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How to contribute to the Global Community Team

These are some of the different options for getting involved with the WordPress Global Community Team 🙂

1) The best way to start is by organizing Meetups and/or WordCamps in your city. If you feel like you can represent WordPress, follow the code of conduct for WordPress events, and follow the five good-faith rules for WordPress meetup organizers, then you can apply to join the program: 

  1. a) Check if there is a WordPress Meetup group in your city – if there is one, join it, attend the events, and step up by either helping the organizers or becoming an organizer yourself!
  2. b) Check if there is a WordCamp in your area – you can attend, apply to speak, volunteer, sponsor and/or help organize your local WordCamp!
  3. c) If there is not an existing WordPress Meetup group (or if there is an inactive group) in your town/city and you want to start one, you can apply here – you’ll receive a reply within a couple of weeks.

2) If you already have experience organizing a successful WordCamp and have an availability of 2-3 hours a month, you can apply to become a WordCamp mentor here: – you’ll receive a reply within a couple of weeks.

3) If you have had at least 1 year of experience as a Meetup organizer and/or have been a WordCamp lead organizer, you are familiar with the WordPress Open Source project and philosophy, you have at least 2-3 hours a week available for contributing, and you accept our Code of Conduct, you can apply to become a Community Deputy. We are a team of community-minded people around the world who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. You can apply to join the Global Community Team as a deputy here – you’ll receive a reply within a couple of weeks.

Note: if you have any additional questions, join us in the #community-events channel of Make WordPress Slack, we’ll be happy to help you there!

#contributors

WordCamp US 2019 – Community Team Plans

We are less than a month away from WordCamp US 2019, which means it’s time to get organised!

WordCamp Europe and WordCamp US are what we consider flagship events and are always a great opportunity for teams to get together, contribute and onboard more people. There are going to be a whole lot of us present and we should take advantage of that and maximize our time together.

Please add in the comments ideas and suggestions for tasks we could work on together while in Saint Louis.

We also need at least two, three Team Leads to coordinate the different activities:

  • Deliver the Team initial presentation
  • Onboard new contributors
  • Help coordinate work during the day
  • Deliver the end of day recap of what was achieved during the day

Please raise your hand in the comments if you are available for this.

Deadline to comment is October 17 so we can discuss this during the next two Community chats: after that date I will summarise in a “squad goals” post (like the one we had last year) and we will go from there!

#contributor-day, #wcus

Grow Your Meetup survey results for #WCUS

Thanks to all the WordPress meetup organizers who responded to our recent survey. We received 23 submissions from around North America and abroad.

Many of the responses were very detailed and thorough. They’re too long to include here verbatim, so we’ve curated some common themes.

We added a bit of commentary in this post, and we’ll discuss these topics in more depth during our Grow Your Meetup! workshop at WordCamp US. You’ll find us in the Community Room, Room 274.

Tell us a bit about your group

  • Many Meetup groups are established vs new, at least a few years, some 10+ years
  • Covering a range of topics: beginners, advanced users, development
  • Active members are a small subset of overall membership

Comment: There’s an oft-cited model of community participation: 90/9/1. Out of your entire community group, 90% will be passive (lurkers); 9% will be active; and 1% will be very engaged regulars.

How big is your group?

  • Ranges from 100’s to 1000’s of total members
  • Average turnout ranges from 20-50 depending on the topic
  • Presentations attract more people than socials

Comment: 30 seems to be the sweet spot for a reasonably-sized meetup group, regardless of the total number of members registered in the meetup, nor those who RSVP for each event.

How often do you meet?

  • 65% meet once a month
  • 35% meet more than once a month
  • No respondents said less than once a month

Comment: Consistent, routine events are a must if you want to build a strong meetup group. An active meetup group should meet at least once a month. This consistency builds momentum that helps make future meetups more likely to happen.

How do you promote your group?

  • Meetup.com is the primary method
  • Social media (Facebook & Twitter) and word-of-mouth
  • WordPress Dashboard, if part of the Chapter program

Comment: In general, it seems like meetup organizers don’t do a lot of outreach or promotion — we rely on Meetup.com to bring members to us, as well as word-of-mouth referrals through existing group members. This could be a big opportunity for us to find new members.

What’s worked?

