-
Increasing contributor recognition and celebration
WordPress contributors are incredible. How can we better acknowledge and celebrate the important contributions made, and recognize the impact they have for the WordPress open source project? This discussion will explore where we currently are not recognizing contributions, and how we can more appropriately and readily show appreciation for contributions and contributors.
Perspectives needed: Teams that feel underrepresented in attribution, contributors that collect props regularly (through both automated and manual means).
Facilitator: Julia Golomb
Tracks:
Time:
-
Refining Five for the Future for a robust WordPress community
The Five for the Future (“5ftF”) program can help ensure the long term health of WordPress’ contributor pipeline. To make 5ftF as effective as possible, strong participation from 5ftF companies and project-wide understanding of Make Team needs and priorities is required. As such, this discussion will focus on two related topics:
- How we can more readily identify priority needs and opportunities and match them to 5ftF contributors.
- How to incentivize and facilitate further participation to the 5ftF program.
Perspectives needed: Current and aspiring 5ftF participants, active Make Team members interested in welcoming new contributors.
Facilitator: Jeff Paul
Tracks:
Time:
-
Can WordPress become the household name it deserves to be?
WordPress is the internet’s best kept secret. What would it take for WordPress to be able to raise awareness about itself and elevate the value of the ecosystem, while being thoughtful on behalf of the community that surrounds it?
Facilitator: Devin Sears
Tracks:
Time:
-
Building trust in WordPress CMS and plugin security
People who work in open source have a stronger understanding of how we ensure security of the CMS and plugins. For new users and consumers, it can be alarming to read or hear about vulnerabilities found in WordPress plugins and themes. This conversation will focus on how we can talk about security best practices and procedures to help users understand that WordPress takes security seriously. Additionally, we will also discuss how to refine tooling for plugin developers so that they are as equipped as possible to adhere to WordPress standards and best practices.
Facilitator: Peter Wilson
Tracks:
Time:
-
Accessibility in the WordPress project
How can WordPress adopt an accessible-first approach, and what would this mean for project development and decision-making? This discussion will center on accessibility considerations in developing WordPress software and current friction points, and explore possible solutions and practices to incorporate.
Perspectives needed: Current and interested accessibility advocates, people interested in or currently involved in release cycles.
Facilitator: Joe Simpson
Tracks:
Time:
-
Iterating on the Team Rep role
Today, each Make Team has a few Team Representatives (often referred to as “Team Reps”). Historically this role was not a leadership position, but designed to help facilitate communication across teams through weekly updates and cross-team discussions. Over the years, the Team Rep role has shifted and now differs from team to team: on some teams, Team Reps are only responsible for setting weekly agendas for meetings and posting recaps. On other teams, the Team Rep holds mentorship responsibilities. This discussion aims to a explore stronger definition for the Team Rep role, including responsibilities and what skills might be helpful, and where in the contributor journey they should be.
Perspectives needed: Current and former team reps, those who work closely with team reps regularly.
Facilitator: Angela Jin
Tracks:
Time:
-
How does the Make Team ecosystem work and how are we connected?
There are 22 Make Teams (and counting!) that build WordPress. Each team has it’s mandate and priorities, and are connected by the overarching purpose of moving WordPress forward. For contributors working on one team, it can be easy to lose sight of the broader project and other teams, or see how your team’s work fits in. This discussion will explore how teams are connected and the impact a team may have on others, with an eye towards growing our collective understanding of the Make WordPress ecosystem as a whole. We will also explore how we can keep growing this collective understanding for all new and current contributors.
Facilitator: Hari Shanker
Tracks:
Time:
-
Handling Trust & Safety (“T&S”) in the WordPress ecosystem: content moderation and sensitive content
WordPress has many community-led initiatives and directories with user-submitted content, like the Pattern Directory, the Photo Directory, Openverse, Themes, Plugins, and Support Forums. These areas hold user-submitted content, whether text or other media. However, each team has its own methods to evaluate its content, and its own moderation practices. This discussion aims to better understand current practices across teams towards establishing project-wide best practices and clear guidelines that prioritize safety and equitable moderation.
Facilitator: Kathryn Presner
Tracks:
Time:
-
Exploring how the Accessibility Team can support Making WordPress teams
The Accessibility Team would like to explore how it can become a shared resource and best support Make Teams and the WordPress project as a whole. The current challenges are that this small team struggles to track where they could be helpful across the WordPress project, and they would like a stronger system that allows them to better address requests as a whole team.
Perspectives needed: Current and interested Accessibility Team members, members from other Make Teams who want to collaborate with Make Accessibility.
