The WordPress Contributor Orientation Tool

Zach (00:00):
I’m here with another episode of the Woo Dev chats. I’m joined as always by the illustrious Carl and Carl board. Carl, how are you doing today?

Carl (00:09):
Doing all right. It’s getting cold here. I’m glad that I’m leaving next week.

Zach (00:15):
Where are you headed?

Carl (00:16):
Japan again.

Zach (00:17):
Nice. I don’t have travel plans that are anywhere near as exciting, but I’ll be at WordCamp Atlanta.

Carl (00:25):
Well, I’ll be at WordCamp Tokyo. That’s in October, so I speak zero Japanese, so that’ll be really exciting.

Zach (00:34):
That should be interesting. And then after WordCamp Atlanta, immediately after, I’ll be at MAV Con, which is Troy Dean’s event in Virginia. And then shortly after that I’m going to be speaking at a Cadence virtual event. So busy month for me for speaking and being involved in events and travel in general. So I’m trying to travel as much as you do Carl.

Carl (01:02):
I mean Milana, ISS the Queen, so Milana iss the Queen. I’m just kind of chasing her coattails. That’s the real troop here.

Zach (01:13):
Well, since you have already introduced, let’s let both Milana and Alexander introduce themselves and we’ll talk a little bit about what we’re here for this week.

Milana (01:24):
Yeah, my name is Milana. So I am engineer based in Serbia and I am also I documentation team representative. I was organizing World Comp Europe for a couple of years and the topic today is a contributor orientation tool that actually rose from those organization days. So that’s me and I travel a little bit.

Zach (01:55):
A little bit. Yeah. Carl makes it sound like it’s quite a bit.

Carl (02:00):
It is quite a bit.

Aleksander (02:02):
Whoever travels lot always say I travel a little bit.

Zach (02:06):
Well, and we also have Alexander here with us. Alexander, you had a big hand in building this tool, but why don’t you give us a little bit of your background.

Aleksander (02:16):
Well, my task in BI tool was basically to build it and make it a plug out of it. So naturally I’m a workplace developer, kind of web developer, working mostly with workplace, and I’m involved in workplace community lot. I mean up to recent years I’ve helped a lot on a lot of work on world camps. So that’s how this came out. I was on a team with miana. She was reading the team of the community team and the idea was born down, let’s create something that can actually help the users onboarding

Zach (02:52):
Well, and I think that’s an important thing and that will segue into talking about the contributor tool. From there, the lifeblood of most open source communities is contribution, right? And as a community grows and as a project grows, it becomes more and more complicated to figure out where exactly you fit and how to get involved. And so this tool, which now is at make dot WordPress dot org slash contribute really helps you to dial in based on what you do with WordPress, what your interests are, what your skills are, what teams you may be the best fit for, and a really awesome tool. I’ve gone through it a few times myself just to try it out and it really does expose the right teams for who you are in a really clever way. So why don’t we talk a little bit about the background of how this came to be?

Milana (04:00):
Well, when I was organizing WordCamp Europe 2018, it was in Belgrade. This was my first time organizing WordCamp Europe and I was in team that was led by, and it was team in charge for contributive days. So first things, we took the feedback from the previous year and we saw what people thought, what was difficult, what should be fixed. And during organizing it, I realized that mostly problems are arising with new people. They don’t know if they fit. They think it’s only just for developers and only good developers. Even if they were developers, they’re like, oh, I’m not good enough for that. I’m not going to show my code. Whatever. They have no idea what is there that you can contribute even if you are not developer. And today we have even more teams that are non-developer than developer teams and people didn’t know that.

(05:11):
And after that, when you explain to them and they say, okay, I’m going to join contributor day, then you ask them, oh well, which team? And they’re like, well, how many teams are there? And you say, well, here are 27 teams and their handbooks please read and decide nobody’s doing that. So that’s another obstacle. So they usually just go, oh, Hollywoods I know what they do. And even if they just go through the list of teams and plugins and teams, they think they know what the theme is about, but it’s not. We know what is designed, but that’s not what design teams doing. Even if you recognize Word that is the team name, you don’t really know what it is about. And now we are asking you to read, to spend a week reading just to decide which team. So they usually just say, okay, I’m going to go with Polyglots or whatever.

