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Hi! I’ve first sent the following lines to support[at]wordcamp.org as I wasn’t sure this blog was a good place to share about this project. Thanks to @adityakane ’s reply, I’m feeling more confident in doing so now!
In April 24, 2019, the WordCamp Paris hosted its very first contributor day. As the WordCamp Paris primary organizer and more globally as a WordPress contributor this was a meeting I absolutely wanted to put together. One of my hope was to take this opportunity to achieve these goals:
build a french documentation about how to get started about contributing to WordPress,
write about how to organize this specific type of WordPress events,
inspire other WordCamp cities in France to also organize contributor days during their events.
During the making of the WordCamp Paris 2019, the contributor day co-organizers and I took some time to organize 6 contributor meetups:
We also worked on points 1 & 2 from a GitHub repository. But there is still a lot to do into the documentation area.
The first WordCamp Paris contributor day was great and gathered 76 contributors. But I believe we have not accomplished 100% of what I was planning to do. In particular when we consider the 3rd goal (Inspire other french WordCamps), I guess we still have to find ways to progress on it.
Contributors during the 1st Contributor day of the WordCamp Paris 2019 – CC BY Jérôme Renault
I am convinced, as part of the french community, we need to promote a lot more these contributor meetings and I must say what have accomplished the italian community about it is very inspiring.
A few weeks ago, I’ve thrown a bottle into the Twitter sea to evaluate if I could get some interests & help from contributors and sponsors. The replies and likes the tweet got made me very enthousiastic about it and..
I’ve decided to try to put together standalone contributor meetings in France.
I’ve added an “s” to “meeting” because my project is to perform a France tour. The first stage will happen in Paris (very likely the day after the WordCamp Paris 2020). The next city stages are not scheduled yet but I have a plan to start filling the blanks.
I’ve used “contributor meetings” instead of “contributor days” because I believe it gives us more freedom about duration and format: we can do contributor mornings, afternoons, days, evenings, nights, etc.
Who is us ?
For now it’s only me, but everyone wishing to contribute to this project is very welcome. My idea is to have an online place to discuss, share & learn about this project very openly.
I think not having to register to a specific Slack to read the informations about the project will maximize our chance to get contributors & even more so new ones. By the way & anyway, Slack’s free plan does not match the needs for openness & to always be able to look back into history.
“Us” is everyone as I said and I hope it will include :
local meetup organizers wishing to put up contributor nights,
WordCamp organizers wanting to add a contributor day to their event,
contributors wishing to be involved into the making of the event they registered to,
in kind sponsors contributing by hosting the event or taking in charge the food/drinks.
Who is me ?
I’m imath. I’ve been contributing to WordPress for 10 years, I participated to my first contributor day on March 20 in 2015 (BuddyPress table at WordCamp London) and it was a really great experience. In 2017, I contributed to the WCEU contributor day organization and this was an awesome experience. In 2018 & 2019 I’ve contributed to the WordCamp Paris organization, coordinating it. I’m a BuddyPress Core developer since January 2014 and I joined the WordPress Community team in July 2019.
The main/first need
A website is the first (and probably the only) need I have. Ideally I think it would be great to have a fr.wordpress.org subsite with the o2 & handbook plugins activated. As some countries (eg: it, es, nl) have a /community area, I believe this would be nice to use this opportunity to also have it for France to :
log the french WordCamps history,
introduce the existing WordPress meetups,
give a space for upcoming contributor meetings.
translate the community handbooks so that it’s easier for Event organizers to get started/
The o2 plugin would make it possible to discuss publicly about any french community topics and using categories would allow us to manage the contributor meetings by cities (It would require some hooks as it’s not native in o2, but I’ve already have it working on a P2 Breathe child theme).
Contributing areas ?
I believe we have the opportunity to do many great things all together:
Meet more regularly, everywhere it’s possible !
Contribute to one or more “Make” areas (Polyglots, Core, Meta…).
Contribute to the content of the /community subsite of fr.wordpress.org (introduce the existing official WordPress events).
Strenghthen the ties into the French community.