  • Consistency – same day of the month, every month
  • Mixing it up – different locations, times, appeals to different people
  • Involve the group – planning, choosing topics, online groups
  • Setting topics in advance; focusing on peer/user support

Comment: Two things here. First, consistency leads to routine which leads to habit. But what works for some people won’t work for others. That’s where options come into play: different days, different times, different formats, different topics, different locations.

Issues?

  • Finding locations/venues
  • Finding speakers/presenters
  • No-shows, low turnout vs RSVPs

Comment: Totally consistent with our experiences as organizers, and an ideal topic for our group brainstorming session on Friday morning.

Advice for new meetup organizers?

  • It takes time. Start small, persist, keep showing up
  • Don’t overthink/overcomplicate; have a structure/template
  • Plan in advance, get experts in as speakers
  • Have a team of committed co-organizers

Other advice?

  • Don’t try to do everything yourself; you’ll burn out
  • Recognize other leaders, invite others to step up
  • Diversity and inclusion takes effort, but it’s worth it
  • You’re growing a community, not just hosting a meetup

That’s just an overview of what we’ve heard through the survey. We’ll address all of these points, and much more, during the Grow Your Meetup! workshop at WordCamp US in the Community Room, Room 274.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the survey!

#wcus, #meetups-2

Thanks Andy. Is there a detailed breakdown or charts/ graphs for the results?
Dan

Hey Dan. Good question! Those will come with the workshop recap.

  • Most of the responses were qualitative (i.e. freeform answers) so there’s no simple visualizations. Lots of text though. 🙂

Weekly Updates

Hello to all our Deputies, WordCamp organizers, Meetup wranglers, and WordPress Community builders! You were probably hard at work this weekend. Tell us what you got accomplished in our #weekly-update!

Have you run into a roadblock with the stuff you’re working on? Head over to #community-events or #community-team in Slack and ask for help!

On October 18th, Long and I had a new mentoring chat about the WordCamp Marseille 2019. Tickets are now available and already 60% of the first batch of 100 tickets have been sold (a good part corresponds to the tickets offered to the speakers, organizers and sponsors).

The organizing team also selected the conferences for the WordCamp: all the speakers are French and 6 of them are ladies. Note that a person (from Turkey) has withdrawn. I suggested to Long to keep his contact as a backup and possibly offered him to give his conference via Google Hangout or Skype.

A first tweet about the list of selected speakers has been shared & the program has followed up soon after.

8 conferences will be held in each of the two rooms of the venue and to tease site visitors video interviewes of speakers will be published on the site.

I reminded Long the importance of AV forms to get the agreement of speakers in the forecast of the publication of videos about their talk on WordPress TV and to make sure to vet the presentation slides.

If participants catering is under control, quotes about the After Party is still a task to achieve in ordrer to decide about the place where it will happen.

The team of volunteers will be made up of 15 students of a digital training and communication on Internet class. This training will give them a WordPress certification: here is a very good initiative to facilitate their integration into the community and allow them see the concrete contributions of the software to professionals and users.

Finally Long told me about a need for invoice requests following the purchase of participants’ tickets: I’ve sent him the document we were using during the WordCamp Paris 2019.


On October 22, Veerle and I had our first mentoring chat for the WordCamp 2019 of Antwerp. The team is still in the early stages of their project as the Budget review interview will happen soon.

So we’ve been talking about the activities the organizing team plans to do during their 3 days event. And I think the plan is looking really great:

  • 2 days of WordCamp conferences
  • 1 contributor evening
  • 1 community day

Veerle told me she already found a venue to host the WordCamp with a capacity of 200 people for the WordCamp conference days and took options with a vendor about catering. The venue is more expansive than previous years and the 2020 projet is 3 times longer than previous WordCamps Antwerp.

So we’ve been discussing about how possible ways to build the sponsorship plans so that they can contribute more than previous years to the WordCamp Antwerp 2020’s budget. Increasing the price seems a good way (that’s what I did for Paris 2019), but at the same time it’s not easy to justify the extra costs to “historical” sponsors.

Once we finished our chat, I’ve shared with Veerle the sponsorship plans we used for Paris so that it can inspire her imagination.

I help the WordCamp Puebla 2019 (10 days left). They still have to sell about 60 tickets (10 are still from speakers). During this week they will intensify the promotion in order to be able to sell more tickets and reach at least 180 tickets.

