The time has come to open up nominations for one rep as I am rotating out. This is an opportunity to bring new ideas and create a new dynamic in the design team.

I have been on this role for about a year and a half and it has been a pleasure to support the team. It is the right time for me to step aside and continue growing as a contributor to WordPress in other areas.

The past few months have been very challening for both, Ahmed and myself, with illenss in our families. And we are both thankful that we always found someone to help with our duties as team reps. This is why is very important to mantain an open communication within the team.

This is a great opportunity for an existing team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. to onboard someone and gives someone the chance to grow into this role and work alongside Ahmed. Yet, I will be around to help with the onboarding until Ahmed returns.

So, let’s get on with the exciting possibility and explain a little about the role.

What does a team rep do?

In the WordPress open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project, each team has one or two (or more!) representatives, abbreviated to reps. The role goes way back to 2012 and is an established one across teams. You can learn more about the team rep role here.

A little note, it’s not called team lead for a reason. This section from the updates page explains team reps well:

“Team Rep is a leadership role that is mostly administrative in nature; it is not a Lead role. Letting go of the Team Rep title is not a loss of status, just a handing off of responsibilities. Someone who is a leader in a team can lead whether they are doing the team rep job or not.”

Here are the main tasks:

• Ensuring a meeting agenda happens along with notes. We have note-takers who are not team reps and post agendas, so this is coordination. The team rep adds agenda items to a shared document.
• Run the weekly design team meeting in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
• Co-ordinate the weekly triage meetings.
• Write a biweekly update post for make.wordpress.org/updates?
• Give quarterly updates on the team when asked.
• Call for new team reps when the time comes at the end of year tenure.

As a team rep, other tasks might fall to you in order to keep the team running, but in general, it’s a support and coordination role. On average the estimated time you would need for this role would be a few hours a week. With another team rep though, that time is shared.

This role is open to contributors of any level, not just full-time contributors. Like many good open-source processes, this work is done openly and can be shared. Also, because WordPress is a globally-minded project, if the team rep that is selected can’t make the current time, we can always discuss changing the meeting time.

The process

Taking inspiration from teams that have done this before the suggested process would be:

• A call for nominations in the comments on this post. Self-nominations are welcome. These will close in on September 22nd.
• After the closing date, another post will highlight those nominated votes will be made on those nominations for a week. Currently, there is one team rep role available and the incoming rep will be working with Ahmed (and Estela in his absence.)
• The votes will be tallied, the chosen team rep asked to confirm they want to do this process and then announced during the Show and Tell at the end of the month.
• If there is only one nomination, we will skip the the voting week and still announce the new team rep during Show & Tell.

If you want to nominate someone in private, please reach out to me  (@estelaris or @chaion07) on Slack.

Disclaimer: if you get nominated, please don’t feel like you have to say yes! We will add to the polls only the names of the people that are responding positively to a nomination. So feel free to reply with a “Thank you, but no thank you”.

#team-rep