Suggested iterations for the Five for the Future program and tool

The Five for the Future site and tools launched at the end of 2019, and then the pandemic hit. It’s been difficult to make time to iterate on the program, but eventually the window of opportunity for changes will open, and I wanted to collect my suggestions here, in case they will be helpful in the future.

The program has a few major challenges that have kept it from reaching its full potential. Here’s my take on those problems, and how they might be resolved:

Spam or dormant pledges

The program runs on the honor system, and it wasn’t clear how much of a risk that would be, at launch. Two years later, there have certainly been more “spam” pledges than anyone would want, and surprisingly (to me) few reports of fake or spam pledges. What that tells me = either people don’t go surfing around in the pledge lists, checking for accuracy, the Report feature is too hard to find (unlikely), or people don’t really care whether pledges are accurate or not.

I do think that a substantial number of false/fake/spam pledges are a problem, because they depreciate the value of the sincere/active/real pledges. If we never intend to clean up the rolls, then we should probably consider shutting down the program or putting more disclaimers on the site. 🙂

I don’t think it’s time to get that drastic, though. Here’s what I think could work, to increase the signal to noise ratio in pledges, in no particular order:

  • Share the list of pledges with leaders on each contributor team, asking them to mark the contributors they’ve never worked with or seen participate on the team.
  • Send the “absent” contributors a friendly email, letting them know that we’re cleaning spam pledges from the site, and asking them to confirm that their pledge is not-spam. Share the names of those who confirm not-spam back to contributor teams and encourage them to reach out to that list with opportunities to help work on things.
  • (This will depend on each team being able to provide a list of ways to contribute. Worse comes to worst, I suppose we can send pledgers to each team’s handbook page that talks about how they can help.)
  • For those who do not confirm within a reasonable time period, remove their pledges from the site, and email them with a friendly message that we have been removing apparent spam pledges. Let them know how they can re-pledge if they simply missed our previous message asking for confirmation. It would be interesting to know if people who only come back once we’ve removed their pledge, actually become active or not. I’m not sure what will happen there.
  • Institute a biannual 5ftF spam-check, following the above process. Maybe that’s too often — maybe only once every year?

Disconnect between contributor teams and pledged contributors

For whatever reason, the outreach that I imagined would happen, between contributor teams looking for help and the list of pledged contributors that was added to every sidebar on the Make network…. never really came to pass. I’m not sure if that’s because contributor teams don’t feel comfortable pinging someone out of the blue and asking for help (it’s very likely that I have less shame than most, in my recruitment work), or if that *has* been happening, but just hasn’t been productive.

I was talking to Courtney Engle Robertson about this a little, this week, and she mentioned the idea of a tagging system on Make blog posts, that could automagically alert pledged contributors of posts that included opportunities to help out. I think we’d need to add some opt-in steps there, for privacy reasons of course, but I think this idea has merit.

When contributors re-confirm their pledges, they could be asked to click a box on their Profile page if they want to be emailed posts from Make blogs with a #5ftF tag or something, and maybe even specify which blogs they’d like to hear from in that way.

Another idea in this vein = inviting people to mark what kind of work they’re interested in doing for WordPress, when they make their pledge. I’m envisioning options like:

  • administrative (answer emails in a queue, take meeting notes, etc)
  • feedback (review and comment on blog posts,
  • testing (Core beta testing, contributor tool beta testing, pre-beta testing for new features, etc)
  • writing (write new or update old documentation, revise contributor team handbooks)
  • and the like.

Then contributor teams could get a regular report that (for example) 24 people have pledged 2 hours per week to their team, and 10 of them are willing to write or edit documentation. This could aid in the outreach/recruitment that contributor teams do, when they need to find people to work on a new or dormant project.

Train the pledgers, train the recruiters/onboarders

Another thought I had, about how we don’t seem to see a strong connection between pledged contributors and the teams they’re pledged to, is that not everyone knows how to effectively recruit people to contribute — even if they’re “qualified leads” (which is what I’d consider pledged contributors).

And not all people making pledges, necessarily know how to *find* the pages that tell them how to get involved.