Facilitator: Joe Dolson
Tracks:
Time:
-
Part I: Aligning processes and contributions between WordPress Core and Gutenberg
WordPress Core and Gutenberg currently have different release schedules and velocities, and are managed in two different locations (Trac/SVN and GitHub). This complicates merging Gutenberg code into Core. For example, it is unclear where modificatons should occur, resulting in version control issues. This discussion hopes to bring clarity to these issues and explore possible processes and solutions.
Perspectives needed: Current and interested Core and Gutenberg contributors, project managers, and team members following the release process.
Facilitator: Jonathan Desrosiers
Tracks:
Time:
-
Part I: Communicating on Make Team blogs: discussions, proposals, announcements
The WordPress community communicates primarily across Slack and Make Team blogs, commonly referred to as “P2s”. Make Team blogs in particular see an assortment of updates, discussions, proposals, and announcements. How do these come to be, and how can people provide feedback? How is the feedback considered when decisions are made? This discussion will focus on best practices around conversations on Make Team blogs.
Facilitator: Helen Hou-Sandi
Tracks:
Time:
-
Part I: Aligning WordPress enterprise with WordPress community
In recent years, WordPress has struggled to grow at the enterprise level. At the same time, companies and individuals invested in enterprise could be an immense value-add to the WordPress open source project. This discussion will explore the current friction points between enterprise interests and community interests, and where alignments can be amplified for mutual benefit.
Facilitator: Siobhan McKeown
Tracks:
Time:
-
Part II: Aligning processes and contributions between WordPress Core and Gutenberg
WordPress Core and Gutenberg currently have different release schedules and velocities, and are managed in two different locations (Trac/SVN and GitHub). This complicates merging Gutenberg code into Core. For example, it is unclear where modificatons should occur, resulting in version control issues. This discussion hopes to bring clarity to these issues and explore possible processes and solutions.
Perspectives needed: Current and interested Core and Gutenberg contributors, project managers, and team members following the release process.
Facilitator: Jonathan Desrosiers
Tracks:
Time:
-
Part II: Communicating on Make Team blogs: discussions, proposals, announcements
The WordPress community communicates primarily across Slack and Make Team blogs, commonly referred to as “P2s”. Make Team blogs in particular see an assortment of updates, discussions, proposals, and announcements. How do these come to be, and how can people provide feedback? How is the feedback considered when decisions are made? This discussion will focus on best practices around conversations on Make Team blogs.
Facilitator: Helen Hou-Sandi
Tracks:
Time:
-
Part II: Aligning WordPress enterprise with WordPress community
In recent years, WordPress has struggled to grow at the enterprise level. At the same time, companies and individuals invested in enterprise could be an immense value-add to the WordPress open source project. This discussion will explore the current friction points between enterprise interests and community interests, and where alignments can be amplified for mutual benefit.
Facilitator: Siobhan McKeown
Tracks:
Time:
-
Open Source participation in global legislation
Historically, the WordPress project has avoided taking clear public stances on legislation as it appeared across the world, instead relying on our sustaining/underwriting corporations to advocate for the best positions. Increasingly, WP is being asked to weigh in or participate in taking a collective stand with other FOSS projects in our field. Are our current methods sustainable? Do we have the community backing to make this sort of broad claim?
Facilitator: Angela Jin
Tracks:
Time:
-
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) for all Make Teams
This discussion will focus on how the WordPress project can welcome and sustain a diverse pool of contributors to all Make Teams. What are teams currently doing, and what practices can be brought to the whole project? What new practices, resources, support should be introduced?
Perspectives needed: Current and aspiring Make Teams members interested in DEIB.
Facilitator: Birgit Olzem
Tracks:
Time:
-
Addressing backwards compatibility in Gutenberg
This discussion aims to explore the challenge of backwards compatibility in JavaScript and PHP APIs from the Gutenberg project into WordPress core. Currently, there is little clarity around maintenance of backward compatibility across the project, resulting in confusion for developers and performance issues. There are two focus areas:
- Depreciating officially stable APIs that have been replaced
- Depreciating unstable, experimental, or internal APIs that have been shipped in WordPress.
Perspectives needed: Senior WordPress Core contributors/committers with deep knowledge of past lessons learned around backwards compatibility, Gutenberg contributors with working knowledge around processes and decision making.
Facilitator: Marius Jensen
Tracks:
Time:
-
Refreshing the contributor pipeline
A healthy contributor pipeline requires new contributors! Prior to the pandemic, our in-person events were key to welcoming and engaging new contributors. With events slower to return, how can we continue to connect with and bring in new contributors? This discussion will explore where Make Teams are currently seeing new contributors from, and brainstorm what kind of outreach the WordPress project could do to refresh the contributor pipeline. An additional focus for this discussion will be around how to continually retain new contributors.