(06:14):
That seems familiar. So they go there and they arrive at the day and it’s completely different than what they expected. A lot of people know each other, they don’t know anyone. Now there are also people with different anxieties and social interactions, and we don’t think about it. We think about it, this is the day where I meet my friends and we have fun and we do a little bit of contributing and have a lunch and that’s it. So I realized there are obstacles on every single step. When people try to contribute and when they finally sit at a table, there’s a lot of onboarding happening, then they realize this is not the team I wanted. Then there’s so much things to do and learn before you actually contribute. They feel like they didn’t do anything. They go home and they’re like, I don’t know why I was there.

(07:18):
So we did a lot in next year when I was offered to lead the same team for organizing Western Europe, I had this idea about the tool, how to help people, and this is the reason why I accepted to lead this team, to make something, to make that tool working to help people a little bit. And we did a lot of other things to remove all those obstacles and contribute. Orient tool is one of those. So I realized we are asking the wrong questions, which team they want to do, how do they know that? There’s no way they can know, but we can ask them questions. They know, what do I do with WordPress? What are my skills? What would I like to do? And then when they tell us that, we can tell, oh, so you would be good for this thing and you might be surprised that that’s not team you would ever join, but based on your interest and your skills, you can actually join and find yourself helpful there. And that’s actually the turnover. Ask them questions they can answer and then we will give you the results.

Zach (08:38):
Yeah, I went through and in my answers, the team that I’ve been the most involved with was in my first four. So it’s always nice to see. I’ve personally done a lot of work with the training team over the years and there are other teams that I’ve been interested working with that are here as well, like TV and photos. So it’s really cool to see that it does dial in based on what you state that your interests are and what your skills are and tries to find you areas where you would enjoy contributing. It’s not just areas where you could effectively contribute, but it’s areas where you would enjoy contributing, which I think is really important

Carl (09:24):
For sure. If you want to keep doing it for and not burnout, you might as well enjoy it. Yeah.

Milana (09:31):
Well also people join open source for different reasons and sometimes the reason is I want to learn new skill, and if we focus only on what you know and what you can do, then you will never learn anything new. So I think that interests are very important.

Aleksander (09:49):
Not only that Miana, but also most of the users know a few teams. They don’t know 27 teams. So you can find out there are other teams that you can contribute. When you first think to join, you’re like, oh, I can join teams. I think there are those teams, maybe community and core, but there are other teams that they don’t know. So you can get a suggestion and read the show description about something like that.

Milana (10:17):
Yeah. We also had a problem in early versions of the tool, W P C L. I was showing up in very few combinations, so we got feedback. Can you put a more there? We need more contributors and we need more people to come to this result.

Aleksander (10:39):
I don’t think this was a public note Miana.

Carl (10:45):
Well, that one’s a bit of a challenging one. Steel I is kind of a weird specialty to fit in. It’s not like it comes up in interests. I really like developing command line tools,

Milana (11:03):
But this thing also has a need for someone to document stuff to manage. So if you want to learn about it, but you have just a limited skills, you still can get there and start learning by not just by having interest. You want to learn about C O I too.

Carl (11:26):
Yeah, exactly.

Zach (11:29):
So what were the challenges in developing this tool, Alexander, when you were putting this together, what were some of the challenges you found in trying to get these items lined up with the right teams?

Aleksander (11:45):
Well, the biggest challenge was maybe let’s say creating relationships between answers. So this was kind of having had a few iterations, the whole team helped. And then we had, I think we also had the extra help from team representatives where they gave us kind of what would fit where. So at the end we went the simplest way in development. You have some points and this team has these points. So if you choose some skill or interest, you fill in these points for this team. Well at the end, how many points you get this team is represented for you at the end? I must know that this was actually the way the first version of this storm was working, which I actually built because after that we had a Berlin, well actually not Berlin, but the next year, and we just started it in, didn’t change much, but after that it was kind of having a peaceful year, I would say, and then it was picked up again, but by other contributor.

