Personally, I love the idea. Speaking as a contributor group member who tries to keep in the loop regarding support and/or Codex issues that impact our group (or issues where our contributor group can be helpful), such consolidation is welcome.
Chip On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:09 AM, Jane Wells <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone. The results of the recent surveys to identify active > contributors and elect team reps made it pretty clear that the docs team is > in a bit of a slump, organizationally speaking. Only 5 people from the > wp-docs post responded, and of those, 2 were new or not yet contributing, > and there was no consensus re reps among the remaining 3 respondents. It > got me thinking about how we organize contributors, what has worked well > elsewhere in the WP ecosystem and in other free software projects, and > leads me to this proposal: what if we combined forums and docs into one > Support team? > > Looking back at the Codex activity from the past six months or year, > chunks of it have been tied to forum mods (like Ipstenu and Andrea_r), > other contributor groups (like Chip on the Theme Review Team), and new > releases. Not that how Automattic/WordPress.com organizes itself should > decide anything, but their support team manages forums, email support, and > docs, and it seems to work pretty well. They have a schedule for reviewing > existing documentation so it never gets too far out of date, and the people > on the front lines with users in the forums and via email can see very > clearly where they need to beef up documentation. I'm thinking this could > work well for .org, too. Those who are strong writers and just want to > contribute to documentation could still do so, but within a context of what > our user support needs are at any given time based on the actual support > requests. > > What I'm envisioning is less siloing of contributor personnel, with one > group blog at make.wordpress.org/support that uses tags like forums and > codex to organize posts, and has pages to help orient new contributors and > get them started. These mailing lists could fade away in favor of email > subscriptions from the blog, which are more easily searchable and would be > more visible to potential contributors. Within the uber-group, some people > would naturally gravitate toward specific tasks while others would > multi-task as they have been doing. > > Over time we could expand the purview of the group to include things like > moderating instructional videos and comments at wordpress.tv (and start > embedding appropriate videos into codex), possibly helping to staff > in-person help desks in local communities and/or at events like WordCamps > and Meetups, etc. I think the prospects are pretty exciting, and I could > see this becoming the biggest and most active of all the contributor > groups, which would be awesome. > > If there are any strong objections to this approach, please reply to this > thread today so we can discuss. If not, and everyone is willing to give > this a shot and all work together (at least as an experiment for, say, the > next release cycle or two), I'll go ahead and set up the group blog > tomorrow. > > Jane > ______________________________**_________________ > wp-docs mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.automattic.com/**mailman/listinfo/wp-docs<http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-docs> >
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