To date, they had not made any agreements or invoices with sponsors since none of them reached $200. However, one of them asked them for an invoice and I helped them manage it.

In addition, I advised them that they had a supplier payment pending correction (the application had an error and had not been approved). Now they have it pending approval again.

I also suggested that they update the operating budget in order to have more control.

If everything goes as expected, all sponsorships and budget will be covered. In addition, the program is now complete and all supplier agreements have been approved.

Update: Contributor Orientation Tool

WordCamp Europe 2019 organising team presented new tool that we’ve been developing to help new contributors select the make team they wish to contribute to – Contributor Orientation Tool. The tool was built as a prototype at which state we asked for feedback from broader community. Many thanks to @webcommsat for writing that post and @fabiofava, @iandunn, @karmatosed, @melchoyce and @mburridge for their feedback and input on that post.

As WordCamp Europe 2020 organising team is back to work, we are continuing our work on Contributor Orientation Tool as well. General plan is to write proposal and ask for help from community outside of WCEU org team, rebuild codebase, enable Make Teams reps manage content for their teams, launch plugin at WordPress.org and after that, at WordCamp.org with close collaboration with #meta and #meta-wordcamp teams, respectively.

Before we publish our proposal, we would like to ask anyone interested in getting involved to reach out either here, in comments; or in Make Slack, look for @francina, @webcommsat (@abhanonstopnewsuk on Slack), @siemens82 (@aleksandarnis on Slack) or myself (@zzap on Slack); or come directly to GitHub repo.

Also, if you are attending WordCamp US, feel free to find @francina and/or myself and we can chat in person. Thank you.

Announcing the 2020 Global Sponsorship Working Group

Thanks for all the interest in participating in the 2020 Global Sponsorship Working Group! I received lots of interest via both the call for volunteers post and direct email.

The working group this year will have the following members: @kcristiano, @mpmike, @lucasartoni, @bph, @aaroncampbell, @lindseyanne, @andreamiddleton and @courtneypk.

Timeline:

  • 7–15 November: 2–4 hours of independent program analysis and two 1-hour Working Group meetings
  • 20 November: Post program proposal
  • 25 November: Send program to sponsors

If you have been mentioned in this post and your availability has changed, please let me know as soon as possible. Thanks!

#global-sponsorship

Recap of the Diverse Speaker Training group (#wpdiversity) on Oct. 23, 2019

Attending: @jillbinder @miriamgoldman @mariaojob @rahuldsarker @bhargavmehta @aurooba

Start: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20191101132629/https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1571850072235500

Today’s Agenda:

  1. Reports
  2. Our internal workshop this weekend
  3. Stats collection
  4. WCUS Contributor day
  5. Upcoming end of daylight savings time affects the meeting time for some of us
  6. Open discussion

Reports

What are you working on? How is it going? Do you have any obstacles? With colour:

  • Green: on plan. No help needed.
  • Yellow: not on plan but I have a strategy to get there
  • Red: not on plan, no plan to get there, I’m lost!

@miriamgoldman
I’m green: Talked about our group at WordCamp Niagara (plugged it in my talk), am digitizing my role as team lead for Train the Trainers, and have outlined with Angela our “Train the Deputies” sessions we are running next month.

Green in that we have scheduled training sessions up to December.

@jillbinder: With @aurooba starting marketing very soon and with our promotions at WCUS, we are expecting our number of meetups wanting training to be increasing soon!

Exciting times. We’re in the transition between our two phases and things are about to get exciting.

@miriamgoldman: That’s fantastic. Once we see the demand go up, I’ll reach out to the individuals who want to become trainers themselves, and start onboarding them. And obviously fill in gaps myself where need be. (so it’s not just Angela and I trying to squeeze things in!)

@jillbinder: Since it’s happening soon, it would be a good idea to be onboarding them sooner… So that they’ll be ready or almost ready by the time they’re needed.

@miriamgoldman: Good call @jillbinder. I’m swamped this week, but will reach out early next week


@rahuldsarker and @bhargavmehta
Had discussion with our team for translation of documentation. They suggested everything can be translated. We can start off with the small test this week.

@jillbinder: That’s perfect as the new full material will be ready soon.


@cguntur
I sent a message to Jeremy and told him that I will wait for him to send me the Calendly details for the Speaker Mentor program.

I am working on the Meetup Care stuff and will be sending out a bunch of emails to meetups who have taken the training to start getting our stats updated.


