Birgit Olzem 12:14 pm on June 28, 2024

Addressing Overlapping Initiatives and Improving Collaboration Across Teams

An in-person meeting during WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe was convened to address the overlapping initiatives among various WordPress contributor groups and explore ways to enhance collaboration and streamline efforts. The primary goal was to avoid duplication of work and ensure that all teams were aligned and working efficiently towards shared objectives.

Meeting Subject: Addressing Overlapping Initiatives and Improving Collaboration Across Teams
Teams/Groups Involved: Sustainability Team, DEIB Working Group, Five for the Future Working Group, Contributor Mentorship Working Group, Community Team, MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. Team, Dashboards Working Group
Facilitator: Angela Jin – Head of Programs & Contributor Experience
Attendees:

Josepha Haden Chomphosy @chanthaboune – Executive Director of the WordPress project
Chloe Brinkmann @cbringmann – Operations/Communication
Naoko Takano @nao– Open SourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. Project Manager / Five for the Future initiative
Patricia Brun Torre @patricia70 – Facilitator of the Contributor Mentorship Group
Courtney Robertson @courane01 – Meta Team and Project Health Working Group
Isotta Peira @peiraisotta – Community Team RepTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts.
Nora Ferreirós @noradriana, Nahuai Badiola @nahuai, Thijs Buijs @yellowlime – Sustainability Team
Birgit Olzem @coachbirgit – DEIB Working Group

The meeting took place in person during WordCamp Europe on June 14th, 2024.

Key Discussions

Introduction and Purpose

Angela Jin opened the meeting by expressing excitement about the gathering and emphasizing the importance of understanding each group’s focus areas to prevent duplication of efforts and improve collaboration.

Team Introductions and Project Overviews

Sustainability Team

The Sustainability Team, represented by Nora Ferreirós, Nahuai Badiola, and Thijs Buijs, has focused primarily on environmental projects like the WP Sustainability Plugin, and the Sustainable Events Handbook due to time constraints. They aim to expand their work to include socio-economic and environmental pillars, with ongoing projects like making WordPress events more sustainable and developing a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party to measure website environmental impact.

Project Health Dashboard

Courtney Robertson discussed the Project Health Working Group’s involvement in exploring dashboard options to gather better statistics and metrics for contributors and the need for better documentation to support team reps during turnover. They are considering whether to build their systems or use SaaS solutions.

DEIB Working Group

Birgit Olzem highlighted the DEIB Working Group’s focus for 2024 on extending the contributor handbook to be more inclusive and accessible. They are conducting surveys to assess DEIB status within the WordPress community at both local and international levels. The intended purpose of the DEIB working group is to be a shared resource for all contributor teams on how to apply the DEIB principles into their daily routines.

Contributor Mentorship Program

Patricia Brun Torre explained the mentorship program’s evolution from earlier contributor working groups. The program aims to improve onboarding and create closer connections with initiatives like Five for the Future.

Overlapping Projects and Communication

The attendees recognized significant overlaps in their projects, especially concerning contributor onboarding and sustainability. Discussions highlighted the need for better coordination and communication among teams. There was a consensus on the value of regular cross-team check-ins and hangouts to share current projects and focus areas.

Challenges and Solutions

Several challenges were identified, including the perception of the sustainability team’s role and the need for clear documentation processes within Meta. The group discussed potential solutions like forming a central team for culture and sustainability, while maintaining specific focus areas under this umbrella. Concerns were raised because of the community’s perception of the term “Sustainability.” This term is often perceived as focusing only on environmental sustainability.

Proposed next steps

Forming a Singular Team

The attendees agreed on the potential benefits of forming a singular team to address contributor culture, sustainability, and onboarding comprehensively. This new team would focus on integrating efforts and providing clear resources for new and existing contributors.

Enhanced Communication

To improve communication and avoid duplication, the group proposed regular cross-team hangouts and using existing channels like the Team Reps channel and P2s for updates and collaboration.

Documentation and Awareness

Emphasizing the importance of documentation, the group suggested creating detailed guides and resources to help team reps and contributors navigate their roles and projects effectively. Additionally, raising awareness about each team’s efforts within the community was seen as crucial for fostering a cohesive and informed contributor base.

Conclusion

The meeting concluded with a commitment to continue discussions and refine the proposed collaboration structure. A follow-up meeting will be scheduled to finalize details and ensure all teams are aligned on the next steps.

Rough dates to follow-up with next steps:

Follow-up meeting via Zoom Call: mid-July
Singular team decision (structure, collaboration protocol, and name/identity): early August

Please leave your thoughts and feedback to this discussion here as a comment before July 12, 2024

Props

Thanks to @nao, @courane01, @cbringmann, @peiraisotta for reviewing and leaving feedback on this post. Thanks also to @patricia70, @noradriana, @nahuai for giving your blessing after reviewing. A special thanks to @courane01 for recording (with consent of all participants) and providing the transcription of the meeting.