So I think a two-pronged approach could help here. We write some docs or a training on how to recruit (and onboard?) contributors, and then we alter the email that pledged contributors get when they pledge, to include links to the onboarding docs for the teams they indicated. That’s work, y’all! But I think it would have a positive effect even beyond this program.

Discuss!

What do you think of these ideas? What ideas do YOU have for making the Five for the Future program more reliable and useful? Share your ideas/feedback and discuss in the comments, below!

#five-for-the-future

I think there are interesting proposals in what is being commented. Following the honor system, perhaps something that allows other people who are in the teams the ability to assess whether what is said is real or not. Something similar to LinkedIn’s “request ratings from other people”, where other people in the community can, in a simple way, bet on others (a simple karma system?).

Regarding the participation of the different teams, surely there are teams that are easier to rate than others. For example, those of Core is very likely that just by the fact of seeing who participates or not in the Trac, in the Git, or in other ways you can have some control. There are other teams that participation will be more manual (in my case I can speak for the Hosting team) in which knowing who participates is easy because there are only 3 places to validate: Slack meetings, improve documentation, participate in PHPUnit tickets.

Maybe, also to encourage participation, in each block of http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20211026144009/https://make.wordpress.org/ we should link 2-3 extra items:
— Link to team*
— Show calendar / meetings*
— Link to Handbook
— Link to onboarding (a page inside the Handbook?)
— Learn WordPress videos? (a curated list inside the Handbook?)

I think (in my personal opinion) that many times there is a lack of participation because people don’t know how to start, that onboarding is not basic and clear, or the office hours / mentoring for those who want to start is not well explained (and why is useful?).

Great job Five for the Future, and let’s hope that more and more people and organizations join WordPress 🙂

As a team rep, I’d love a way to call in contributors that have pledged to the team. I’d like them filtered a bit based upon team roles matched with what folks say they are interested in helping with. They could opt out if they need to change their commitments.

The #5ftf tag idea would highlight some low-lift opportunities that contributing organizations could hop into. Is the support queue strangely low that day? Does staff have an hour of awkward time? Some teams could benefit greatly with some contributions that don’t take advanced skills. For example: Training & Docs frequently need audits to track what content will change in a future release. Flagging this taxonomy, swapping screenshots, etc. are all greatly appreciated.

Teams could have a running list that would be great for 5FtF. Possibly we could aggregate these over RSS, and providing a simplified roundup for contributing organizations to browse in one location.

Spam or dormant pledges

I think it’d be best to tackle this first, because it won’t matter how good our recruiting docs are if team reps have to dig through hundreds of inaccurate pledges in order to find the 5% of them that will contribute.

I worry that a manual approach would add too much work for team reps, and wouldn’t be done consistently, especially after the first 6-12 months.

I think we could automate much of it instead, and then rely on team reps to review the gaps and grey areas.

  1. Send a polite, one-time email like Andrea described, but send it to all pledges, instead of team reps having to manually figure out who’s active. It’ll be important to define what a contribution is, and clearly communicate that. Otherwise lots of people will continue thinking that they contribute 40 hours a week to the Plugin Review Team, simply because they have a plugin in the Plugin Directory. The same thing happens for the Theme Review Team.
  2. Remove folks who don’t confirm, and send them a polite email.
  3. Automatically add various “props” for each team to Profiles. This is especially important for non-code contributions (which have historically been unrecognized); and for newer contribution mediums, like Slack and GitHub. This will make the activity/badges there a roughly accurate reflection of contributions.
  4. Once that’s done, we could start automatically removing folks who don’t have any contribution activity in the last 6 months
  5. Send them a polite email like Andrea described, and let them know team reps can manually re-activate their pledge if it was removed by mistake
  6. Ask team reps to let us know which contributions aren’t being credited in Profiles, so we can get them automated

+make.wordpress.org/updates/ since this p2 is pretty new
+make.wordpress.org/meta/ for technical feedback on automation

I think it’d be best to tackle this first, because it won’t matter how good our recruiting docs are if team reps have to dig through hundreds of inaccurate pledges in order to find the 5% of them that will contribute.