(12:53):
And that’s what you see now in the global song. So the biggest challenge was the relationships and maybe choosing the right way to display this to our users. We started with a, let’s say, prototype with the Google form wanted just to see if we can prove the point of existing such tool. And I think work Camp A was the one testing it first, and they gave us really good feedback about everything. But then we learned that you can have so many relationships and conditionals in the simple Google form. So we needed to develop, let’s say, the basic plugin to test this in at least one world camp. And that’s how this first version came out. It was later tested in, also used in World Camp Asia. I think it had a great success there and now it’s on V solve. I’m really, really happy that something we started ended up somewhere that people can actually use.

Milana (13:55):
I would just like to add something. So in creating those relationships between the themes and answers, a lot of help was coming from Reta. He was working on from the beginning on the tool with us, and a lot of marketing and testing on the field was done by Abba Taku. So those are the four of us. Were actually the starting team on this two.

Aleksander (14:28):
The technology itself, I don’t think it matters in this case, but it’s just a form where you can go, basically this was the best use case for us, a form where you can site an answers. But then we started, oh, but you need to go back. And I made a mistake, then developed, extended, then it was like, oh, we need to include more teams at the end. Then we go back and again, change the logic. So there were a lot of iterations, but the good thing is that Miada was good teammate for that year. We had a lot of time to dedicate to this. I hope that at the end something first version came out, and I don’t think it’s much changed over the years, Ana,

Milana (15:13):
Right? Yeah, I don’t think so. When we first submitted it as a idea to live at WordPress dot org, because there are two different ways where you can use it at WordPress dot org and it includes all the teams that you can contribute to, but also every Board Cup can have it on their website. And not every board Cup has every team. So you can select which teams you want to be displayed. So those are two use cases. And we wanted first to try with WordPress dot org. And when we submitted that idea, ABBA did a lot of writing copywriting for this. The first response from community was, it’s a great tool we really needed. It’s wonderful, but it needs to be completely written to match the meta requirements. And we simply didn’t have a time to work on that back then, and nobody picked it up. So it didn’t change much, it just stayed the way it is. And I think WorldCom page just took it like that and changed it a little bit, but not that much. Now, this version that lives at WordPress org, I don’t know. I didn’t see the code, but so I don’t know how much it differs from our first version.

Zach (16:43):
I think that I’m looking through and playing around with the tool right now while we’re talking and in the world of enhancement requests, I have noticed that if I click on one of the teams, it opens in the same tab and then if I go back, I lose my results.

Milana (17:05):
We were thinking about the feature sending results to your email, and I think that would be very helpful for people. But on the other side, there was this anonymity that we wanted to leave to people because not all of them when they think, oh, somebody’s going to look at my results, and people think differently when they’re being watched and they behave differently. So we wanted really to give them the freedom to say what they really know and what they really want to do. And if they don’t like results, they don’t have to show it anyone, and they don’t have to think that somebody saw them. So that was the reason why we kept it anonymous. But really I think it would be very helpful to have the option just add email if you want to email it to yourself so you have results.

Zach (18:08):
Yeah, I think that would be really cool.

Aleksander (18:09):
Yes. But this was quite also a big limitation in development because we were really, really looking how to not collect any data. I mean literally any data for anyone. So it’s just, let’s say this form is working just inside this page saving stuff on in JavaScript at the moment. So once you go away from this page, everything is lost. So it’s completely, even the email to yourself was a feature like, okay, but then we need to cover all of the things, how we use the email, where do we store it or not storing it or how do we send, so that’s maybe one of the reasons why this feature never came up.

Zach (18:50):
Right. No, I can understand that.

Carl (18:52):
I’m in so many teams.

