 All right, so once again, hello everybody and welcome to today's online workshop where we'll be talking about the training team's welcome committee. So I'm Ben Evans and I was selected as a training team representative for 2023. And that means I represent the training team to the larger WordPress project. So if the project wants to communicate something with the team, it may sometimes come through me or if the team wants to communicate something with the project, it might go through me as well. So I was a training team welcome wrangler. We used to call them wranglers last year. So I have experience doing that. And then yet in February this year, we sort of updated the whole welcome process in the training team, renamed it the welcome committee. And so what I'm about to share with you is a new process we've started from about two weeks, two months ago. So I'm trying to raise awareness, see if people are interested in getting involved because I think it's one of the easier ways somebody can contribute to WordPress. So yeah, that's a brief overview of what we're going to be talking about today. Let's see. So let's start from make.wordpress.org. So many of the folks here already have experience with WordPress and that's great. But for those who might be seeing the recording later, I just want to briefly give an overview of the make WordPress project. So WordPress, of course, is the name of homepage building software or content management system. And there's a huge community of volunteers that help make WordPress possible. And if you go to make.wordpress.org, you'll see a list of all the teams that contribute to making WordPress. So at the top here, you see we have a core team, we have a design team, we have a mobile team, we have accessibility. So these teams relate heavily to the actual code behind WordPress. But we also then have like a polygots team. So this team focuses on translating WordPress into different languages. We have a support team to answer people's questions about using WordPress. We have a documentation team. So they write documentation about the features of WordPress and many other teams. I think we have somewhere around 20 teams at the moment that contribute to building WordPress. And I sort of skip past that right now, but here you'll see we have a training team. And that's what we'll be talking about today. So the training team, let's see, the WordPress training team helps people learn to use, extend and contribute to WordPress through synchronous and asynchronous learning. So the training team, we don't directly build WordPress code or we don't help, we're not the support team, we're not the translation team, we're not the core team. What we do is we help people learn how to use the WordPress software. So the core team makes the WordPress software and distributes it and we make videos or text-based tutorials or courses that help people learn how to use the WordPress software. And so today we're part of an online workshop. This is a interactive format where folks can ask questions about whatever the topic we're talking about. And yeah, so we have different education opportunities like this we present to the world so that more and more people can learn WordPress and use WordPress in their lives. And it says here, if you enjoy teaching people how to use and build stuff for WordPress, immediately stop what you're doing and join our team. So I didn't write that, that text has been there for a couple of years now. But if you enjoy teaching people, come and join our team. And then the question is, well, how do you join the team? How do you join the training team? And so that's what we're going to dive into. If I dive into the training team specifically, was there any question people want to ask about general WordPress? Mark Andrew, I see your sweat emoji. Yeah, I mean, it's a good catch-copper here. All right, so when you click on training here, we're taken to a site, make.wordpress.org slash training. So I'll drop this link in the Zoom chat here. Every WordPress team has their own blog, we call these blogs. And it all goes make.wordpress.org slash and then the team name. So we're part of the training team. And if you have a quick look here, at the top we have our current focus areas. So if you click onto these different topics, you can see what projects we're working on. And then down the left here, we have lots of posts. So if you want to know just in general, what the training team does, this gives you an idea of what recent things we're doing. And also here, you'll probably see a welcome box when you come to the blog for the first time. There's a button here to close the welcome box. This should be open. And so this has a bit more information here about what the team does. And most importantly, we have a link to a meeting calendar here. So in the WordPress project, when we say meetings, most teams mean Slack-based meetings. So Slack is a text communication tool. And because we want meetings to be accessible to people and we also want to allow people to comment in meetings asynchronously, a lot of meetings are held in Slack with text. So the meeting might be for one hour, but people who aren't able to log in during that hour are able to come afterwards and comment on the meeting discussion items, et cetera. So I just opened the meeting calendar and you'll see here, this is the training team meeting calendar. I'll drop a link to that in the Zoom chat as well. And you'll see we have a few meetings each week. So let's see, today is the 14th. So the time you see here is your local time. So at the moment, I'm in Japan. So you're seeing the times in Japan time. If you were to open this link, you would see the times in your local time zone, which is a pretty nifty tool, the feature. But anyway, so today, the training team has a coffee hour. It's at 10 p.m. my time, which is my bedtime. So I won't be attending, but coffee hours are just casual, get to know your chats with people in the training team. And these are an exception and these are held my Zoom. So if you just want to casually get to know other people in the training team, this is about the only time in the week where you can actually see people's faces and talk to them synchronously. But next week, you'll see here, we have a training team meeting on Tuesday. And this is APAC. So this is 4 p.m. my time. So this is sort of aimed for the people who live in the Asia Pacific region. And then the following week, the training team meeting is held here, which is 1 a.m. my time, but this is aimed to more for the European and American contributors. So we alternate our team meetings between the Asia Pacific region and the Europe American regions. So hopefully people can join a meeting live every two weeks or so. Yep. And we have other meetings here, but you can click on those and look into those. The main points I wanted to bring out were these team meetings. So they happen every Tuesday and they alternate between Asia and Europe American time zones. We'll come back to the meetings in a moment, but for the moment, just keep in mind, we have weekly meetings. All right. So we're back to the training team blog beyond and we have a welcome box. I usually keep this hidden. And I want to point out three important links at the top right here. So we have Getting Started. We have Handbook and we have faculty members. Now, the Handbook is your go-to resource with all the information about how the training team operates. So I clicked on Handbook. We'll open it in the new tab. And you'll see here a table of contents down the left about Getting Started, how-to guides, faculty program, et cetera, et cetera. And then if you open these, you'll have a lot more information. So our Handbook is a treasure trove of information. And if you want to know how the training team does a specific thing, search for it in the Handbook and you'll probably find some information about that. Today's, we'll be looking at the Handbook mainly. So we'll come back to it in a moment. Oops, but I just wanted to point out, we also have two more links here. So the Getting Started, this links to the training teams onboarding program. So if I click on Getting Started, there's welcome to the training team. And on the right here on the topics, this is like a table of content for the content on this particular page. So you can get an overview of what this page has. So we have welcome to training team, get set up, talks about some accounts, the WordPress.log account, Slack account, GitHub account, and then find your interest and make your first contribution. So this onboarding program takes about 30 to 60 minutes, hopefully, and helps you figure out how you can contribute in the training team. If you scroll down, you'll see a familiar face here. Let me scroll down further and you'll see more information here. Just this is designed to be self-serve. So if you haven't walked through the onboarding program yet, I highly recommend taking 30 to 60 minutes just so you get an overview of the training team and how we communicate, how we operate. And in particular, at the very bottom here, we say find your interest and make your first contribution. So in the training team, we have split out the tasks into five areas of contribution. So we have content creator, we have content translator, we have editor, we have subject matter experts, and we have administrators. So lots of different tasks in the training team. So we sort of split them out into specialities. And in this onboarding program, there'll be a few questions to help you figure out which onboarding in particular would match your interests. So do have a look at that. The welcome committee we'll be talking about today is not tied to any of these. So let me rephrase that. You can be part of any role in the training team and you can still become a welcome committee member. So you can be a content creator and a welcome committee member or you can be an administrator and a welcome committee member. So the welcome committee is open to anyone in the training team. So that was the getting started guide. And then there was one more link I wanted to point out. And that was the faculty members. So the faculty members in a sense experience contributors in the training team who have dedicated a specific amount of time to the training team's causes. So we have some faculty who just dedicate one hour a month and that's okay as well. We have other faculty members who dedicate 20, 30 hours a week and that's okay as well. But this list of people have a bit of experience in the training team. So if you ever get stuck on something, these are great people you can reach out to and ask questions. And you'll see here, we have roles. So some of these people at the top here, these are like past team reps or full-time contributors who have experience with all the roles. So for example here, Benjamin Evans, that's me. I live in Asia and I'm part of all the roles. Let me drop this link in the Zoom chat as well. And then like if you become a content creator, then you can see these are some other content creators you can reach out to with questions. Or if you become a subject matter expert, these are our other subject matter experts you can ask questions, et cetera. So faculty list. So there we go. So those are the three important links at the top right here. We have getting started, we have handbook and we have faculty members. Let me pause it. Does anybody have any questions so far? We sort of, we went from the big WordPress project down to the training team and I'm sort of getting an overview of how things work and we're finally coming down to the welcome committee next. No questions so far. All right. So the welcome committee, what is that all about? Now you'll find the welcome committee's manual. Oh, sorry, I see some people with their hands up. Lisa, did you have a question? Yes, I do. Okay. I think I was mainly wondering but you'll probably get there so I can probably just wait. But it seems so much more organized. I think I actually had Sarah kind of walk us through this process a long time ago when it was probably newer. And now it seems like you have much more backup information than there was before. So it's probably grown a lot and been fleshed out but I was wondering what would be the next steps? Would you, obviously you go to the handbook and you go to contents but I am kind of curious like where would you recommend we dive in once we decide what type of a person we would wanna be or are you talking about welcome committee and not your main subject? Yeah, so that's a good question. That's a good question. If you open the how to guides, we have a list of like team roles. This gives a more fleshed out list of team roles and different things you can do in the team. And then we have specifics like how to write a meeting agenda, how to host a training team meeting, guidelines for reviewing content. So it sort of comes back to what role or area of expertise you choose in the meat onboarding. So if you want to become an admin, then as an admin something you can do is write a meeting agenda or a meeting recap. So then you would click in this how to guide to see specifically how to do that. Or if you choose to become an editor, then one thing an editor does is reviewing content. So then you would click on guideline for reviewing content to see how exactly you would review content. So let me just open the getting started guide one more time. So at the bottom of the getting started guide, I showed we have five areas of contribution here. And then if you open each of these onboarding pages at the very bottom, they have what's next. So now that you've completed your first contribution, here's a list of other tasks you can complete as a team content creator. And then we have here, you can become a lesson plan writer, you can facilitate an online workshop, create a tutorial creative course. And so what we've tried to do is at the end of each onboarding, there's a section with next steps. So here we have the content creators and these are linked back into the table of contents in the handbook. So you can look, you can find things directly in the handbook or you can come from the end of the onboarding and figure out a specific task you can work on next. All right, Elisa, I see you say great. Good to know. And Elisa, I see you ask, are these also discussed in the weekly meeting? I presume you mean these next tasks? In the weekly meetings, we do list mainly content creation tasks, but sorry, let me go back. So in the weekly meetings, we do talk about active projects at the moment. And yes, we do say, okay, this is a list of content that we need to be created now. This is the high priority content. And then we say, this is the high priority content that's being made and waiting a review. And then we also say, these are the high priority admin projects that need contributors. So yes, if you come to the meeting, you will get to see what the high priority stuff is. So let's come back to the handbook. Great question, Elisa, and if you have any more like that, feel free to use the hand emoji and I'll try and pick that. All right, so welcome committee. So if you come to the handbook under how to guides and the team roles, you'll find welcome committee. And it says team roles and so hopefully in the future we'll have more documentation about the other roles. But at the moment, we just have welcome committee. So we'll click on that. So this is the same for any WordPress team, but generally when the new contributor comes along and they find the team they want to be part of, they sort of join the team, but then they don't know what to do next. And maybe people in this call have had a similar experiences. So you came to the training team and you want to get involved, but you're not exactly sure what to do next. And so the welcome committee's main purpose is to make sure those people who join the team are connected with the team. So in my mind, joining a team and connecting with the team are two separate things. Just because somebody joins the training team doesn't necessarily mean they've connected with the team and the mission and the goals we're working towards. And so the welcome committee tries to bridge the gap there. So they keep an eye out and when somebody new joins, they reach out to them and help them connect with whatever is most interesting to them in the training team. So that is the primary goal of the welcome committee member. All right, so let's go through this overview. Welcoming folks when they join the training team channel is a critical part of ensuring we create connections with them early. Any training team member can volunteer to be on the welcome committee. We aim to have multiple team members in the role at any given time. This page will provide guidance on how to perform this role. And I do want to point out the welcome committee isn't just for experienced contributors. For example, if you joined the training team last month and somebody new joins today, then you have a month of experience more than that new contributor. So there is something you can help them with or show them. And so the welcome committee members don't have to have the answers to everything, but even just knowing like we have a handbook and if you go to the handbook, you'll be able to find the information you're looking for. That piece of knowledge, the new contributor might not have so even brand new team members can still join the welcome committee and share what knowledge they do have with the new members who joined the team. So that's why it says that any training team member can volunteer to be on the welcome committee. We don't expect years of experience. Anybody can really join the welcome committee. And the list of responsibilities is pretty short actually. So first one, welcome new contributors when you notice they've joined the training Slack channel. Second one, direct new contributors to the team's onboarding program to help them learn about and understand our team. And the third one, answer new contributors questions in the training channel. So let's quickly go over these three points here. These are the responsibilities of the welcome committee. So the first one, welcome new contributors when they joined the training Slack channel. So in order to become a welcome committee member you have to have a Slack account and you have to have joined the training team's Slack. So let me bring over my Slack here. All right, so for those who aren't too familiar with Slack you'll probably be surprised with just how much information showing here but that's because I'm a training team rep and I'm connected with a few different groups. So you'll see here, if you have this blue WordPress icon then you're part of the WordPress Slack. And then in the left here you have lots of channels and different direct messages with people but today we're focusing just on this one. So you'll see here a sharp and then training. So this is where the training team meets and this is where we have our meetings and this is where the main work of the welcome committee happens. So the first one was welcome new contributors. Oops, when you've noticed they've joined the training Slack channel. So how do you know when somebody has joined the training Slack channel? And if you look here the very bottom message of the training channel actually is a good example of somebody who has joined. So when somebody new joins the channel it says here probably joined training along with color press. Oh, Elisa, is that you? Yep, so we can see here two people recently joined probably joined and if you click on his name it'll open his profile on the right here. And it says here a bit of interest and a bit of background about him. And then you'll see if you click on color press oops, you click on color press then we see Elisa over here as well. So when you know that somebody has joined and you'll see some people have put a wave mark here and that is their way of recognizing new people have joined the channel. So that's first of all one way training team members sorry, welcome committee members can welcome new people but I also like to just send a message out. So like, hey welcome Elisa and Praveen to the training channel or if it's somebody you know from an event or someone you know specifically then you can even send them a personal message you just say, hey I saw you joined the training channel welcome to the team. So there isn't a hard rule here about what the welcome committee member must do but just keep an eye out for people who join and sometimes after somebody joins they ask a question immediately so they've come to the training team with a purpose with a question they want answers and so they'll join and they'll say hey team I'm wanting to look for information about this particular thing. And that comes to the third point here so we'll skip the second one if you come to the third one it says answer the new contributors question in the training channel. And so what we ask welcome committee members is to just keep an eye out for new people who joined the channel in any questions they might ask. It can be any question and just making sure people aren't ignored they're not ignored but it's sometimes easy to overlook questions people ask. And so the welcome committee just keeps an eye out to see if somebody has asked the question say in the last two or three days since you last logged in and if nobody has sort of responded to that person yet then they can add a comment and start to answer the question for them. So let me see let me see if there's a good example here. Mark Andrew I saw you did this recently and I thought it was really cool. So let's see. Here we go so this is a somebody who joined the channel and they said hello training team and he gave a bit of an introduction and I would also like to make some contributions to perform and also encourage other members to contribute as well. So he said that, oh sorry I'm bringing up my example but I said to you welcome and then he asked some questions here so I gave him a bit of information and then what I know those team Mark Andrews you welcomed the new team member as well and then we have Courtney and Amit who also gave a welcome message and just responding to questions like this making new people feel welcomed is very valuable and helping them connect with the team and that's what we ask welcome committee members to do. You don't need to know the answer to everything but when you do find somebody new has joined the team just send them a nice warm welcome so that they feel part of the team. So what we just covered was the first and third of the responsibilities. Did anybody have any questions about those? I'm pretty sure I saw you Mark Andrew you responded to somebody recently and you didn't have the answer but you called faculty members into the conversation because they could answer. Yeah, it's not coming to me right now but Mark Andrews I've seen you do this naturally already so that's great. All right. Then the second one here is direct new contributors to the team's onboarding program to help them learn about and understand our team. So once again where can people find the onboarding program? It's at the top of the training team blog. So if you click on getting started that takes people to the onboarding program and so if you see someone who joins the team and they're like, I'm interested in creating content I don't know where to start, please send me guidance then you can send them the link to the onboarding program that's the best guidance you can give new people and as I work through that they might have additional questions but we'll get to that. Like if they have additional questions you can always ask somebody else to help you answer them but anybody in this call is free to share the onboarding link with anybody new who joins the training channel. All right. So those are the three responsibilities that's basically all we want people to do. We want people to just be aware of new people who joined the team and send them a warm welcome message when they do. The requirements to become a welcome committee member is that you're an active training team member. Now the word active here can sometimes seem I don't know overwhelming to people but in my mind an active training team member is somebody who might log in, attend a meeting, add a comment to a blog post at least once or twice a month and as long as they come around once or twice a month and have a basic understanding of what's going on in the team right now I think they're an active training team member. Of course there are people who are under different circumstances who are in the training team 20 and 30 hours a week and they are active members as well but don't think that is the only, I don't know, active doesn't mean you have to be there all the time. As long as you come in every now and then you have a basic understanding of what's going on in the team then you are just as much an active member who can volunteer to become a committee member. I've been talking for a while I think does anybody have any questions? All good so far. Yep, Mike Andrew, thank you. All right, now we do list current committee members here and so you'll see we have three committee members I'm one of them and what we have is a rotation system. So what it is is we have what we'd like to see is say a dozen people with their names on the welcome committee list and these dozen people just keep an eye on the slack and welcome new people when they join but sometimes life gets busy and you might not be able to log in for a week and if we have about a dozen people then if you're not able to log in for a week or two that's still okay because there'll be other welcome committee members who should be there and who'd be able to welcome them. So we don't need every single welcome committee member to send a message to every new people who join but as long as we have a group of committee members then hopefully two or three of them will be able to catch the new people to join and send them a welcome message and so we have a simple rotation system and so these two people who have a tick next to them these two people are just paying particular attention to the people who join so this is just so these people on rotation they know they are the primary welcome committee members for the month and of course if this becomes difficult you can pass the rotation on to somebody else but this is just so that we have a couple of people who are paying specific attention to welcoming people but it doesn't mean these are the only people who send welcoming messages anybody on the list and even people not on the list are free to welcome new people to the team alright and then finally there's just one more point I wanted to talk about in today's call and that is following and responding to the welcome thread in team meetings so in every training team meeting we have a thread where we welcome new people to the team who joined the team in the last week so I'm going to drop a link here in the zoom chat go and if you click on that link that will take you to Slack to the welcome message from this week's team meeting so let me click on them as well so we can open that in the browser here alright so training team meetings start with a with a message like this so Pooja is another one of the training team reps this year so she says here the EMEA American meeting is starting now so the meeting starts she sends a welcome message welcome everyone and then we have an intro and welcome and so we have people introduce themselves there's always a thread who is joining us today please say hello and share a flag or your favorite emoji feel welcome to introduce yourself briefly and share your region in the thread so if you open the thread you'll see here everybody who was present for that meeting listed and just a flag from where they're joining from and then if you come to the bottom you'll see here catching up async catching up async and I think I'm here as well async from Japan so these people who use the word async they weren't there at the time of the meeting but they've opened Slack later and they're catching up on what happened in the meeting and this is the good thing about having meetings text-based rather than video-based because people can do that they can come back later and join the meeting alright so after this welcome message then the team the meeting facilitator will always say something like this we've had several new people join the channel recently what is your interest in learning training and what do you enjoy outside of WordPress so at least because you joined the training team channel this week your name will pop up next week next week's meeting in a similar message like this so welcome to the team welcome to the team and you notice here we use their Slack names like this you can see sort of a blue colour and start with an axe this sends a notification to each of these new members so each of these members get a notification saying their name was mentioned in the training team channel and sometimes people respond to that comment and so they come back and say hi thank you for the welcome message I am so and so these are my interests I'd like to be part of the training team and so this is a great message for welcome committee members to follow so that when those new people come back and add comments to the thread the welcome committee members are also notified so that they can then respond with those new team members so this week we see Mark Andrew and Courtney has responded none of the new contributors have said anything and that's okay we have weeks like that so let me show you the link from last week's meeting so not this week so last week's welcome message so I've dropped another Slack link in Zoom which will take us to last week's message and you see we have a similar thing we've had several new people join the channel recently what is your interest in learning training what do you enjoy outside of WordPress so if you open this thread you'll see here for example Corina she's one of the new people mentioned here Corina L so she said I would like to help where I can and learn as well she's a web designer developer so this is an ideal message for welcome committee members to pick up on and send a welcoming message back to so this person knows where to get started so you see here Courtney has sort of responded and sent a bit of message and then we see Kyle Kyle is also one of the new people who joined the team recently he gave a brief introduction I actually personally know Kyle so I sent him a message welcoming him to the team and that's basically that's what we want welcome committee members to do to give a warm and welcoming atmosphere to the new people who joined the team and an easy way to do that is whenever you're skimming through the channel the Slack channel and you see a message like this what I do is I click here and then that's not a good example because that's not a good example when you click here you'll see a message like this get notified about new replies so if you click on that then if any of the new joinees comment on that thread then you'll get a notification in the Slack I think it's up here in the thread section saying somebody new has commented on the thread then you'll be able to respond to them with a welcome message so this section on the handbook shows you how to do that so each week we have a welcome message like this if you click on the three dots and then click on get notified about new replies then if any of these new people commented on the thread you'll be notified about that and you can respond with a warm welcome message and that's basically it that's what the welcome committee does they just keep an eye out for new people who join and welcome them to the next week with the team we have about five minutes left any questions from people? Mark Andrew, thumbs up Tarek, thumbs up great, Elisa, thumbs up cool so since we have a couple of minutes left I will just mention one more thing and that is when you join when somebody joins the training team channel we have what's called workflow setup that sends an automated message to that new person this doesn't happen in the training channel it happens I think it's a slack bot that sends that new person a message so for example Elisa you joined the training channel today you've probably received a message from slack bot so not the training channel but some other channel down the side you probably received a message and it says something like this hey, name of new contributor welcome to training we're so happy you joined the team the training team helps people learn to use extend and contribute to WordPress through learning material provided on Learn WordPress our team representatives are Pooja, Destiny and Ben Evans to get started come walk through our onboarding program getting started and then it talks a bit about the onboarding program so welcome committee members now when people join the training team they do get a message like this and it does direct them to the onboarding program but sometimes people don't read the message or maybe they're busy and they get like dive into the training team channel and they forget about the message and so sometimes they don't actually walk through the onboarding program and that's okay so if you find someone in the training channel hold and ask them questions feel free to share the getting started link with them again the onboarding program is where they will get the best idea of how the training team works and so if we can share it with them two or three times I think that would be a good idea alright I'm going to stop my screen share thank you folks for listening we have just two minutes left and if final questions people want to squeeze in all good if you listen to today's presentation and you want to become a welcome committee member the way to do that is ping me inside and say I want to join the welcome committee and then I will put your name on the welcome committee table and then you can start welcoming people into the team when they join alright so I will never be able to make 11 o'clock because I have Tai Chi so everything would have to be async is that typical yes that is totally fine you might have seen Courtney so popped up in a couple of those threads there she lives in Hawaii and she doesn't get to any of the meetings either so everything she does is async but that is totally fine she is the welcome committee member already and she leads some other projects as well so async is totally okay great great question yeah I think unless you act like this online workshop which Ben spoke to me about before I knew it was coming I made a plan to be here I knew I had the time because it is a global community everything in Slack not everything but everything there is set up async that is why it is there so we can get back to it but as you said living in Japan you are in between time zones all over the place yeah if you are not used to async it might take a bit of time getting comfortable with but the whole WordPress program that people communicate async and they can contribute to async hopefully Jim you can get used to that quickly as well and yeah please come and become a welcome committee member sure that would be awesome alright well thank you everybody thank you Mark Andrew for co-hosting for me thank you everybody for your questions and your comments thanks for this Ben it was fun and interesting great to hear alright everyone have a great day bye thanks for joining