[wp-docs] Joining Forces: Support

[Jane Wells]

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reviewing existing documentation so it never gets too far out of date, 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