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WordPress.org

Welcome to the official blog of the community/outreach team for the WordPress open source project!

This team oversees official events, mentorship programs, diversity initiatives, contributor outreach, and other ways of growing our community.

If you love WordPress and want to help us do these things, join in!

Getting Involved

We use this blog for policy debates, project announcements, and status reports. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to comment on posts and join the discussion.

You can learn about our current activities on the Team Projects page. These projects are suitable for everyone from newcomers to WordPress community elders.

You can use our contact form to volunteer for one of our projects.

Communication

We have Office Hours four times a week in the #community-events channel on Slack: Mondays & Wednesdays 22:00 UTC, Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:00 UTC.

We also have regular Community Team meetings on the first and third Thursdays of every month at 11:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC in #community-team on Slack (same agenda).

Events Widget

If you have questions about the Events and News dashboard widget that came out in WordPress 4.8, please read this FAQ!

Make WordPress Communities

Keyboard Shortcuts | Hide comment threads

Community Team Reps for 2020

Now that voting for this year’s Community Team reps has concluded, I’m pleased to announce that the new Community Team reps for 2020 are Mary Job (@mariaojob) and Cami Kaos (@camikaos)!

Mary Job

Mary hails from Lagos, Nigeria. She started using WordPress about 7 years ago, and has been involved in organising her local WordPress community meetup group since 2016. Not only that, but she has been the primary catalyst for the explosive growth of WordPress community events all across Nigeria, offering countless hours of ongoing support to local organisers. She has also spoken at a number of WordCamps around the world and has served as a community deputy since 2017. Mary brings a passion and fervour to her work on the Community Team that is matched by few others. You can read more about her journey with tech and WordPress on HeroPress and her profile page.

Cami Kaos

Cami needs no introduction to those who have been involved in WordPress community events program for a while. A resident of Portland, OR, Cami has served as an integral member of the WordCamp Central team since 2013 where she has assisted hundreds, if not thousands, of local organisers in bringing their event ideas to life. While she has been such an active member of the team for so many years, it is very exciting to now have her serving in the role of Community Team rep so she can bring her trademark insight, understanding, and wisdom to new areas of the team. You can read more about Cami’s journey on HeroPress and her profile page.

From myself and @francina (the outgoing Community Team reps), we’re excited to see these two wonderful women step up to their new role and are looking forward to a fruitful and productive year ahead for the team!

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

Event Cancellation Guidelines and Procedures

Given the unfortunate crisis we find ourselves in with COVID-19 (corona virus) we’ve seen as many WordCamp cancellations this month as we would ordinarily see in a full calendar year. Being mindful that the question of when to cancel, and what to do if cancellation is required, is on the minds of many organizers I’d like to start collecting some information on and common questions you might have around cancelling/postponing an event so we can add them to the WordCamp Organizers Handbook.

We have some existing documentation on procedures followed for WordPress Community Support which we’ll publish along with an FAQ and other guidelines.

I know @courtneypk and @sippis have a lot to add to this conversation, I invite everyone to chime in as well.

While ordinarily we would wait until a call for feedback has been completed to add an update like this, in this case I hope you all agree we should add this documentation as soon as possible and update as necessary.

Please share feedback and concerns in the comments!

#community-events #wordcamps

First of all, I think there should be an assessment of whether to postpone or cancel (need guidance on what this involves). Then…

If postponing:

  • Remove tickets so they can no longer be purchased
  • Send postponement email to attendees
  • Contact venue to confirm postponement and find new date
  • Offer refunds for attendees and local sponsors for which the new date doesn’t work
  • Contact Speakers
  • Change event status (back to “Pre-planning” if postponing to next year. Mark as “Cancelled” if pushing to the next calendar year)
  • (optional) Post announcement on Central (+Twitter and Facebook?)