+1

I worry that a manual approach would add too much work for team reps, and wouldn’t be done consistently, especially after the first 6-12 months.

+1

4. Once that’s done, we could start automatically removing folks who don’t have any contribution activity in the last 6 months

This might be hard, as not all contribution activity is tracked on the WordPress.org profiles. For example, Community Team members who mentor WordCamps, but do not post or comment in P2. Or Design team member working in Figma.

I don’t have any solution or better idea thought.

not all contribution activity is tracked

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking we could fix in step 3. We have the data on WordCamp mentorships, we just need to connect it with Profiles.

There’s lots of non-code contributions we aren’t currently tracking, but it seems like we could. Here’s some rough thoughts:

  • polyglots – translating a string, reviewing a submitted translation. maybe add it in batches so activity isn’t flooded.
  • design – use figma API to see when designers create mockups. same for trello board
  • community – wordcamp deputies vetting applications, help scout API to see when deputies reply to support emails (maybe aggregate in to “answers N support tickets this week” stat
  • marketing – google docs API to see when marketing team writes copy for things?
  • wptv – moderating a video, captioning a video
  • theme review – comments/status changes on submissions
  • plugin review – comments/status changes on submissions
  • docs – writing/editing handbook pages, devhub pages, etc
  • training – publishing/editing docs
  • all teams – leading meetings
  • all – username mentioned in the #props channel on slack

The marketing team is also moving toward GitHub (away from Trello). So there could be some tie-in to the use of GitHub for tracking contributions if needed.

Why not celebrate and promote the people and teams that are doing it correctly?

WebDevStudios has dedicated 5% of company time to give back to WordPress since the original challenge from Matt all those years ago. We’ve tracked thousands of non-billable hours to #5ftf over the years probably totaling close to $1M. We blog about it, tweet about it, speak about it at events, etc, etc. We’ve even mentored other companies in how they can bring #5tft to their teams. We are doing it right and have been for years. Celebrating teams like ours will hopefully encourage more companies and individuals to get involved and do things the correct way.

+ 1
Perhaps there’s a way to create a space on the 5FTF site to house success stories like WebDevStudios, among others. I do like the idea of focusing energy/bandwidth on highlighting successes.

Why not celebrate and promote the people and teams that are doing it correctly?

That was part of the intention for the site, but is being hindered by all the spam; how do you picture it being done in a way that’s different from what the site already does?

Perhaps there’s a way to create a space on the 5FTF site to house success stories

The Case Study section of the homepage was meant to do that; do you feel like it’s too easy to miss, or needs other changes in order to be effective?

@williamsba1 hosted a Twitter Spaces chat about this. Ideas shared:

  • Have a Five for the Future office hours series on how to get started, ways for organizations to share what they did, and helping other organizations get started. See also WebDevStudios presentation about this
  • Organize contribution opportunities such as Good First Bugs, GitHub, Trac, and other teams needs that are often not visible for contributing organizations

*Automate as much contribution tracking as possible for areas that are often manually tracked things (mint NFTs perhaps -> profiles)

I was a team rep for Hosting for a while, and thought I’d leave a few thoughts.

I was surprised to see the Widget show up on the Make site — I think mostly because I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

As of now, it says there are 537 folks pledged to spend time.

The majority of them (including myself, at this point) have pledged time that is split between multiple teams, and Hosting is only one of the ones listed.

Right now, it’s not possible to say how many hours are split between which teams, which makes it harder to “expect” time for any particular team. I’d recommend making it possible for folks to pledge time to a particular team. And, if possible, to include a description of the intended contribution as well.

As a rep, I considered coming to meetings / following team happenings as contribution — which might not be visible to reps, but is still appreciated. This doesn’t require the same skills as, for instance, coding work on the test runner. The listing doesn’t currently make it clear who has the skills required and interest for particular projects within the team.

I think that the Five for the Future project has been successful in helping raise the profile of companies that are participating (and as far as I can tell, in upping contributions at least to some extent), and has also made those contributions a little easier to justify within companies.

I agree that if some of the point was that the listings should make it clear to team reps who they could ask for help, some work is necessary to clean things up and clarify what folks’ contributions are.