Perspectives needed: Current team reps, prospective team reps, mentors, new contributors, and any one who cares about the longevity of the project through contribution and collaboration.
Facilitator: AmyJune Hineline
Tracks:
Time:
-
PHP version support
Currently, WordPress does not officially fully support PHP 8.0+. This discussion will focus on how WordPress can support and align with modern PHP versions, and how to drop support for PHP versions that are end-of-life (“EoL”). There is urgency to this as PHP 8.0 will be EoL in November, and PHP 7.4 reached EoL last November.
Facilitator: Mike Schroder
Tracks:
Time:
-
Communication and collaboration: finding your way around WordPress
The WordPress project both generates and processes a lot of information on a regular basis. Even for tenured contributors, it can be challenging to know where or who to go for much needed information. On each team and across the project, who should be responsible for disseminating information, and how can communication practices be streamlined to make collaboration more seamless for everyone building WordPress? This discussion will explore current friction points and possible ways to address communication and collaboration in the WordPress ecosystem.
Facilitator: Kevin Cristiano
Tracks:
Time:
-
Invisible and under-appreciated: bolstering “behind the scenes” contributions
A number of teams and their work in the WordPress project currently recieve little visibility, but also have high stakes or impact on the health of the WordPress community. Especially in recent years, the contributor pipeline for these teams has faced significant struggles. This discussion will explore how to address the broken pipeline, support the contributors involved, and how to give appropriate appreciation to this difficult work. Examples of teams facing this challenge include Plugins, Support, Security, Incident Response.
Perspectives needed: Current and aspiring members of the teams listed above, people interested in better understanding the nature of this work.
Facilitator: Marius Jensen
Tracks:
Time:
-
Unifying development tooling for contribution
Today, the local development tooling for contribution to WordPress is fragmented. Contributors use tools such as VVV/Vagrant, Docker, and Playground, but each have limitations and may not be endorsed for contributions. Additionally, some tools require specific set ups, making it challenging for contributors to get started. This discussion will explore how we can unify tooling to provide clarity around recommended tooling and process for contributors.
Facilitator: Aaron Jorbin
Tracks:
Time:
-
Revitalizing contributor teams’ leadership pipeline
The leadership pipeline for contributor teams has struggled, especially in recent years. This discussion will focus on what calls people to leading in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), where contributors have insurmountable blockers to leadership, and what a future investment into our future community leadership pipeline could look like.
Perspectives needed: Current and aspiring team representatives, contributors who would like to better understand what leadership in FOSS looks like, aspiring contributor team leaders in WordPress
Facilitator: Chloé Bringmann
Tracks:
Time:
-
Creating WordPress curriculum and educational experiences
One important way to welcome new users, builders, and extenders of all ages is to create excellent curriculum or educational experiences around WordPress. To address this gap, the WordPress community has held KidsCamps and launched Learn WordPress. This discussion will focus on the future of WordPress education, from topics to teach, to levels of experience, to curriculum for specific age groups.
Facilitator: Benjamin Evans
Tracks:
Time:
-
Improving maintenance of older default themes
Recently, there was a proposal to retire some old default themes. In response concerns were raised around how to do so. This discussion aims to explore how to maintain older default themes in more sustainable, streamlined methods.
Facilitator: Jonathan Desrosiers
Tracks:
Time:
-
Is succession planning possible in open source?
Key work for all leaders is investing in the next generation of leadership. This is especially true (yet especially hard) in free and open source software (FOSS), where you see hybrid concerns: not-for-profit/for-profit, volunteer/paid, skilled/unskilled. While our leadership group has expanded, it’s still unclear how to confirm a succession plan (either from an emergent or planned perspective).
Facilitator: Joe McGill
Tracks:
Time:
-
What is the criteria for delaying the upgrade of foundational tech, and what triggers reconsideration?
From time to time, it’s necessary to delay adoption of newer versions of our underlying technology, either because our software isn’t yet fully compatible or we otherwise cannot recommend the use of the new technology. This is an appropriate measure to take when we are thinking through the promises we make to our users, but what should be the acceptance criteria for reconsidering a delay?
Facilitator: Marius Jensen
Tracks:
Time:
-
Understanding contributor leadership roles in the WordPress open source project
Across the WordPress ecosystem, contributors can take on various leadership roles, such as release leads or lead organizers for Flagship WordCamps. However, it is not well understood how individuals are selected. This discuss will help build stronger undrestanding of how various leadership roles are created and individuals selected, with a focus on how to better share that information.
Facilitator: Aaron Campbell
Tracks:
Time:
