On 5/16/2012 8:00 AM, [email protected] wrote:
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Joining Forces: Support (Lorelle on WordPress)
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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 15 May 2012 15:32:42 -0700
From: Lorelle on WordPress<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [wp-docs] Joining Forces: Support
To: WordPress Documentation<[email protected]>
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I've worked with some three person teams on many projects and love it for
that reason, Andrea. There are a LOT of plates to spin when it comes to the
Codex. We've never been able to get someone to coordinate the international
versions and I fear for what are on those pages, for example.
The WordPress Meetup group here in Portland has asked me to do a WordPress
Codex evening followed by a Codex Day. I'll be posting about that in a bit,
and I'd love to see more such projects from WordCamps and WordPress
Meetups, too, and that takes some team coordination as well.
Lorelle
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 12:57 PM, Andrea Rennick<[email protected]>wrote:
Ideally a team of three. One is too few (what if they get busy? then it
stalls), and two can disagree (another stall) while a third can be a
tiebreaker if needed. Or a sane person, depending. :P
I'm just tossing out ideas here.
a.
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Doug Sparling<[email protected]>wrote:
I like the idea as well.
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 2:22 PM, Lorelle on WordPress<
[email protected]> wrote:
This is so exciting. The Docs team has been walking on egg shells for
years over the confusion of the WordPress Handbook, and I'm eager to see
new energy being sent in this direction.
The close ties between the Forum and Codex have been there since the
beginning. However, time and skills serving the Forum and the time and
skills serving documentation are distinctive, as several people mentioned.
I agree that there needs to be one or two people overseeing the
organizational structure, management, and maintenance of the Codex.
Having a site of our own has been essential and lacking, which is why we
created the unofficial docs task list not long ago. It was critical that we
find a better way of communicating and keeping our community connected than
the mailing list. As it was "unofficial," we haven't done much to promote
it or work with it, but it was a start. We need to have a place to support
and educate each other on how to write for the Codex and offer task lists
beyond those we've had in the past on the Codex, so I'm excited about
having our own space or making the current blog on WordPress.com official.
The mailing list has not been the sole line of communication either. As
many do, I work with many people one on one to help them write and edit for
the Codex and assign tasks, communicating with the mailing list when
necessary for edits and such.
As we struggled to understand the role the WordPress Handbook and
WordPress Lessons played in the role of documentation in the WordPress
Community, we've come to realize the Codex best serves the WordPress
Community by providing support for issues found within the Forums,
expanding upon Learn WordPress instructions for the WordPress Lessons
section, and developing more extensive documentation and guides beyond the
basics found within the help files, especially servicing developers and
programmers.
While melding together Forum and Codex sounds great on the surface, I
agree with Andrea and others that we need to have one or more people
focused on the bigger picture overseeing the Codex, thus supporting the
overall WordPress Community better.
Thanks for the survey, Jane, and for helping with all of this.
Lorelle
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 8:28 AM, Andrea Rennick<[email protected]
wrote:
It makes totally sense, because Support& Docs are two sides of the
same coin. :) If users can't understanding docs or can't find them, they
post in the forums. ;P
Better docs mean less support issues, because people don't scale. And
the people answering questions are the first ones who see the need for new
docs. Because they answer the same questions over and over (and over) again.
Getting people to read docs is a separate issue, but having support and
docs work hand in hand in tandem is a big first step.
I think half the people overlap anyway, yes?
a.
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 11:51 AM, Chip Bennett<[email protected]>wrote:
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
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Andrea Rennick, http://wpebooks.com and http://ronandandrea.com
Co-author of WordPress All-In-One For Dummies http://rml.me/aio
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Hello, I would like to know how I get involved in helping out in the
Wordpress community?
Thanks
Wayne Hatter
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