If cancelling:

  • Remove tickets so they can no longer be purchased
  • Send cancellation email to attendees
  • Refund all purchased tickets after email goes out
  • Email venue to start cancellation process
  • Email paid vendors to cancel and request refunds if necessary
  • Contact all invoiced sponsors
  • Refund all paid sponsors
  • Void sent (but unpaid) sponsor invoices
  • Contact global sponsors
  • Contact Speakers
  • Change event status to “Cancelled”
  • (optional) Post announcement on Central (+Twitter and Facebook?)

Let me know if you have anything else to add!

Some clarification on remove tickets. Don’t zero out the tickets available. Either set the availability to and end date in the past or delete the ticket types. When tickets are refunded, the number of available tickets will be greater than zero.

@courtneypk, can you check this for a typo? It’s unclear to me.

Change event status (back to “Pre-planning” if postponing to next yet.

Whoops! I meant “next year”. Corrected above 🙂

As far as removing tickets, in past cancellations we’ve removed the Camptix shortcode from the Tickets page and added a note about the cancellation/postponement, or moved the Tickets page back to draft. Does that work?

When the Camptix shortcode is removed, the ability to access the refund ticket user interface from Camptix is removed as well. I just tested on a 2019 WordCamp site.

This would be true for the WordCamp thas is being postponed and attendees can decide if they want to refund their ticket or not. For canceled WordCamps, refunds are automatically issued and there’s no need to access the Camptix refund feature.

(optional) Post announcement on Central (+Twitter and Facebook?)

I think this should not be optional. The announcement in Central will get larger attention than a post in WordCamp’s own site, which ensures that information reaches everyone relevant. Posts in Central are automatically published to Twitter and Facebook.

I think there should be an assessment of whether to postpone or cancel (need guidance on what this involves)

I think there are a few crucial matters to help decide between postponing and cancellation:

  • What are the circumstances that have lead to thinking about postponing or cancellation and can those change drastically (to better) in a short period of time? If not => cancel
  • Will the majority of the organizing team still want to be involved if WordCamp is postponed? If not => cancel
  • Does the WordCamp gather attendees and sponsors from wide region (for example from multiple countries) rather than from local areas? If does => cancel
  • Would the WordCamp be postponed for more than three months? If yes => cancel
  • Is the same venue or some other sensible alternative available for the date(s) postponing is planned? If not => cancel

I think we all need to consider if cancelation actually protects healthy people. I don’t think it does.

I feel just as exposed when I chose to take public transit, go to the grocery store or go to work. Canceling events to protect people seems futile in this broader context.

If the threshold for canceling is, are there COVID-19 infected people in the city the camp is in, or simply are there attendees coming from a city with infections you might as well just cancel every conference in 2020 now.

This is already the new normal, I feel the focus needs to move from cancelation to how to continue have meetups/conferences while minimizing transmission risk, not on when and how to cancel, but how to move forward as safely as possible.

All conferences should be encourage people who may have been recently exposed to self quarantine or protect against transmission (mask wearing, non-contact, etc). Maybe this should be mandated for all attendees for a while, although that could easily result in complacency (if everyone is wearing a mask, why give anyone with a mask a little extra distance and care).

I think this guidance is for people who are asking the question. This is not something we force on organizers. When local authorities are requiring cancellation of events it ceases to be about what we think is best and becomes what the city/county/state/country etc is recommending or requiring.

I understood the intended scope, but there really should also be guidance for how to conduct a camp in these times, not just how to deal with cancelation.

How to deal with attendee concerns
How to deal with speakers canceling

How do we all make camp safer than other public spaces

How to deal with attendee concerns
How to deal with speakers canceling

I agree that we should have guidance on how to address these, as well as how to deal with sponsors that are concerned or canceling. For the time being, organizers can reach deputies and mentors by emailing to support@wordcamp.org to get help with these concerns and situations.

How do we all make camp safer than other public spaces

This is a thought question and I wouldn’t want us to provide this guidance for the organizers because we are not the experts. Also global and local recommendations can vary a lot and change fastly. Instead of providing guidance itself, I would recommend organizers to follow closely announcements and instructions from local health authorities.

