[wp-docs] Joining Forces: Support

[Chip Bennett]

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.

Chip

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:09 AM, Jane Wells <jane at automattic.com> wrote:

> 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 existing documentation so it never gets too far out of date, and the people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
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