In March, the design team had our first call for team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. nominations. The time has come to open up nominations for one rep as I am rotating out. This is a great opportunity for an existing team rep to onboard someone and gives someone the chance to grow into this role and work alongside Estela.

It’s been a pleasure to be a team rep for design, and I am excited to continue contributing in other ways. This is purely a rotation out, not a goodbye. Being able to move in and out of this role is something built into the experience.

So, let’s get on with the exciting possibility and explain a little about the role. For this, I am going to be taking quite a bit from the post in March.

What does a team rep do?

In the WordPress open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project, each team has one or two (or more!) representatives, abbreviated to reps. The role goes way back to 2012 and is an established one across teams. You can learn more about the team rep role here.

A little note, it’s not called team lead for a reason. This section from the updates page explains team reps well:

“Team Rep is a leadership role that is mostly administrative in nature; it is not a Lead role. Letting go of the Team Rep title is not a loss of status, just a handing off of responsibilities. Someone who is a leader in a team can lead whether they are doing the team rep job or not.”

Here are the main tasks:

• Ensuring a meeting agenda happens along with notes. We have note-takers who are not team reps and post agendas, so this is coordination. The team rep adds agenda items to a shared document.
• Run the weekly design team meeting in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
• Co-ordinate the weekly triage meetings.
• Write a biweekly update post for make.wordpress.org/updates?
• Give quarterly updates on the team when asked.
• Call for new team reps when the time comes at the end of year tenure.

As a team rep, other tasks might fall to you in order to keep the team running, but in general, it’s a support and coordination role. On average the estimated time you would need for this role would be a few hours a week. With another team rep though, that time is shared.

This role is open to contributors of any level, not just full-time contributors. Like many good open-source processes, this work is done openly and can be shared. Also, because WordPress is a globally-minded project, if the team rep that is selected can’t make the current time, we can always discuss changing the meeting time.

The process

Taking inspiration from teams that have done this before the suggested process would be:

• A call for nominations in the comments on this post. Self-nominations are welcome. These will close in on November 30th.
• After the closing date, another post will highlight those nominated votes will be made on those nominations for a week. Currently, there is one team rep role available and the incoming rep will be working with Estela.
• The votes will be tallied, the chosen team rep asked to confirm they want to do this process and then announced.

If you want to nominate someone in private, please reach out to me (@karmatosed or @estelaris) on Slack.

Disclaimer: if you get nominated, please don’t feel like you have to say yes! We will add to the polls only the names of the people that are responding positively to a nomination. So feel free to reply with a “Thank you, but no thank you”.

#team-rep