Welcome to the recap post of the contributor working group’s mentorship chat that was held on June 15th, 2023. In this chat, we finalized the dates for our pilot mentorship cohort (July 12th to August 9th), and kicked off project management in preparation for the same.
In attendance: @adityakane @oglekler @yoga1103 @st810amaze @onealtr @tobifjellner @javiercasares @courane01 @sereedmedia @juliarosia @harishanker @leonnugraha @patricia70 @webtechpooja @casiepa @realloc @peiraisotta @coachbirgit @angelasjin @chaion07 @ronakganatra @fitehal @sumitsingh @siddhantwadhwani @carl-alberto @kafleg @hapiucrobert @devinmaeztri @zunaid321 @christopheramirian
Notes: @harishanker
Agenda: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/06/14/contributor-working-group-mentorship-chat-agenda-june-15th-0700-utc-apac-emea-and-1600-utc-amer/
Meeting Start
EMEA: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1686812403775139
AMER: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1686844802822219
Project Updates
We kicked off the chat by sharing our project updates thus far:
- Thanks to @leogopal, we now have a fully-fledged GitHub project board for our project. Our group will be working on adding tasks and content to the board. Group members also shared their wordpress.org and GitHub profiles to be added to the board.
- We also have a draft of the call for mentees post which is ready for publishing.
Updates from WordCamp Europe 2023
The Contributor Working Group had an informal tribe meeting at WordCamp Europe 2023 with nearly twelve participants. We did an informal discussion of the program, introduced the pilot, and brainstormed different aspects of our program. In the discussion, we arrived at two important updates:
- Our pilot cohort will kick off on the second week of July (July 12th) and will run for four weeks until August 4th. We discussed this at the cohort and group members approved the same.
- Continuing from our last chat, we finalized the following teams were finalized for our pilot.
- Core
- Community
- Docs
- Photos
- Polyglots
- Support
- Test
- Training
Wins from the past month
Our group did not forget to celebrate some wins from the last month!
- Our contributor mentorship program was featured on the June Edition (Episode 57) of The Official WordPress Podcast – WP Briefing. Support from @chanthaboune – our executive director, was a great encouragement for our group and for our work!
- At WordCamp Europe 2023, our group and our work got a lot of attention with several folks expressing interest in being a mentor, mentee, or a facilitator. Our mentorship program also found a prominent mention in the event’s keynote session with Matt Mullenweg, Josepha Haden, and Matias Ventura. Check out the Q&A video of WordCamp Europe 2023 to catch the moment!
While our wins were humbling, we reminded ourselves that we still have miles to go!
Implementation and Project Management for our Pilot
With dates finalized, we started working on steps to implement our pilot program. We’ll be using our GitHub Project Board to coordinate everything. The action items are divided into high and medium priority, and we sought group members’ help in proceeding with it.
High Priority Action items
- Call for Mentees announcement
We already have a draft post going which we aim to publish by early next week. Make/Marketing has also offered to review and amplify the same - Finalizing our mentors
Many group members have offered to become mentors for our program, we hope to finalize at least 5-10 mentors. For our cohort. - Recruit Make/Team Representatives and support their involvement in our pilot.
As shared earlier, we have the following teams in our pilot program. Core, Community, Docs, Photos, Polyglots, Support, Test, and Training. Group members offered to reach out to these teams to get support for our program.
Medium Priority Action Items
- Audit Learn WordPress courses 🔍
Since our program’s learning content is based on Learn WordPress, we’re asking group members if they could audit these courses:
Group members can note down changes or suggestions in this Google Doc: Suggested Changes to Learn WordPress Contributor Courses
- Prepare mentor script or playbook 📜
We’re working on a detailed step-by-step guide that mentors can use to adequately support mentees as they go through the contributor mentorship program. We’re collaborating together in this task using this boilerplate script document. - Facilitating the program ⚓
We also asked cohort members to support by facilitating the program (keeping the cohort active and overseeing program progress). While all group members will be engaged in this, anyone who has more bandwidth to support was encouraged to join.
Making Progress Towards the Pilot Program
With less than a month remaining until the pilot program, we decided to meet more frequently. Our idea is to:
- Try a weekly sync on our task, synchronously or asynchronously in the #community-team channel.
- Do at least one synchronous audio/video chat before our event.
- Start a dedicated channel for the working group discussions, but default to public in #community-team as much as possible.
Discussions
- We discussed the possibility of a multilingual cohort. While the mentorship cohort will be in English, we’ll try to make it as local as possible by assigning mentors based on language preferences. @javiercasares is also attempting to translate our cohort’s content to Spanish for Spanish language speaking mentees. He has already kickstarted work on the same and is looking for collaborators! @coachbirgit has offered to support German mentees, while @leonnugraha has kindly offered to support mentees from Indonesia.
- @angelasjin suggested that we amplify our program in the #team-reps channel to get broad support from team representatives.
- Our group members felt strongly about the need for a dedicated channel to discuss the program. So while we will attempt to work in public as much as possible, we will also create and use a dedicated Slack channel for focussed discussions.
- @pascalcasier offered to do an onboarding for group members to the TV team!
- @milana_cap offered to onboard new contributors to the Docs team.
- We’re attempting to do yet another contributor working group at WCUS (around contributor day). @s810amaze has offered to help broadcast it live.
#contributor-working-group #mentorship-program #wpcontributors #meeting-notes