Zach (18:57):
Yeah,

Carl (18:58):
I did get C l I though, so I don’t know. I tricked it

Milana (19:02):
Now. You have to join.

Carl (19:04):
I’m sure Alain would love me if I joined.

Milana (19:06):
Yeah, there should be disclaimer, now you have to join. Then

Aleksander (19:10):
There is no going back

Zach (19:13):
Now that you know have to pick at least one team. This has always been a hard problem to solve, and I think that you and the team have done a great job of honestly solving the problem of helping people find their place. I hope that it results and has resulted already in an uptick in the number of people who apply to become involved as contributors with various teams. I know people who’ve signed up for contributor today and they walk in and they’re just overwhelmed at WordCamp us or at any of the larger camps like Europe or Asia, they walk in and there are so many tables, there are so many people already at those tables that they don’t know and they just get overwhelmed. So having a good introduction to that is a great way to ease that transition from being somebody who wants to contribute to being a contributor. And for anybody listening, I would encourage you, if you’re interested in getting involved with a team, all of these teams meet regularly. They meet virtually, join them for those meetings. It’s a great way to see if they’re a good fit. You can see what they’re working on. You can get involved in the making WordPress Slack, and you can see those teams Slack channels as well. It doesn’t take anything to join and it doesn’t take anything to leave if it’s not a good fit.

Milana (20:58):
And the documentation team, we always have cookies.

Carl (21:02):
That’s how they get you. That’s how get you with Sweetss. Yeah,

Zach (21:05):
Always. It’s always the cookies.

Carl (21:07):
It’s always do you like sweets and also writing a lot.

Milana (21:11):
Yeah. Yeah. That should be a question there in the tool.

Carl (21:21):
What I was going to say, what are things you’d like to see the tool do or what are your wishlists of things that you wish it did already?

Milana (21:30):
Well, I wish to see it on every world site. I would also like to see that feature for sending email, but not saving email address anywhere. And I would like to see it renamed because contributor orientation tool is something like working title and we’re like, oh, this sounds horrible, but we don’t have a better name for it right now, so let’s leave it for now. And it stayed. I think it’s explaining

Aleksander (22:01):
Me, took us a lot to think of this name, so you want to rename it,

Milana (22:07):
But it does explain very well what it does, but I think it’s really not good name.

Carl (22:16):
It isn’t programming the two hard things in programming and it’s like cash in validation and naming. So it’s true. I spent a lot of time thinking about names

Aleksander (22:28):
And in this team, which created these tools, you had two developers. So most of the names,

Zach (22:34):
Well, I mean, being that we are a technology focused community, we could always just call it Sorting Hat and just call it what it really is.

Carl (22:45):
I like Sorting Hat actually. Also, you could ask Chad, G P t I always actually, for naming things, I’ve found that Chad g p t is a good tool for just brainstorming ideas for me.

Milana (23:03):
Oh, I wonder if you ask Chad g pt, which team should you join? Would it give you a good

Carl (23:09):
Example? Oh, I mean, I did a joke. Oh my God. So a week and a half ago I tried to figure out if Chad g PT knew about me. It did not, but I find it useful for naming. So you could always ask it, Hey, what do you think we should name this tool? It does this, this it, this, and we’re trying to, maybe I’ll find something interesting.

Milana (23:34):
Yeah, maybe it’s too late now, but I would really love to see it renamed.

Aleksander (23:40):
I would say it’s to, but maybe one more thing that I would like to see is the summary of the teams rewritten. So at the end, you get some results, and this is what, let’s say you can read or what we saw, maybe if you go further, but maybe making it more plain or more beginner, beginner friendly would help there. If you start the team review teams review and approve every team submitted to work with Team repository, reviewing teams sharpens your own team development skills, well that’s nice, but what am I going to do in this team?

Milana (24:17):
Maybe a good feature would be once we have on Learn platform onboarding sessions, maybe just linking to onboarding session for selected teams. You can go and learn more about it.

Aleksander (24:31):
Yeah, the first step is done. So tools exists. I think it needs to be a little bit more beginner friendly because it’s targeting the audience that let’s say we think they don’t know much about teams. So maybe some survey or something there that they can say what’s good, or maybe testing or something like that’s in the future maybe.

Zach (24:55):
Well, awesome. I’m really excited to see how the results of this being deployed in the wild on make WordPress dot org slash contribute and on some of these camp websites as time goes on, what the uptick is, what the result is in contribution overall. Like I said at the beginning of this, the contribution is the lifeblood of how these projects survive. And WordPress is nothing if not for its contributors, and the contributors form the basis of what the community is. And the community is obviously bigger than just our contributors, but really the contributors set the tone for how the community interacts, where the project goes. So it’s an incredibly important part of being involved in the WordPress project. Beyond that, could we see a tool like this used for some of the other larger ecosystem projects in the future? Things like WooCommerce, things like, because that’s a really hard thing still. I mean, it’s really difficult to figure out where you fit as a WooCommerce developer too. It’s a hard project to get into and involved with. The barrier of entry is even higher than working with Core. I think you just have to start grabbing things and submitting poll requests, and that’s really it. Yeah.

Carl (26:38):
Yeah. That’s what I do. But I’m just like, yeah, I mean, WooCommerce is a bit in its own category. They’re kind of understaffed and almost feels like it should be its own team in this tool. A bit like the cli, like, hey, you want to contribute to cli, or do you want to contribute to WooCommerce bringing it in the larger contribution ecosystem?

Zach (27:06):
I would love to see WooCommerce have its own make team. I think that would be a great thing for the project and for WordPress overall. But some of these other ecosystem plugins, the larger ecosystem plugins need contributors to things like even easy digital downloads or Gravity forms or some of these other giant plugins that have huge install bases, that have paid teams behind them, but that also need people to help with both reporting and fixing issues.

Milana (27:44):
The good thing with this tool is actually that idea behind it can be applied to everything. So I’ve been applying it to documentation team. Again, I ask you what skills you have, what you want to do, and then I give you the list of roles you can do in this team. And there are a lot of roles. It’s not just writing the condition. And the best thing about the tool is that you can make a tool so you don’t have to say that or type that a million times. That’s why you have the tool. So the same idea can be applied to which plugin you want to contribute to or which project you want to translate. I don’t know, maybe we can go even to further to videos.

Zach (28:36):
Yeah, I think that would be great, providing a way for people to narrow down their roles within the teams once they’ve selected a team. I think that would be a great use case for something like this.

Milana (28:48):
Yes, yes, yes.

Zach (28:50):
Carl, do you have any other questions that you’d like to ask about the tool?

Carl (28:54):
No, I was just thinking, it’s like what I was saying. I feel like WooCommerce could benefit from just a larger integration. How do you see it working? I guess the one thing I was thinking is you embedded in all the work camps, but not every Workcamp has a contributor day or a big enough contributor day to, let’s say I match with, I’m like, oh, I want to do the C L I stuff, and then you’re on contributor day, but really this, I’m at work camp to Tokyo.

Milana (29:29):
Well, that’s why it would be like a plugin, which if you don’t have contributor day, you don’t have to activate it, so you don’t have the page. But if you have contributor day, you can select just themes you have at contributor.

Carl (29:42):
Oh yeah. Okay. Got it. So you’d select the teams that you can support locally?

Milana (29:48):
Yes, you could do that even with the first prototype that we built for worst computer, because we didn’t have all teams, so we created it for all teams, but we just turned off the teams that we didn’t have.

Carl (30:03):
Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, as an organizer, I was thinking about that. I was like, well, when I was Montreal, I was like, okay, well, we don’t really have anyone. Maybe we have one person coming that works on a specific team. But it’s kind of interesting for that. Montreal had a lot of Ians back in the day, and it was just like, there’s a lot of Ians, but Ians doesn’t necessarily mean they can help you contribute, especially now at the size of the company. And back then it was a bit smaller, but it’s kind of weird. Normally it was just like, go create a track issue or pick up a track issue and work on it. And it’s just like, okay.