@miriamgoldman for @angelasjin
I can semi report for Angela, in that she has two people signed up for a training (regular Train the Trainers) in November.

Our internal workshop this weekend

We are recording the workshop straight up, as if it were a real class. No stopping to explain facilitator notes. I’ll be recording those separately. (But you can always send me questions in Slack after.)

It’ll be a piece of the “choose your own training” we’re creating. If they want to see how any part is done, they can watch that module.

A reminder: our sound was not good in our previous training.

Let’s have a great recording: Please at a minimum wear headphones and be at the best internet connection you can.
It’s preferable if you can also be using a headset or have a microphone.

We won’t be using the chat, as that won’t translate well for the recording. If you’re participating in any exercise, it’ll be on the video and audio. (I know in some countries you won’t be able to do to video, and that’s fine. It’s preferable if you can, but not at the expense of the recording quality.)

You’ll be taking the class as though you are someone actually taking it. Working through Impostor Syndrome, coming up with a talk topic, writing your pitch, title, outline, bio.

You can opt out of anything, and if you do want to opt out, it’ll be fine as it’ll be an example of how people can opt out in real life, too.

They opt out by saying “Pass” in the exercises.

Ideally I’d want almost everyone participating, please! I want to show how the exercises actually work.

As it’s a 4-5 hour workshop, we have it split into the 2 days, Saturday is half and Sunday is half.

I set it for 2.5 hours each day. I’m finding that online that amount of time is a good balance.

It should be in your google calendars, but just a reminder that it’s 10am-12:30pm Pacific time.

If anyone in our team hasn’t signed up for it yet, you still can!

It would be great to have as many of us as possible closely familiar with what we do by having done it.

One last thing I can think of right now: It would be great to have a timestamp of when the title slide of each of the 6 modules comes up on the screen, to make it easy to separate the modules into different videos later.
Who would be willing to mark down the times of the 6 module title slides?

@miriamgoldman: I’ll do it if no one else volunteers.

@jillbinder: That sounds good, Miriam. It’ll be great to have more people involved, and if no one does, I will call on you for it!

Stats collection

Last time I talked about getting our stats early this year (which cities/countries meetups have taken the training, where have run it, how have their WordCamp speaker stats changed) so that it is a possible contender to be included in Matt’s State of the Word.

@cguntur has started sending out the first question to those who have been trained or have indicated that they will run it on their own. Thanks, @cguntur! Hoping we can have as much data as possible by end of the week to submit in. (But if people respond after the end of the week, please still let me know those.)

WCUS Contributor day

As far as I know there are 2 major items our team will be working on on WCUS Contributor day. Let’s start on the first: Marketing items.

There won’t be many from our team specifically there that day, but we will have access to other eager volunteers who will love to help.

@aurooba: By the end of today I’ll have documents set up for the big things we want to get drafts done for by WCUS, I’ll share in slack and everyone who wants to pitch in can add suggestions, etc.

@jillbinder: I like that idea of getting our suggestions etc ahead of time.

@aurooba: Yes! And anyone who wants to pitch in virtually the day of can as well. Or any other time

@jillbinder: Oh yes, a few said they’d be available that day. That is so good.

@aurooba: I’ll be sure to give a heads up on our team slack, and there will undoubtedly be relevant conversation happening in the #marketing channel

@aurooba: The marketing plan is here: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20191101132629/https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Wlv75QpVVkMqJrpw8M18nya4_iWGMOHUpzfPvM_U954
We are focusing on the first 2-3 items plus an email to add to the automation for organizers.

The other item is getting started on creating the self-guided training material for the Community Team out of our “Creating a Welcoming and Diverse Space” WCUS workshop.

I still need to check in if the other workshop facilitators of our group will be available. It’ll be even better if they are, but even if they aren’t, we’ll still certainly be able to start.

If we can’t do both for whatever reason, the Marketing items will take priority.

@aurooba: The recording will be helpful to work with afterwards as well

@jillbinder: Ohh! Awesome! How do you think we might use it?

@aurooba: Just in terms of creating the self paced version with the help of others besides the facilitators

@rahuldsarker: Once the translation is complete. Can we translate the full material as a video. How is that idea?

@jillbinder: That’s an interesting idea, @rahuldsarker! I like your innovative thinking. It’s really important for our work to have as many text translations of the workshop as possible.