Should we reach out to WordCamps who are in pre-planning or approved statuses with the guidance determined from this? Especially in cities and regions where there are confirmed cases. I’m sure there are several organizers who won’t monitor this make blog. I think some organizers would like to know there are other organizers and other cities dealing with this tough decision and they are not alone.

We’ll put up a post on Central letting organizers know that this is an available resource if they are concerned. At this time I feel like contacting every camp in pre-planning/ planning would be overstepping and could cause panic and concern where none is needed.

I agree with Cami here. Reaching out to all WordCamps in pre-planning or approved would be much work and cause unnecessary panic. If WordCamp organizers do have hesitations whether they should organize or not, I’m sure they will know to contact Central and we can then help them in this matter.

Could we add information about where to go to find the most up to date information about things like major weather events and public health issues?

Hmm, while this is a good idea, it’s going to vary from region to region since we’re trying to make this resource globally relevant. I think the general advice to keep an eye on major weather events and public health issues is a good tip, though!

Hi! Thanks a lot for starting this thread. I believe all WordCamp organizers want to see the event they contributed to happen. But as @camikaos replied earlier, what we need to do is to explain how to deal with the issue when local authorities advised or ordered to cancel / postpone the event because I’m afraid, anyway, the attendees are not in a mood to gather in such a situation.

How to deal with vendors, sponsors? etc. are the questions we need to answer to if this sad case happens.

I like the clear steps @courtneypk shared above. I can imagine advice like: watch the news, contact local authorities. Write about your policy on your WordCamp site in case the event needs to be cancelled.

Yes, the intent of this new handbook page isn’t specific to the current case, it’s basically about the steps needed to take in any cases of cancellation.

Thank you so much. I think adding that document is very important and helpful.

I think three items need to be added.

  • What happens to the site URL and WordCamp name if the postponement of WordCamp spans years (2020-2021)?
    For example, WordCamp XXX 2020 will be held in 2021, is strange?

  • Does the insurance covered by WordCamp guarantee the money for cancellation?

  • Can we hold a WordCamp online as an alternative?

Youth Event Working Group (Formerly Kids) Chat Agenda | Thursday 27 February 2020

Our next Kids Events Working Group chat is happening Thursday, 27 February 2020 at 1900 UTC/ 3pm EST. This chat will occur in the Make WordPress Community-Team Slack channel.

This chat occurs every 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month. Asynchronous chat will be noted in the minutes up to 12 hours after the chat occurs so feel free to chat when it is convenient for you.

Agenda

  1. Updates from the month
  2. Goals for next month
  3. Open Floor Discussion

Come and discuss how you can be involved. We need people to:

  • Research – laws surrounding minors at events globally
  • Writing – arts and crafts documentation, WordPress basics documentation, Parental Resources Documents
  • Editing – grammar, spell check, and general flow proof readers/editors

Everyone is welcome. Please attend even if you are not sure how to participate.

If for any reason you can not attend the meeting live but still want to be involved please comment on the post to introduce yourself. Share a bit about your WP background and what area you want to help with.

Please leave a comment below of anything else that should be added to the agenda for discussion.

#kids-events, #youth-events

We will also discuss the addition of an online workshop and what that will entail. It will be an easy way for anyone looking to get involved to get familiar with Youth Events in the community and how to run them and/or participate in the working group.

Recap of the Diverse Speaker Training group (#wpdiversity) on Feb 26, 2020

Summary: I shared where I’m at with creating the new Train the Trainers videos, and asked for help filling in some gaps in our 2019 year-end report.

Show full post

Attendance: @jillbinder @wpfangirl

Start: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301090700/https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1582736313028500

New Train the Trainers videos: I am just finishing off editing and next will do live testing.

I asked if we are missing any meetups or WordCamps who ran our workshop. I will post our current list in another post this week.