Having the website on WordPress.org would be a real benefit and very convenient as we need a WordPress.org user account to contribute, but it’s not a blocker: if it’s not possible I’ll use an external site (I first thought of WordPress.com, but it lacks the handbook plugin).
Thanks a lot for your time and happy to read your feedbacks, advice, and thoughts about this project.
I can see that you’ve also tried posting in fr/team but nobody noticed your pending posts there. Perhaps @audrasjb could help you a bit, he has been one of the more active admins there.
So, yes, I’ve used it to ask for validating some translations I’ve contributed to a while ago… My problem is I can’t ask for contributions using the “pending” status and I don’t want to disturb what’s already in place there. If someone contributes and gets an “awaiting moderation” message it’s a huge brake. That’s why I thought a different site would be best.
IIRC, something like this has been discussed before, and there could be some important information there. I couldn’t find any posts about it, though; @samuelsidler, do you remember, and/or have any thoughts?
Also CC @miss_jwo, since you’ve worked on related efforts in the past.
Thanks for your feedback and for confirming it’s possible to do standalone contributor events 🙂
Contributor day guides are great, I’ve already read them, but thanks for the links.
About “community” pages: it doesn’t seem to be a translation need imho. If I look to the existing ones there are not translating a WordPress.org content.
Finally thanks for your (and @tobifjellner) advice about getting in touch with the fr_FR team.
Japanese community use our /team P2 for non-translation related contribution areas (mostly community but sometimes docs and design too).
In our case, translation-related requests are made on local Slack.
That said if we were using /teamP2 for translation requests, I totally understand that you want an additional channel or some kind of separated area on the same P2 for talking about other things (our Make Polyglots P2 is experiencing this 😂).
If there is no technical barrier for adding another subsite, I think it’s a great idea to provide a space where the contributors can share thoughts and notes.
For example, we’ve been using japan.wordcamp.org site (which we got for WordCamp Tokyo 2008 & 2009) for posting WordCamp related contents. We were able to publish WordCamp Organizer Handbook here long before /team/handbookwere enabled.
Some of the resources that are set up for new/existing polyglots & regional communities may end up not being used as expected. But I feel having to remove unused resources when they become stalled is still better than letting the community struggle because of lacking useful and needed tools (at least for this case).
I wanted to share with you the orientation I’m about to take about this Standalone meetings project. First thanks again for the great pieces of advice and feedbacks you provided.
About the website need, I haven’t contacted the fr_FRpolyglots team because I don’t want to disturb/put a mess into the great job they have been doing on the fr.w.org site (orienting it as the place where WordPress Core, Plugins, Themes,… translations in french are discussed).
Moreover I have no idea if the project will gather interests/people. That’s why I’m going to buy a domain name on my own and use a private host as a start. Depending on what we manage to achieve, we’ll give it up (I hope not!) or we’ll have something to show/demonstrate and it will be easier to decide if it worths moving the content on a WordPress.org site.
I’m in, we have “La Station” here in Saint-Omer and we’ll be pleased to organize that with you. :clap:
Awesome !! 😍 Let’s do it!
I’m in! I don’t know how yet, but I love it! 😀
Beautiful idea Mathieu!
Merci 🙂
Great! Thanks a lot for your feedback & welcome on board 😘
My meetup does a Contributor Day every year and we’ve never had a WordCamp, so I definitely endorse independent contributor events.
Thanks a lot for your endorsement 😊
I love the goal of inspiring more contributor events, and I think this is a cool idea for doing that. Kudos 🙂
It sounds like this would be for countries, but the Rosetta sites like http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://fr.wordpress.org/ are for locales, so that’s one potential conflict that we’d need to find a solution for. I don’t have any suggestions for that at the moment, though.
+make.wordpress.org/polyglots, +make.wordpress.org/meta
In most cases, a locale is connected to a particular geographical area, so I don’t see any big conflicts between Community in Francs and the locale #fr_FR
The locale managers listed in http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/?locale=fr_FR should be able to help a bit around what can be done under the umbrella of fr.wordpress.org and/or http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://wpfr.net/
I can see that you’ve also tried posting in fr/team but nobody noticed your pending posts there. Perhaps @audrasjb could help you a bit, he has been one of the more active admins there.