I get the sense that it would be valuable for your community in particular to have the video version… So if you think it won’t interfere with communicating with the #polyglots to get more language translations done, then we can consider it.

Upcoming end of daylight savings time affects the meeting time for some of us

I get confused every year of which times change for who and when, but fyi, TIMES ARE CHANGING.

We go by UTC time for our meetings, so in most of North America for example our next meeting will be an hour earlier.

I trust everyone to be responsible for their own times. Check when is 5pm UTC where you are.

Open Discussion

Anything relating to our work & team you’d like to talk about in our last few min?

@miriamgoldman: Not really. Excited for the workshop this weekend.

@jillbinder: Just got a notice of a first meetup training planned for 2020. Woohoo!

Alright, thanks all! I adore you. Thank you for all you do, and for coming to me when things are hard or stuck as well. It’s important. See some of you at WCUS and speak with the rest of you soon.

End: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20191101132629/https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1571853657310500

#wpdiversity

WordPress meetup organizer newsletter: October 2019

Hello WordPress Meetup organizers!

Welcome to another meetup organizer newsletter full of news, information, and inspiration for your local meetup.

Newsletter contents:

  • WordCamp US – Community Track
  • Watch the WordCamp US Live Stream with your Local Community
  • Meetup Kit released by WordCamp Asia
  • Tips on getting more speakers to your meetup
  • Reminders

WordCamp US – Community Track

This year WordCamp US is holding its first ever community track. This track will feature workshops and interactive presentations designed to include the audience.

Here is what is being covered on the community track:

Creating A Welcoming And Diverse Space
A workshop to create WordPress events in person or online; on how to create a welcoming and diverse space.

Grow Your Meetup
This workshop will cover some popular ideas around marketing tactics, meetup formats and ideas along with WordCamps to grow your meetup. Check out their Grow your meetup Survey!

Running A Successful Contributor Day
This workshop will cover how to go about running a contributor day for WordCamp that has never done it before. It might also be useful for Contributor meetups.

Organizing A WordCamp While Staying Sane
This workshop will explore tools, software and techniques to remove barriers and make running a WordPress meetup easier.

Watch the WordCamp US Live Stream with your Local Community

WordCamp US 2019 is happening on Nov 1-3 and, to allow people all over the world to enjoy the great content, the organising team is opening up a live stream of the event.

This live stream will available for free all over the world, making it a great opportunity to get your local community together to watch it. It is also a great way to watch “State of the Word” by Matt Mullenweg the founder of WordPress.

You can organize a “WordCamp US Live Stream Party” or a “State of the Word Live Stream Party” with your local meetup.

You can view the live stream by visiting the WCUS homepage.

WordCamp Asia 2020 Meetup Kit

The WordCamp Asia team in an effort to reach out to more meetups to learn about their first flagship WordCamp – have put together some useful resources as part of a meetup kit for organizers.

You can view the WordCamp Asia 2020 meetup kit here

Tips on getting more speakers to your meetup

Topher wrote a post on the community blog sharing a couple of tricks to get more speakers to your meetups.

One would be to encourage live remote speakers using video conference to talk about a topic that your meetup group wants to know more about but do not have a local speaker.

The other tip, suggests watching a session from WordPress.TV and then to have a round-table discussion around content at the meetup. Maybe have the speaker from the video available to take questions via chat.
You can read more about it here.

Reminders

That’s it for now — chat with you next time!

Your friends on the Community Team

make.wordpress.org/community

#newsletter #meetups

I know the last time…

I know the last time I posted about incident reporting documentation, some sad news followed. Don’t worry — that is not the case this time. 🙂

I’ve published two new handbook pages related to incident response, and I’d love feedback from community organizers on either or both.

Incident Response Plan for Organizers includes a template for a safety/incident response plan for community events, with a step-by-step process for taking an incident report.

The Incident report response procedure describes the process that’s currently followed when a complaint is sent to report@wordcamp.org or via our Incident Report form. This is the current process, but not necessarily the desired process. So!

I’d love to collect feedback on:
1. Is the information provided or language used in either handbook page confusing?
2. Do you think either handbook page is missing important information, and if so, what?

Please share your feedback in a comment on this post!

