Contributor Working Group (and this repo) as an umbrella for cross team projects and collaboration

[gusaus]

Coming out of another successful Mentorship Cohort the following section of the recent mentorship chat recap outlined next step ideas for the Contributor Working Group.

The original purpose of the working group was to bolster the contributor experience of WordPress, and we identified mentorship as a kick-it off. Now that we have run two cohorts and have good clarity on mentorship, we explored working on other projects such as Five for the Future and also asked our group members to share if they have any thoughts on additional projects to work on.

@coachbirgit: “As mentioned in the proposal, I published last year, the idea of establishing a formal DEIB team as an umbrella group to enhance the contributor experience and act as a shared resource. From my understanding, the 5ftF, diversity speaker training and mentorship program would fit under that umbrella.”

@rcreators: ” There are many small companies or medium size company like to start contribute but the issue is contribution is connected to user profiles. Apart from that if they don’t have any contributor in the team, they have no clue. So it will great to put both items in to one umbrella. So new companies register to 5ftF and add more new contributors to the table.”

@kirasong asked for clarity on how 5ftF connects to contributions, and @harishanker clarified that it could be a way to work on Five for the Future in the open, and also have a chance to improve the contributor experience in WordPress through sponsored contributions.

@gusaus suggested a couple of ideas such as creating an entry point for various community programs, as well as an idea on extending do_action. We also briefly discussed and brainstormed some ideas on mentorship too.

@gusaus also clarified that Contributing to Five for the Future is indeed on the Sustainability roadmap](WordPress/sustainability#39). He also pointed us to some good discussion on collaboration in the #sustainability channel for us to pick up later.

In short, group members shared broad consensus on working on other impactful community projects.

While all of the above involve and overlap with goals of multiple teams, (related) projects, tasks, and discussions seem to be scattered about multiple teams, repos, and owners. Without clear processes it seems like a challenge to streamline collaboration and pool resources.

Considering most/all of the projects (including Contributor Working Group) are owned and align with goals of the Community Team, it seems like one solution would be for Contributor Working Group (and this repo) to be an umbrella for cross team projects and collaboration.

With 2256 people already pledging time to community (of course that's an aspirational estimate), it seems like there's already a foundation we could build upon by directing contributors and resources to this aptly named working group.

Does that make sense?

[gusaus]

I left a comment and subsequently surfaced (see the Slack 🧵) this discussion during the May 23rd Contributor Working Group Chat.

@harishankerr seemed warm to the idea and asked @naokomc and @peiraisotta to provide feedback.

As mentioned in the discussion(s), the steps to enable would be relatively simple:

• Change the name of this repo to Contributor Working Group / contributor-working-group
• Create a #contributor-working-group Slack channel
• Create comments/threads in this discussion focusing on things like priorities, team, resources, processes, etc...

Does that seem like a reasonable path forward?

[harishankerr]

@gusaus Thank you for this proposal. I agree with your general idea that there are multiple scattered efforts across many places that need to be consolidated.

While I wasn't present at the event, I do know that this idea came up at WordCamp Europe 2024, on building a unified group to work on parallel projects. Stakeholders from all these groups (including reps from our working group) attended an in-person discussion where this idea was discussed. I believe a recap post of the discussions are forthcoming, but there was consensus that we all need to work together.

As for your suggestion on the Contributor Working Group being that place for us to work on, I am not 100% sure. I don’t think a final decision on this has been made though, even though there was consensus. I do feel that all of us should continue this discussion in the weeks to come and finalize a common space for us to continue this work. I will keep checking on this, and hopefully we should be able to do this consolidation sooner than later.

I am quite happy to hear your thought that this group could be a place for us to combine forces though. :)

[gusaus]

Really appreciate that update @harishankerr! Looking forward to seeing a recap of the WCEU discussion.

Considering there's already a related contribution goal I'm hoping Sustainability team can help with evaluation and enabling.

Ideally we'll be able to give a progress report at WCUS!