Please see the Slack for the long list of what we accomplished in 2019 that will paint a fuller picture of our year-end report. I will ask the team members individually if I’m missing anything in the list. http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301090700/https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1582737306042000

End: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301090700/https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1582739052061800

Next Actions

  1. I will ask the team and post to the P2 about who has done our workshop in 2019, and are we missing any?
  2. I will ask the team individually if I’m missing anything in the list of items we accomplished this year.

#wpdiversity

Forming the WordCamp Central Twitter account working group

I think that the WordCamp Central Twitter account is too silent, official and boring. Currently, the only content is automatically shared from central.wordcamp.org news. It would be awesome to raise local communities and their WordCamps more in the content of that account. One way of doing this could be re-tweeting curated content.

Birgit Pauli-Haack and contributors did write an awesome proposal about this in 2017 and feedback on that proposal was enthusiastic. After the proposal, activating the Twitter account didn’t get enough momentum because of a lack of interested contributors.

The proposal from 2017 is still valid and could be a good starting point for activating the Twitter account today. The missing part is contributors who want to commit to updating the account actively.

That’s why I’m calling all persons interested in contributing to this topic to express their interest in the comments. If we get at least six interested and tentatively committed contributors, we’ll start a working group.

The first task for the working group will be scheduling a video meeting where the plan for reactivating the Twitter account will be discussed. The next steps will be agreed on that call.

#marketing, #twitter, #working-group

I was already thinking about WordCamp Central Twitter strategy earlier this week when I was using a Twitter Poll to see which WordCamps are hyped and higher chance to get a large crowd. I was thinking if we could have a similar kinda poll from Central account or at least a retweet from central’s twitter, then it could get great engagements. I felt the same during our WordCamp Dhaka 2019 or even whenever I see organizers struggling to promote the local WordCamp or meetups. WordCamp Central can be a great help for them and also amplify other news about WordCamps around the world.

I’d be happy to contribute. 🙋‍♀️

Hi @sippis continuing our chat from Slack. Can you please include @yvettesonneveld and myself (it may be that one of the other marketing team reps attends to represent the team depending on the dates set). Together with other team reps and the team as whole, we have been working on the issues for ideas / suggestions for social media communications for some time and can represent and relay the marketing’s perspective related to WordCamps. It would be good to build on the work that we have been doing on social media supporting WordCamps and contributor events during the last two years too, and it can feed into our joint documents with Community on social media help for camps too. We know camps have been using our document and we regularly signpost to it as an evolving document. The plan is for it to be go into the handbook. If we can include information on how camps can interact with the Central Twitter feed this will help us complete an important query in the document.

The marketing team also has a proposal developing for a content plan, which will have some relevance for WordCamps too.

We can feature something about this in our notes and actions on the Marketing P2 to gather wider feedback when needed too. Thanks

I don’t think I have the bandwidth at the moment to participate in the Working Group, but I think it’s a great idea!

I was also wondering if this group should also discuss the WordCamp Facebook page as well? It is as equally stagnant as the Twitter account.

I was also wondering if this group should also discuss the WordCamp Facebook page as well? It is as equally stagnant as the Twitter account.

Yeah, Facebook and Instagram need to be activated also. The marketing team has made some efforts towards that, but it’s still in progress because of some issues with access to accounts.

I’d like to see how the activation goes with Twitter and if we find enough committed contributors, before trying to activate all social media accounts. To avoid taking too big a scope at a time and failing because of that.

WordPress meetup organizer newsletter: February 2020

Hello WordPress Meetup organizers!

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

Newsletter contents:

  • Diverse Speaker Training Workshops
  • 2019 Annual WordPress Meetup Member Survey
  • Grow your meetup – from WCUS
  • Visual Composer is a 100% GPL-Licensed Plugin!

Diverse Speaker Training Workshops

As a meetup or WordCamp organizer, have you ever had challenges getting women and people from other under-represented groups to speak at your events? So have we.

There is a workshop created by and for people from under-represented groups to help us bust through Impostor Syndrome and other obstacles.

