Angela Jin 9:00 am on February 8, 2021
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Community Team 2021 Goals Summary

Toward the end of last year, the global community teamGlobal Community Team A group of community organizers and contributors who collaborate on local events about WordPress — monthly WordPress meetups and/or annual conferences called WordCamps. requested suggestions for Community team goals for 2021! To help sort through all the many, excellent goals received, and to give more information to tasks, the Community team held open discussion sessions throughout January. Major kudos to all the community deputiesDeputy Community Deputies are a team of people all over the world who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and generally keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about deputies in our Community Deputy Handbook. and members who participated! 

The community suggested a total of 33 goals, which deputiesDeputy Community Deputies are a team of people all over the world who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and generally keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about deputies in our Community Deputy Handbook. have sorted into five, overarching goals:   

  • Improve communication within the Community team
  • Support event organizers
  • Increase training and support for deputies and mentorsMentor Someone who has already organised a WordCamp and has time to meet with their assigned mentee every 2 weeks, they talk over where they should be in their timeline, help them to identify their issues, and also identify solutions for their issues.
  • Revisit and improve tools and resources
  • Give visibility, support, and appreciation to contributors

Additionally, goals were sorted into two categories: 

Ongoing focus areas: A number of suggested goals centered around building stronger team culture, or areas that require ongoing support and teamwork.

Action Items for 2021: A number of goals were task-based, action items that support ongoing focus areas. Deputies gave thought to which action items could be addressed in the first versus second half of this year.

Many of these goals are big, ambitious goals, and while The Community team hopes to make as much progress as possible, the team also knows that things may not happen as planned. The team will revisit these goals after Q2 2021 to reassess action items for the remainder of the year. 

Help the Community Team achieve our 2021 goals!

Are you interested in helping us out this year? Awesome! Here are some suggested next steps: 

  1. Click on “Read more” below to learn more about our 2021 goals. 
  2. Share in comments the top three items you are interested in contributing to.
  3. Participate in the next Community Team meeting on February 18, 2021, 11:00 UTC and February 18, 2021, 20:00 UTC in the #community-team channel on Slack to connect with other contributors working on similar goals. 

If you would like to see more context for these goals, please visit the public Trello board. 

The Community team will also need contributors to coordinate and organize efforts! If you have the time to take on this role, please share in comments which goals you would like to help lead. 

Thank you to @sippis, @harishanker, @afshanadiya, @nao, @andreamiddleton, @camikaos for helping to write this summary!

Read on to learn all about our 2021 goals in more detail! 

Ongoing focus areas

Improve communication within the Community team

The Community team aims to work as transparently as possible, so that there is clarity on decision making processes and work being done across all levels of community contributors. You can help by regularly sharing work updates in Community Team meetings, or in the #community-team channel, inviting feedback, and asking questions. 

Support event organizers

Supporting and lowering barriers for organizers is always at the forefront of our goals. The team will continue to help meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. and WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. organizers with online events, including Contributor Drives, and exploring how sponsorships can better integrate with virtual events. 

Increase training and support for deputies and mentors

Deputies and mentors help organizers and communities with program expectations and share best practices. An ongoing goal is to help deputies and mentors in supporting online events and offering more hands-on training. 

Give visibility, support, and appreciation to contributors

A healthy team practice is to regularly recognize each other. Ways that everyone can help with this goal include:

Action items for 2021

Q1 and Q2

Improve communication within the Community team

  • Create task rotations for deputies and host more sprints so that deputies work with and learn from each other.
  • Host a virtual deputyDeputy Community Deputies are a team of people all over the world who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and generally keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about deputies in our Community Deputy Handbook. table to spend time together to discuss our work and priorities. 

Support event organizers

  • Alongside Training and Marketing teams, help Meetup groups better utilize Learn WordPress, and help increase the number of workshops and discussion groups. 
  • Continue and improve Tuesday Trainings with contributor content.
  • Identify priority content for translation of community handbooks.

Increase training and support for deputies and mentors

  • Begin creating a leadership training course.
  • Begin creating Code of ConductCode of Conduct “A code of conduct is a set of rules outlining the norms, rules, and responsibilities or proper practices of an individual party.” - Wikipedia incident response training course.
  • Help deputies better understand and run the diverse speaker training workshop so that they can help local communities with the workshop.

Q3 and Q4

In advance of Q3, Community deputies will reassess these goals and provide an update. For now, Q3 and Q4 could address the following goals.

Improve communication within the Community team

  • Create a triage role on the community team to make sure that blog proposals and discussions are followed up on or closed.
  • Toward the end of the year, complete a deputy survey.

Support event organizers

  • Continue support of Learn WordPress content creation and events
  • Continue translation of community handbooks. 

Increase training and support for deputies and mentors

  • Continue creation of leadership training course, and begin training community members.
  • Continue creation of Code of Conduct incident response training course, and begin training community members.
  • Continue to support deputies in running the diverse speaker workshop, and do some active outreach to meetup groups.

Revisit and improve tools and resources

You might have noticed that this goal didn’t make it into the above action items! That’s because anyone interested in improving our tools and resources can help make the proposal to do so at any time. In particular, the following goals were suggested:

  • Revisit and perhaps retire the Camera Kit program in favor of capturing slides and audio.
  • Automate an email receipt following submission of a WordCamp talk. Making progress here would require working with the #meta-wordcamp team, always a great experience.
  • Create a yearly calendar of annual events for the Community Team. 
  • Revisit usage of meetup.com. This has the potential to be a much larger project which may require a working group and collaboration with the #meta-wordcamp team.

#goals