Last year I posted a proposal for a Five for the Future acknowledgement page, which discussed multiple approaches for how to achieve the goal of acknowledging companies that pay contributors to work on the WordPress project as well as motivating more companies to sponsor more contributors. My recommendation was to create a tool companies could use to publicly pledge employee time, with pledges that would link to the WordPress contributor profiles of those employees. Promotion of the program would guide potential participants to a landing page that describes and explains the benefits of the program, featuring contributor case studies.
In June, WordPress.org Profiles and jobs.wordpress.net were updated to help with transparency, and make it easier for companies to find and hire people who wish to become sponsored contributors.
Based on public feedback and technical considerations, I think the proposed approach from last year is viable, and worth a try.
This post includes a more granular description on how the project could work, including some mockups for easier visualization. Below the slideshow of mockups, you will find explanations and more details.
View the prototype or see additional states in Figma.
Landing Page
This page explains the Five for the Future program, outlines the benefits to companies and contributors, and helps individual contributors or companies find their next steps. The marketing team and I collaborated on the spec copy for this mockup.
Individuals
For freelancers or micro-agencies that would like to participate, there are two options. The simplest is by filling out the Contributor tab on your profile with the number of hours per week you wish to pledge, and the teams you plan to contribute to. Once you click “save,�? an automated notification will go to the team’s 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/. channel, announcing (for example):
“@julialopez just pledged 5 hours a month to work on CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and Documentation! 🎉 Please reach out and help them get involved in a cool project!�?
We’d add another field to the Contributor tab of the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ Profile, to make it easier for people who currently contribute to a team on a volunteer basis, and are interested in being hired to contribute to WordPress. If a contributor clicks the “I’m interested in being hired to contribute�? box, then some kind of “Hire me!�? graphic element will appear on the front end of the contributor’s profile. There will be no messaging capability; we’ll assume that contributors looking for WordPress work have included ways to contact them on their WordPress profile page.
Another method for freelancers or micro-agencies to participate, would be to follow the company prompt; which I’ll describe next.
Organizations
If, when a pledge is submitted, the organization names one or many contributors, each contributor will receive this email from WordPress.org, asking whether the contributor would like to accept the invitation to link their profile to a pledge.
A company does not have to name contributors to pledge time, and can edit their pledge to add or remove contributors. Every 6 months, the company will be prompted to update their pledge.
Pledges will be displayed (in random order by default) on a Five for the Future page that can be filtered alphabetically, by number of contributors, and number of pledged hours per week.
Feedback time!
Based on these descriptions and mockups…
- Do you have any concerns about what you’re seeing?
- Do you have any suggestions based on what I’ve written about this already?