WordCamp Application Vetting Sprints | 23 & 25 October 2019

We currently have an abnormally large backlog of WordCamp applications that need their initial vetting (27 at the time of writing this!) and we need the help of all deputies to get this sorted out. To that end, we will be holding two WordCamp application vetting sprints this week:

Each sprint will last for 2 hours, and we will collectively vet as many WordCamp applications in that time as possible. If you are a deputy and would like to coordinate a sprint at another time this week (or any other week), then please comment on this post and I’ll add it to the list.

All deputies are welcome and encouraged to join! Please comment on this post if you think you can take part.


What is a Vetting Sprint?

A vetting sprint for WordCamp applications is a scheduled session where all available deputies meet together in the #community-team channel in the WordPress Slack group. Over the course of the sprint, we will all work on vetting applications and use the Slack channel as a central place to discuss what we’re working on and support each other.

Who can take part?

Any deputies who have access to the WordCamp central listings can take part. That means people who have completed the deputy training, signed the deputy agreement and been given access to the dashboard.

If you are a deputy who has been active in the last year, then you should have access to this. If you don’t have access and still want to take part, please comment here or ask in #community-team and we’ll sort out your access.

How Does it Work?

As mentioned above, we will be going through the open WordCamp applications that still need vetting – you can find all of those here. We also have some handy notes to help you with the process.

As always, deputies can work on these things at any time that suits them, but these dedicated sprints help to provide some direct focussed time for it.

Thanks @hlashbrooke for organizing the 2 vetting sprints, I’ll be with you on October 25: its hour match best with my pro agenda 😊

Awesome, will join you on Friday, 25 October 2019, 12:00 GMT+1

Proposal Update: Speaker Feedback Tool

We recently posted a proposal for a speaker feedback tool to be baked into WordCamp sites. The proposal included some ideas and mockups, with a call for feedback, suggestions and questions. Thanks to @adityakane, @imath, @andreamiddleton, @hlashbrooke, @karmatosed, @iandunn, @mrwweb, @dimensionmedia, @samsuresh and @wpfangirl for their input on that post.

Based on the feedback from that post, we have some more refined mockups to share with you, courtesy of @karmatosed. In addition to that, we are looking for input on the data storage method here, so check out the mockups and details below.

Front-end views

Initial view before selecting a talk to give feedback on:

Full form view after selecting a talk:

Dashboard views

The following mockups are based on the idea that we would store the feedback in a new custom post type with each feedback item being a separate post in that type.

List table view of feedback items in the dashboard:

Single view of the feedback post in the dashboard:

Considerations

The main decision that needs to be made at this stage is regarding how the feedback data will be stored. The three options are:

#1 Custom post type

This would appear as shown in the mockups above. Feedback would be stored in individual posts within a new custom post type.

Pros:

  • Uses existing WordPress APIs, so no need for custom data structures
  • Easy to extend with further features at a later date
  • Familiar UI

Cons:

  • Some WordCamp sites could get thousands of feedback items for a single event, this could slow everything down and make for a very tedious UI to look through for feedback items.
  • Individual feedback items would require a click through to a new page in order to view them

#2 Comments

This would involve storing the feedback as comments on the session post using a custom comment type and comment meta.

Pros:

  • Uses existing WordPress APIs, so no need for custom data structures
  • Easy to extend with further features at a later date
  • Familiar UI (this would use the edit-comments.php template in the dashboard
  • Dashboard comments view allows for full feedback content to be viewed in the list table, without a new page load
  • Feedback is effectively a comment, so this would be a logical way of storing the data

Cons:

  • Custom comment types and comment meta have historically been tricky to work with (although I think this has been largely fixed in recent Core releases)

#3 Custom database table

This would involve writing a custom data structure in custom database tables – the exact data structure and dashboard UI would still need to be planned out.

Pros:

  • Flexibility of building things exactly how we want it, in the most performant way possible
  • UI can be as optimised as possible

Cons:

  • Lots of development hours for planning and building
  • Dashboard UI would likely be unfamiliar and less predictable
  • Custom database tables on a large multisite instance can be unpredictable

Questions and Feedback

With all of that in mind, please comment with your thoughts on the following:

  1. Which data structure do you think would be a good fit for session feedback?
  2. Is there anything further that you feel should be included in the feedback form for attendees?

#proposal, #speaker-feedback, #tools

I think these are great iterations on the previous version, kudos!

