For today’s meetup the support team welcomed @karmatosed from the Theme team and @joedolson from the Accessibility team and the agenda was “How can support assist those two teams?”
This resulted in the following points being discussed.
- There are always themes that need reviewing and any help offered there will be greatly appreciated.
- Cross team training for support to learn more about themes would be good.
- Tammie introduced us to the idea of learnups.
- What constitutes an accessibility support topic?
- Tagging topics correctly to make it easier to find or monitor via email or RSS.
Learnups
Everyone got excited at this idea and one example was summed up like so:
“Pick your favorite theme and answer 4 questions. At least one is outside your ‘normal wheelhouse’.”
So like if you’re the bee’s knees for css, try editing functions.
Theme team learnups have happened on Google Hangouts to be recorded and on Slack. A Support Challenge learnup can be scheduled or even an afternoon sprint to reply to support topics.
This is a great idea and will be explored further. Think of it as an online mini contributor day for support.
What make a topic about accessibility?
Joe had some questions about how does the support team work, are there any requirements or training involved etc. Most of the support team started by getting involved in the forums or IRC. Except for having some PHP and CSS experience and remaining calm there really is not much to do to get started in support.
A legitimate accessibility topic is anything that impacts people using assistive technology or with a disability that doesn’t impact people in other environments.
Using good tags on topics
For accessibility support a real problem is finding topics. This lead to a conversation on how to tag topics and Mika wrote up a good post on that subject. Joe’s forum account was upgraded to moderator to permit him to use some of the search in the backend as well as remove tags from topics that are incorrectly tagged “a11y”.
This meetup ran a little on the long side (over 1 hour) but it was good and inviting people from other teams was really useful. It resulted in some good conversations and there will be more of these meetings as well as possibly scheduling a learnup session.