The Diverse Speaker Training workshop (#wpdiversity), run by the Community Team, busts through this and other obstacles.

Sign up to run the workshop in your local WordPress meetup chapter this coming year: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200301090700/http://tiny.cc/wpdiversity

Bonus! If you have run the workshop in your meetup, please let us know by emailing us at speaker-training@wordcamp.org. We’d love to hear your feedback. 

2019 Annual WordPress Meetup Member and Organizer Survey

Since 2019 has come to a close, we would like to gather feedback on how the chapter meetup program is doing. Please share the WordPress meetup program survey with your meetup members.

Help your chapter by letting members know about the survey. You can share it in both online and in-person discussions!

Also, for organizers like yourself, we have the WordPress meetup organizer survey here.

Grow your meetup – Tips for Meetup organizers.

WCUS 2019 held a workshop to help organizers grow their meetups, and a wide variety of general tips were shared at this workshop for Meetup organizers. These tips are relatable to all meetup organizers and volunteers – even if you are just beginning to start your first meetup, this workshop will ensure you are starting off on the right foot.

The workshop is available on WordPress.tv

Visual Composer is now a 100% GPL-Licensed Plugin!

We’re very happy to announce that Visual Composer (and all plugins/themes from the same company) is now 100% GPL compliant!

From now on, Visual Composer, WP Bakery and any other of their plugins/themes can be sponsors of official WordPress Meetup groups in the chapter program and WordCamps, and their employees can be organizers, volunteers and/or speakers at our community events!
  

Join us in welcoming the big team of Visual Composer, and we would especially like to thank Michael Makijenko, the company’s founder, for his amazing and quick collaboration.

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

Your friends on the Community Team

make.wordpress.org/community

#newsletter

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!

  • EU camera kit wrangling
  • HS triage
  • WCEU Accessibility planning and wrangling
  • WordCamp Aalborg and Mannheim mentoring
  • WordCamp.org meta contributions

Bit busy week behind and ahead in work and personal life.

Would have reported this last week but I’m out sick. We had an unusually high number of no-shows at our February meetup, but then, we’d had an unusually high number of registrations.

I asked my meetup members to fill out the Meetup Member Survey during that meeting. One thing people pointed out was that typing in the URL was a pain, but I don’t recollect ever seeing a shortlink for it, and apparently not everyone had the email handy. At least this should ensure I get more than 2 responses to help guide me in my organizing.

Also, I’ve just filled out the organizer survey. One thing I noticed: it asks if you are the only organizer. Technically, if your meetup is part of the WPCS program, you can’t be the only organizer, because WordPress is the main organizer and account owner.

Hello there! During these last two weeks I had two WC mentoring calls and one WordCamp update via Slack (the organizer couldn’t join the call):

WordCamp Cartagena 2020 (Spain)
I had the first mentoring call with all the organizing team! It was nice to meet all of them 🙂

  • WordCamp dates 20/6 (Contributor Day) and 21/6 (Talks). They are planning a Tourism Day on 22/6.
  • They had a venue.
  • The budget is in progress and they’ll submit soon.
  • They’re working on the website.
  • I showed them the Planning Tool and they liked! I told them to keep it updated.
  • We talked about Sponsors packages and I gave them some advice.

WordCamp Lime 2020 (Perú)

  • The Lead Organizer shared the new WordCamp Organizing Timeline to the Team.
  • They’re looking for a discount for the Venue. They’ll have to make a pre-payment (to reserve the venue).
  • They’ll run the money through WCS.

WordCamp Montevideo 2020 (Uruguay)

  • Elías couldn’t attend the call so he wrote me the Status in Slack.
  • They have a meetup on 3rd of March where they’ll talk about the WordCamp Organization.
  • In this day, the Organizing Team will meet to review the pending tasks and set deadlines to them and work with the priority tasks.

That’s all!

Changes in Meetup Organizer Application form

For some time, we have had a problem with vetting Meetup applications that we don’t have enough information about the applicant to do the proper vetting. First step for many applications have been sending email asking more information. This has caused extra work for deputies and delay in application processing time.