I still worry that we’re not asking the right questions, though. I think the unstated goal of the project is to help speakers improve their presentations — not just to collect feedback for the sake of collecting feedback — but we’re not directly asking attendees how the presentation could have been improved.

How do the questions, “What did you learn?”, “Was the talk what you expected?”, and “Do you have any other feedback?” get us closer to the goal of helping speakers improve?

IMO it’d be better to just ask something like, “What was good about the presentation?” and “What are some ways that the presentation could be improved?”.

That’s fair. The questions would be easy to change as we build this of course, but it would be good to finalise that before we start building. We want to strike a balance between asking people to give loads of information, and making it quick and easy to submit, so that’s something we can definitely improve.

I really like @mrwweb‘s idea:

In my own presentation surveys, I use the format Keep/Tweak/Delete as in “What is one good thing you would keep from this presentation”, etc. It sometimes discourages broad feedback, but it also is specific and even makes sense to answer in a textbox vs a more intimidating text-area.

I think that’d be a great way to directly ask for the kind of info we’re looking for.

I also like idea of using textboxes. Personally I hate them because I’m so verbose and highly-value context and detail, but I also realize that I’m a bit neurotic, and most people would find a textarea less onerous 🙂

I don’t think we should set a character limit, though, in case someone wants to type something more detailed.

I’m curious why the You are leaving feedback as @foo… bit was added?

~99% of attendees will already be logged out, and probably 60%+ won’t have a w.org account to begin with. Of the ~40% that do have an account, I’d guess that ~95% of them only have account.

The project has always discouraged “company” accounts in favor of real human accounts too, so having multiple accounts seems like an extreme edge case, and not one that I think we want to encourage.

I’m happy to remove that – agree with your reasoning.

What’s the use case for exporting the feedback to a CSV?

It could make it easier to share feedback with the speakers. A better solution would be to allow them access to it directly rather than needing a manual export.

Providing direct access would mean some sort of authentication and new type of UI for that purpose. So CSV sounds like the best option for now.

Doh, yeah, sharing w/ the speakers is a critical feature 🙂

It sounds like exporting to CSV, then separating per speaker, then sending an email to each speaker, etc would be a lot of manual work.

We could do something more automated, like give the speaker’s w.org account a subscriber role on the site when their username is added to the speaker post, and then just have a small has_cap callback that allow them to view that post in wp-admin (including comments), but not edit it. That’d give them the same UI that admins would use, so no need to write anything additional for that.

We could also give them access to edit the post as well, if that’d be useful for making them responsible for adding their bio, etc? I don’t think they should have access to edit the comments, though, since that feels like trusting a bit too much.

I don’t have any serious technical concerns about comments vs a CPT; I think UI should be the main driver, and I think comments would be a much, much better UI.

Even if we grouped the posts by their presentation, they’d still be split across pagination, and you’d have to open a new tab for each one, or click back and forth dozens of times, instead of just scrolling and seeing everything in context.

I agree with comments being the best option in terms of UI, and I agree that it’s the best way forward here.

+1 for comments.

But. I think we should do some kind of simple statics page for an average rating in addition to that. Maybe add a new column to session CPT where that is displayed?

Another option would be a public report like we have for t-shirt sizes. We definitely wouldn’t want to share the rating for individual speakers, but could share the average for each camp.

It’d also be nice to track the year-over-year average for each camp, to see if this helps them improve. Also tracking the year-over-year average for all camps combined would be interesting.

I’m glad to see this work moving forward. A few thoughts…

First, off I’m in agreement with @iandunn both that “the unstated goal of the project is to help speakers improve their presentations” and that these questions don’t feel as targeted as they could (I think the expectation matching question is likely the most concretely useful for both speakers and organizers of the bunch). In my own presentation surveys, I use the format Keep/Tweak/Delete as in “What is one good thing you would keep from this presentation”, etc. It sometimes discourages broad feedback, but it also is specific and even make sense to answer in a textbox vs a more intimidating text-are.

Related, there was quite a bit of discussion on the original post over whether naked ratings without any comments should be allowed. It seemed to me that the general consensus was that some written feedback should be required, but the mockup here doesn’t appear to do that. I would again voice my support for requiring more than just a star rating.

