Personally, I love the idea. Speaking as a contributor group member who tries to keep in the loop regarding support and/or Codex issues that impact our group (or issues where our contributor group can be helpful), such consolidation is welcome.<div>
<br></div><div>Chip<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:09 AM, Jane Wells <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jane@automattic.com" target="_blank">jane@automattic.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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?<br>
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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 They have a schedule for reviewing existing documentation so it never gets too far out of date, and the people on the front lines with users in the forums and via email can see very clearly where they need to beef up documentation.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.<br>
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What I'm envisioning is less siloing of contributor personnel, with one group blog at <a href="http://make.wordpress.org/support" target="_blank">make.wordpress.org/support</a> 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.<br>
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Over time we could expand the purview of the group to include things like moderating instructional videos and comments at <a href="http://wordpress.tv" target="_blank">wordpress.tv</a> (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.<br>
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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.<br>
<br>
Jane<br>
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