To tackle this issue, changes have been made to the Meetup Organizer Application form. From now on, the application form asks the same question deputies have usually asked in the email.

New questions added to the form are:

  • Could you introduce yourself and tell us more about your connection with WordPress?
  • Where we can find you online? (Please add links to your websites, blogs and social media accounts.)
  • Why do you want to start a WordPress Meetup in your city? And what are your immediate plans?
  • Have you talked with people in your community to check the level of interest?
  • Anything else you want us to know while we’re looking over your application?

These questions were removed because those are covered in new ones:

  • How would you describe yourself?
  • Anything you’d like to tell us about yourself, or what you hope to do with a meetup group?

When deputies are doing application vetting, all answers to these questions can be found from “Original Application” metabox at the very end of the page just like in WordCamp applications.

Hopefully, this change will make Meetup Organizer application vetting more smoother for deputies and reduce the processing time for an individual application!

Props to @sippis, @ryelle and @iandunn.

#meetup-applications

Great initiative ! Thanks a lot to all of you 👏👌

Excellent work! Thanks for adding this and getting it live!

This is a great idea, thank you for suggesting and implementing it!

Should we delete or change the Saved Replies in Help Scout that ask for more information?

I’d keep that saved reply there for a moment because we have 15 applications that are sent before this change to the form was made. After some time, it can be removed I think.

Community Team Chat Agenda | 20 February 2020

Hello Team!

Our bi-monthly Community Team chat is happening this Thursday, 20 February 2020. Meeting times are detailed below. We use the same agenda for both meetings in order to include all time zones.

Asia-Pacific / EMEA friendly: Thursday, February 20, 2020 at 11:00 AM UTC

Americas friendly: Thursday, February 20, 2020 at 08:00 PM UTC

Deputy/Mentor check-in

What have you been doing and how is it going?

P2 posts needing review/feedback

Highlighted P2 posts

Please add any additional items to this agenda by commenting on this post as needed.

#meeting-agenda

Applying lessons from agile to event organization: the sprint retro

In the last 2 years, I have been diving deep into the practice of agile methodologies, their frameworks and processes. Hindsight being what it is, I often find myself looking back and thinking, “Man, if only I knew then what I know today!” And not only for software delivery, but for my time working as a WordCamp organizer as well.

There is a lot that event organizers can learn from lean and agile beyond the now ubiquitous kanban board, and today I want to share some thoughts and techniques for my favorite of all the agile practices: the sprint retrospective.

At the end of each of the three WCEU organizing years that I participated in (2016-2018), the team, or teams, would hold a “post-mortem” to reflect on all of our successes, learnings and fumbles. Those learnings didn’t often translate into anything actionable, because:

  1. We didn’t have a clear and consistent process
  2. The team had a high turnover rate
  3. Folks switched roles from year to year
  4. At the end of the year we were all exhausted and just ready to move on

Why run a sprint retrospective?

Retros are most effective when they are done at regular intervals while the work is ongoing. They serve as checkpoints to create space for teams to stop, inspect, learn, and adapt. In scrum jargon we call this a sprint retrospective, where a sprint is a predefined and regular interval of time into which project delivery is broken down and delivered. The sprint retro then serves to only look back on that period of time. Typically this is 2 weeks, but 3 and 4-week intervals are also common. (Yes, I do realize that I’m writing this largely to a group of software developers, but I won’t assume everyone reading is familiar with these concepts 🙂)

Am I saying that because we didn’t run regular retros that we never learned on the job and course-corrected when needed? No, of course not! On the contrary, for a huge team of volunteers self-organizing across a dozen countries, we were constantly learning and adapting our work accordingly. We just didn’t have a clear process to do so, which meant that a lot did slip through the cracks, knowledge did get lost, and a lot of things went unsaid. And worst of all, not everyone felt comfortable or safe raising difficult topics and in a timely manner.