Courtney Robertson 12:22 pm on June 28, 2024

+make.wordpress.org/sustainability/
Birgit Olzem 12:45 pm on June 28, 2024

+make.wordpress.org/project/
+make.wordpress.org/community/
Gus Austin 11:56 pm on June 28, 2024
Heard there was a meeting but didn’t realize the nice mix of folks that were involved. So is the idea to fold DEIB and Sustainability into a singular team (with a different name)? If yes, what would happen to those teams?

Not sure if it was discussed at the meeting but I’ve been proposing that Contributor Working Group (and a modified version of https://github.com/WordPress/wp-contributor-working-group-tracker/) as the umbrella for cross team projects and collaboration.

Curious to hear thoughts on the reasoning (and if that seems viable) in the GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ discussion or here.

We also have a few related discussions in the Sustainability GitHub repo including the following:
- Determining team roles, responsibilities, commitments, and resource needs
- Help connect and streamline collaboration between Make Teams and community contributors
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yellowlime 11:11 am on July 5, 2024

Thank you so much for having shared notes of this meeting. It indeed was a valuable meeting during which we learned more about the goals of the teams and initiatives present. Am looking forward for the upcoming meeting.

Looking at the section below:

Forming a Singular Team
The attendees agreed on the potential benefits of forming a singular team to address contributor culture, sustainability, and onboarding comprehensively. This new team would focus on integrating efforts and providing clear resources for new and existing contributors.

I would like to stress that imho this topic was a kind of brainstorm. As no agreements or decisions have been made. This is food for thought. I am ready to discover next steps together.
Courtney Robertson 4:43 pm on July 6, 2024
Some discussion occurred about the term sustainability being more broad than environmental sustainability. Let’s look to other open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. guides for the terminology.

Examples of Sustainability Terminology:
- Linux Foundation
  - “open source—would be instrumental in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals”
  - “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” described as “a plan of action for people, planet, and prosperity.”
- SustainOSS – “sustainer—the individual or organization who is concerned with the fragile state and future of highly-used and impactful open source projects”
- CHAOSS – “Contributor sustainability is an important part of assessing whether an open source project and community have enough contributors for the project to be sustained over the long-term, so contributor sustainability has a large impact on overall project sustainability.”
- Observations on WordPress Contributor Team Structure – cited in a proposal for an open source course as means to sustain community.
Additionally, the opening keynote of WCEU was about open source sustainability as well.

https://wordpress.tv/2024/07/03/keynote-sustainable-open-source-is-the-future/

Other feedback

I reached out to @jrf about the terminology, given her presentation with @joostdevalk was entitled this. Her feedback, quoted with permission, is

If I think of the different initiatives being lumped together now, I do see two distinctly different ones, though in both cases, the term “sustainability” is apt and correct.
- [Inner sustainability] Project sustainability, i.e. future-proving the survival of the project. In my vision, this includes economic sustainability for contributors, DEIB, five for the future.
- [Outer sustainability] Impact/footprint of the project on the world, i.e. future-proving the survival of the world/environment we live in. In my vision, this includes initiatives to improve the performance of WP, lower bandwidth use, lower energy use etc.
I can understand these being under one umbrella could be confusing for people, but maybe using “inner/outer” (or similar terms) to communicate about the different aspects may help ?

Terminology

I do believe that naming things is hard. In part, we’re lacking the support of a Marketing team during the experiment to shutter. They often have helped wordsmith terminologies and conducted field research. Additionally, we can ask for support from Polyglots for consideration in how the team name is translated.

Based upon the findings above, my leaning is toward continuing as the Sustainability team (pending Polyglots consideration) and educating the community about the 3 pillars of the team (environment, economic, and social).

It would be good to think more thoroughly about terms such as Project Health, related to dashboards, being used. Does that convey social and possibly economic sustainability?

I do envision the related working groups and initiatives currently organized within other teams (DEIB, 5ftF, Mentorship, etc.) to fit well within the Sustainability team, much the way CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and others have multiple areas of the organization. This would also allow the community team to continue the focus on events and community management needs, not limited to events.
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Ryan Boren 2:27 pm on July 12, 2024

I’m concerned that “Sustainability” is too narrow a lens to perceive the breadth of humanity, especially given the ignorance of and hostility to disability rights seen over and over and over in environmental sustainability movements. Likewise with the Social Sustainability in ESG. Disabled people are expected to capitulate to sustainability when our needs are perceived as in opposition. We saw this painfully with the straw bans. Sustainability movements are often too quick to write off the concerns of marginalized groups as insignificant or inconvenient.

I’m more inclined to use “DEIB & Sustainability” so that one isn’t subsumed by the other.