The problem
Over the past months we’ve tried two meeting slots at different times, then a 12-hour open window, hoping to catch more people across timezones. Neither change moved the needle. Attendance and participation remain low, and, as we discussed openly in the April meeting, most of the value of these meetings can already be absorbed by reading the agenda or the recap afterward. If a meeting can be fully replaced by a P2 post, it’s not really a meeting anymore.
We (the 2026 Team Reps) have talked this through and want to propose splitting what today is a single monthly meeting into two separate, more focused things.
The proposal
1. A monthly written update (unchanged in spirit, clarified in purpose)
We’ll keep publishing a monthly post at the start of each month summarizing what the team has been working on: policy changes, WordCamps, meetups, Campus Connect recaps, education programs, and anything else worth surfacing for people who can’t follow every P2 post or Slack thread.
What changes: this stops being “the agenda for a meeting” and becomes its own thing: a monthly digest, written by a different volunteer each month. We think this is a great low-friction way for people to start contributing to team coordination without needing to run a live session.
2. Coworking sessions
Instead of a status-update meeting, we want to try live coworking sessions: blocks of 1–2 hours where a group works together, in real time, on an actual team task.
Rough shape:
- Short kickoff (5–10 min): whoever’s hosting explains what we’re working on that session and why, and takes quick questions.
- Focused work block: everyone works (same or related tasks) with the channel/call open for “does anyone know how…” questions as they come up.
- Wrap-up (10–15 min): quick share of what got done, what’s blocked, and what needs follow-up.
Why we think this could work
The core insight from the discussion was that people don’t show up for information they can get elsewhere, they show up when there’s something to do together, or someone to ask in real time. A status meeting competes with reading a P2 post, and loses. A working session doesn’t have that competition, because you can’t “read” your way into having helped triage the backlog.
We’d love feedback before taking this further:
- Does the split between “written update” and “coworking” make sense to you?
- Any specific ideas about the coworking sessions format?
- Any concerns about coworking sessions being harder to join for volunteers in less common timezones (worse than a single meeting would be, since we’re not proposing multiple slots yet)?
- Should we pilot this for one or two months before committing, and if so, what would tell us it’s working better than the old format?
Thanks to @adityakane @thehopemonger and @webtechpooja for reviewing the proposal.