Retrospectives serve to:

  • Create a safe, dedicated space to have open, candid conversations
  • Build trust
  • Hold ourselves and one another accountable
  • Celebrate everything we’re doing right
  • Share our learnings
  • Identify things that don’t make sense to us
  • Take an honest look at what’s not going well
  • Come up with creative, tangible solutions toward improvement
  • Define controlled experiments
  • Follow up on action items, experiments and their outcomes in the next iteration

How to run a remote retro

These types of conversations are best had in person, with a big bare wall, a punch of Post-it notes and some Sharpies. But there are lots of great tools and tips for running remote retrospectives as well. Let’s dive in.

Participants

The participants should only include the immediate delivery team. That is, the individuals who are directly collaborating on a daily (or regular) basis. No stakeholders or outside team members should be present, without the express permission of every core team member. Why? Again, this needs to be a safe place to talk about potentially difficult topics. Folks need to be able to express themselves without fear of judgement or repercussions.

However, sometimes it does make sense to bring in someone to facilitate the meeting, that way all team members can participate. This person should of course be someone that all team members are comfortable with, and someone capable of remaining neutral (more on facilitating below).

Duration

A retro shouldn’t last longer than an hour, although for larger teams, and for end-of-project retros it might make sense to extend this an extra 30m to ensure enough time for discussion.

The acknowledgment

Before kicking off I always mention the following (and include it in written form on the tool being used):

We are having this discussion with the goal in mind of continuous improvement. Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what was known at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at-hand.

Hat tip to my colleague Jen Laker for that one. She says that she will refer back to this if the conversation ever starts turning into a blame game – retros aren’t about blaming people or passing the buck. They are about being accountable and learning from our inevitable errors.

I’ve also come to add the following:

If you find yourself struggling to find the right words to say something, that probably means that it’s really important. I encourage you to not worry about getting the phrasing just right. Get it out there first, then we will work through it together as a team.

This came after repeatedly watching people start to type and then erase their words…finding just the right words is not always possible, and not wanting to offend anyone is a real fear. Make it easy for people to voice the hard stuff.

The brainstorm

Now it’s time to get all the ideas out. There are different tools that you can use for this:

  • Google docs (my preferred method)
  • Trello
  • Confluence (has a built-in template)
  • Miro

Really, any online tool that lets multiple people collaborate simultaneously can serve this purpose. With Trello and Confluence, the prompts are divided into columns. On a Google doc you can create sections with bullet lists.

I find that 7-8 minutes is the right amount of time for this phase.

  • Encourage everyone to contribute at least one item to each column
  • Invite them to mute themselves and to work in silence
  • If you see the activity waning early, you of course don’t need to use the whole allotted time, stop early
  • Give folks a 1 minute warning before the time is up, asking them to wrap it up
  • At the end, ask if anyone needs more time – it should absolutely be ok to spend another minute or two to make sure all of the important stuff gets out there

The formula

There are lots of different ways to frame a retro, the most common, and the one I use most frequently with teams is:

  1. What went well?
  2. What went less well?
  3. What still puzzles me?

And sometimes I add a fourth:

  1. What did I learn?

An alternative to this is:

  1. Start doing
  2. Stop doing
  3. Keep doing

Though I find this lacks the emotional connection that helps foster team building.

For long term projects I like to shake it up from time to time. Two I’ve experimented with, with great results, are The Wish, and The Sailboat.

The vote

This is an optional step. Ideally, when the time intervals aren’t too lengthy or the team too big, the group can get through all of the items in the allotted time. However, if it’s clear that there are too many to get through, then you can take 4-5 minutes and have members upvote the topics that they feel would be the most valuable use of time to discuss.

Grant each person 3-4 votes. They can be added as emojis, and tools like Trello have “like” features that can serve this purpose well. People can place one or more of their votes on individual items, as long as they don’t use more than the defined quantity each. Count the votes and sort topics in each question/column by those with the most votes.