Thanks for your feedback. Well I first thought of asking there http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://fr.wordpress.org/team/ but the o2 editor’s placeholder of the site clearly informs it can be used to ask for plugin translations. So I understood it wasn’t the best place to post about my topic.
So, yes, I’ve used it to ask for validating some translations I’ve contributed to a while ago… My problem is I can’t ask for contributions using the “pending” status and I don’t want to disturb what’s already in place there. If someone contributes and gets an “awaiting moderation” message it’s a huge brake. That’s why I thought a different site would be best.
Hi @iandunn
Thanks a lot for your feedback and for bringing new contributors to comment the post 😍.
IIRC, something like this has been discussed before, and there could be some important information there. I couldn’t find any posts about it, though; @samuelsidler, do you remember, and/or have any thoughts?
Also CC @miss_jwo, since you’ve worked on related efforts in the past.
Also @sewmyheadon, who’s done a lot of standalone events in Seattle, and might have some thoughts.
First of all: a Contributor Day does not need to be linked to a WordCamp. It’s a way of contributing together on parts of WordPress.
An http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://fr.wordpress.org/community would probably just be a page but using http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://fr.wordpress.org/team might be a starting point, so indeed as mentioned before best check with the locale managers.
A lot of make teams have created Contributor Day starting guides (e.g. http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/handbook/about/get-involved/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/ or http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://make.wordpress.org/tv/handbook/contributor-day/) and for sure don’t forget the Contributor Orientation Tool (http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://make.wordpress.org/community/2019/10/27/update-contributor-orientation-tool/)
Also for the translation of Community related pages, again check with the locale managers on http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/?locale=fr_FR because now that HelpHub is being rolled out (so http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://wordpress.org/support/ will be translated to http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301113352/https://fr.wordpress.org/support/) some of the documents you look for might fit in there.
Hope it helps, bonne chance!
Hi @casiepa
Thanks for your feedback and for confirming it’s possible to do standalone contributor events 🙂
Contributor day guides are great, I’ve already read them, but thanks for the links.
About “community” pages: it doesn’t seem to be a translation need imho. If I look to the existing ones there are not translating a WordPress.org content.
Finally thanks for your (and @tobifjellner) advice about getting in touch with the fr_FR team.
Japanese community use our /team P2 for non-translation related contribution areas (mostly community but sometimes docs and design too).
In our case, translation-related requests are made on local Slack.
That said if we were using
/teamP2 for translation requests, I totally understand that you want an additional channel or some kind of separated area on the same P2 for talking about other things (our Make Polyglots P2 is experiencing this 😂).If there is no technical barrier for adding another subsite, I think it’s a great idea to provide a space where the contributors can share thoughts and notes.
For example, we’ve been using japan.wordcamp.org site (which we got for WordCamp Tokyo 2008 & 2009) for posting WordCamp related contents. We were able to publish WordCamp Organizer Handbook here long before
/team/handbookwere enabled.Some of the resources that are set up for new/existing polyglots & regional communities may end up not being used as expected. But I feel having to remove unused resources when they become stalled is still better than letting the community struggle because of lacking useful and needed tools (at least for this case).
Thank you so much for your feedback @nao Your experience and work about making available the handbooks in Japanese is really great 👏😍
I like this idea. A lot.
Thanks for your feedback Mary.
Hi,
I wanted to share with you the orientation I’m about to take about this Standalone meetings project. First thanks again for the great pieces of advice and feedbacks you provided.
About the website need, I haven’t contacted the
fr_FRpolyglots team because I don’t want to disturb/put a mess into the great job they have been doing on the fr.w.org site (orienting it as the place where WordPress Core, Plugins, Themes,… translations in french are discussed).Moreover I have no idea if the project will gather interests/people. That’s why I’m going to buy a domain name on my own and use a private host as a start. Depending on what we manage to achieve, we’ll give it up (I hope not!) or we’ll have something to show/demonstrate and it will be easier to decide if it worths moving the content on a WordPress.org site.
I’ll keep you updated 😉