Finally, the original post stated:

The feedback tool could be accessed at an easy-to-remember URL, like <year.cityname.wordcamp.org/feedback>

Looking at this design, I realize that I just blindly accepted that project assumption, but I think it would really make sense to show this form on each individual session’s post. This would almost certainly be a place that people both expect to find a feedback form and also where a speaker can easily instruct audience members to go to provide feedback. That has the further advantage of placing the full title and description next to the feedback form to help the audience remember how the talk was framed and what it covered. I could imagine the /feedback/ page also existing as shown, but it really feels like it should go on each presentation’s page…

…which leads me to my answer to question #1 and my answer of “comments”. @iandunn is much more qualified to answer this question than I, but it sure feels like this feedback walks like a comment and talks like a comment, so it’s probably a comment. It feels like any other choice only make sense if there is a significant downside to comment meta that has yet to be identified.

It seemed to me that the general consensus was that some written feedback should be required, but the mockup here doesn’t appear to do that.

I’m personally somewhat undecided about that as we don’t want to make giving feedback too onerous for the attendees. I think a good middle ground is making one of the questions mandatory, but leaving the rest as optional.

I think it would really make sense to show this form on each individual session’s post.

That seems sound to me – as you say, it’s a logical place to go looking for a feedback form. I’m sure we could include the form on the session post, as well as on a separate /feedback page – it would be the same code block used in both places.

+1

It’d be nice to skip the “select a presentation” step when it’s on a session page, which shouldn’t be hard to do.

I think a good middle ground is making one of the questions mandatory, but leaving the rest as optional.

I like the sound of that.

That sounds good to me too. If we use the keep/tweak/delete format, then the “delete” question would be an obvious choice for the required one. It’d have to be conditional, though, so only required if they rate less than 3 or 4 stars.

🤔, actually, I guess “tweak” could make sense too, especially for a 3 star review. Maybe we make it so that one of those two questions be completed, but not both?

If we go w/ comments, I’m wondering how we should treat the questions, since there’ll be multiple.

Should we have a separate comment for each answer, or combine all the answers into a single comment?

The former is more structured, in case we ever want to do some kind of data processing that would be easier if they were separate (like word clouds, or some fancy-pants AI blah blah blah).

The latter would probably be a better UX for reading, though. We could make a consistent format, like:

What’s one good thing you’d keep in this presentation?

The structure of the presentation was organized well, it helped me track what they said as they moved between concepts.

What’s one thing you’d tweak to improve the presentation?

The font was so small, I couldn’t read the words from the back of the room.

What’s one unhelpful thing you’d delete from the presentation?

The company logo on every slide felt crass, and made me suspicious of their motives.

I’m leaning towards the latter, but am curious what others think.

My gut reaction is to merge them too, but I can think of a few reasons not to, and it makes me think keeping them separate is the way to go in the end.

  • If the export-to-CSV feature happens, outputting each answer in an individual column would be nicer than one giant field of all comments. (I think this is the most realistic near-term “data processing” scenario.)
  • If keeping these out of the default comment field prevents them from being edited, that’s relevant one way or the other. (I know some folks thought comments should be editable by site admins, but I question whether anything other than comment status should be editable given the need to maintain a record of the original comments.)
  • If one question feels like the “primary” comment, keeping it as the sole content in the comment body field feels like the way to go.

Hi !

This is shaping great! Many thanks to the people involved into this project.

Using comments seems the best way to store these feedbacks. I guess the rating would be a comment meta and the answers would be in the comment content field. There’s probably a way to use some structured markup to be able to pull out specific answers from this field (like how the Block Editor separates blocks with html comments).

I agree with @iandunn about adding (or replacing an existing question) in favor of « How could the talk be improved? »

Yeah, using comments ala Gutenberg sounds like a good way to add some structure around the data, but still keep it all in a single comment content field 🙂

Weekly Updates

Hello to all our Deputies, WordCamp organizers, Meetup wranglers, and WordPress Community builders! You were probably hard at work this weekend. Tell us what you got accomplished in our #weekly-update!

Have you run into a roadblock with the stuff you’re working on? Head over to #community-events or #community-team in Slack and ask for help!

Conducted the Speaker Training/Diversity Outreach workshop yesterday at the East Bay WordPress meetup. Though only about half the people who RSVPed showed up, everyone who did attend seemed to get a lot out of it and feel more confident about speaking. I’ll be following up with them all to encourage them to speak at my meetup.