The discussion

I often like to start with what went well as a bit of an ice-breaker. It’s great to look at everything the team is doing well, and this column/section often has the largest quantity of items.

That said, when there are a lot of items in the “went less well” and “puzzles me” columns, then I’ll save the “went wells” until the end. The facilitator should read the room and decide what the best approach is on that particular day.

The facilitator

Right, so yes, someone should facilitate this meeting, and ideally that should be someone who is not also participating. This may not always be possible. The important things for effective facilitation of this meeting:

  • The facilitator is neutral, they are not there to push an agenda
  • They actively create a safe space and ensure that everyone has a voice
  • Respect the timeboxes, and move the conversation along if the group gets stuck on a topic (see below)

Notes, decisions & action items

The facilitator should also capture the output of the discussion. This generally falls into 3 categories:

  1. Notes: general impressions that add value beyond what was captured in the brainstorm items. The development of those topics that add clarity, meaning and different perspectives.
  2. Decisions: has the group agreed to make any process changes? Document these under Decisions, and keep a log to refer back to. Process is specific to each group and it is natural for it to evolve.
  3. Action items: these are clear tasks to be completed and should be immediately assigned to one or more individuals. p2’s have built in checklists that can be used to track the completion of actionables, or trello could be a good place to track them as well. Make sure and check off items as they’re completed, and review previous Decisions and Action items in the next meeting.

Decisions and action items don’t often manifest on their own. It is also the role of the facilitator to move the discussion toward the learning, change, action or experiment. Give the discussion ample space to breathe, then move toward the idea of improvement.

Some closing thoughts

I had the honor and privilege of accompanying the WordCamp Asia organizing team over the last 10 months as one of their mentors. I brought up this idea of running retros, and eventually facilitated one for one of the teams. A big thanks to @hlashbrooke for prompting me to share these thoughts and techniques with you all, following that experience 😄

Some final thoughts in no particular order:

  • You might try leaving the sprint retro doc open for folks to add to it as they go, rather than wait until the meeting itself. This can be particularly useful if the sprint is longer than 2 weeks, but also helps for teams that are multitasking a lot (as WordCamp organizers do!).
  • I recommend making it clear that people don’t need to wait for a retro to raise a topic. Some topics are timely and should be addressed accordingly.
  • On the flip side, not all topics need to be addressed right away. The sprint also serves to let the team focus. I often suggest, “hey, that’s a great topic, how about we address it in the next retro?” That way folks don’t get unnecessarily distracted by things that aren’t urgent. Also, you don’t want to introduce change or an experiment mid-sprint (unless something is really broken and it’s absolutely vital). Most things can wait, ride it out then introduce change in the next iteration.
  • While conflicts and misunderstandings absolutely can get resolved through this process, a retro is not a replacement for conflict resolution, or to be used punctually as such. This is essentially what ended up happening for WordCamp Asia. It’s not a bad thing, but again, retros are most effective when done regularly.
  • Along those same lines, everyone on a delivery team should participate. For flagship events, this would mean that if one team is running retros, all teams should be running retros. They can each add their own nuance to the way they’re run, but ideally all teams have the same framework to operate in.
  • Community Mentors could potentially be well placed to serve as facilitators, especially for local WordCamps.
  • For flagship events, I’ve always thought of the global lead role as being that of a scrum master, more so than that of a product owner. That is, a servant leader, someone who is their to educate, mentor and coach the team. I see the individual team leads as the product owners, each with the vision and autonomy to set objectives for their teams.
  • A flagship event might then run a scrum of scrums, where individual teams run team retros, then team leads also gather to run them at a global level.
  • It would be interesting to explore how other scrum practices could benefit event organizing teams, but that will have to be another post for another time 😍

Thank you for reading to the end! I hope you have found this interesting and valuable. If there is any area that I may have missed or that you’d like me to develop on further, please let me know. 🙂

This is excellent, and something that will be so useful for WordCamp organisers! Thanks for posting it 🙂

Thank you for sharing this in a post, Jenny!

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