in mind, I’d like to propose that the Learn Working Group be “formally” considered a cross-team working group to drive home the multi-team efforts, and that the group move its communications, meetings, agendas, et al. over to the Training team P2 and Slack channel. This is also a great opportunity to refresh and refocus the working group to confirm the engagement of everyone involved, while also giving us an opportunity to revisit and modify some of our processes across teams as we grow closer towards an official launch of Learn WordPress.
While proactive communication is necessary for collaboration in any open source project, there are a few benefits here that this transition would assist with:
- A more natural link between historical conversations and decisions with future iterations of Learn WordPress.
- Leveraging the existing structures and tools of the Training team, i.e. weekly team meetings at alternating times with a chat or update on Learn working group tasks.
- For new contributors that join through their experiences on Learn WordPress, more seamless onboarding between contributing workshops and/or lesson plans.
- A joint Handbook that covers contributions and guidelines that include both the existing documentation for lesson plans, and new documentation for workshops.
For working group members, Community, and Training team folks, how does this proposal sound?
Are there any reasons we would not want to do this?
Any benefits that are missing?
I would like to leave this post open for a week – until December 9, 2020 – for conversation, thoughts, and concerns, with the idea that we can come to a resolution before the new year, especially as we continue planning for future improvements, changes, and iterations on Learn WordPress.
Thank you so much to @courane01, @camikaos, @hlashbrooke, and @angelasjin for helping me write this proposal.