Zach (30:44):
Yeah. I think that is what most people think of when they think of contributing to open source is, oh, well, I’ve got to go pour through track and figure out if there’s a code issue I can fix.

Carl (30:58):
I mean, that’s a definition I think I want to help change. Also, what it is to support, this is tangential, but what it is to support open source too. I think it’s not just code. Milana has always been a really early advocate of just like, Hey, documentation. Hello, hi documentation team. We need people help, but what it is to contribute to open sources in itself really interesting. It could be marketing, it could be all these things, and people don’t necessarily think about that because open source has a code connotation built into it.

Zach (31:41):
Absolutely.

Milana (31:42):
But also just running the meeting of the team, it’s very valuable contribution or just writing meeting notes. It’s something that doesn’t count as building the software itself, but it’s so needed and helpful,

Carl (31:59):
And I’ll never be the one doing that. My A D H D, I couldn’t even take notes in school, so forget taking meeting notes. I’m useless.

Milana (32:11):
In documentation team, we have it. So if you take a look at the page for team reps, that is one of the things that team reps should do, run the meeting and write meeting notes, but I don’t like to do it. And being a rep, I can decide not to do it. So I dealt to new contributors. This is great way to start contributing. So they all do. It’s new contributors in documentation team who run the meetings and meeting notes.

Carl (32:40):
That’s fun. That’s a clever way of getting your, it’s like, well, I don’t want to do it. So hey, let me talk to you about this great opportunity. In the documentations team,

Aleksander (32:54):
I was thinking of joining documentation team. Now I’m going to rethink about this.

Zach (33:01):
I believe in the music industry, that’s what they call new guy. So new guy always does all of the work. Nobody else in the band wants to do.

Carl (33:11):
Basically. You’re always the, it’s like it’s a seniority thing. You’re the new person, you get to do the things we don’t want to do,

Milana (33:20):
But it’s also delegating. I see a lot of people who are team reps or were team reps who take too many responsibilities on themselves and they get burned down very fast because you have to do this and you have to, but if you learn to delegate and you show people new contributors that you have trust in them to write the meeting notes and publish that and make that work repository, it’s like huge responsibility. They’re afraid to post that, to press that publish.

Carl (33:54):
Yeah, I mean that’s like management. This is stuff I wrote about when I was applying for MBAs and stuff like that. It’s like management trust. Not be a micromanager, but not be a micromanager. But that’s challenging for people because some people are just super type A, they just want it like, okay, I have my way. I want it this way, and I don’t trust anybody to do it the correct way. Or they’re scared that it’ll make them look bad. But yeah, like you said, you have to trust people because when you trust people, they feel empowered, and when they feel empowered, they take responsibility. But that’s really management. But again, you’re there to learn things, so might as well learn how to manage people in the process and try to not burn yourself out.

Aleksander (34:47):
There is an extra, extra, let’s say, thing you can get from writing notes. So for the new, even me, I don’t like it. Every time I need to write them. I like you write, is it good enough? Or people going to read this, right? But once you publish them and you see there is a good reaction, you feel good. And that’s really important for the new joiners because once they publish their first notes and they see that started hard, they’re going to feel empowered and they’re going to go much harder.

Carl (35:18):
Yeah, I mean, I like notes. I mean, for Emir, I write a report every two weeks, but it’s right, it’s the A, D H D. I just can’t pay attention during the meeting to write the thing down. I can’t even multitask. There’s a reason I don’t really listen to podcasts or watch videos. I can’t actually listen to something and do something else at the same time. So it’s much more of a limitation because I’m with you, Alexander. I’m like, oh my God, when somebody take really good meeting minutes, I’m like, oh my God, thank you so much. You go back and you’re like, what did we talk about three weeks ago? And then somebody wrote it all down super neatly, and I’m just like, wow, this is amazing. But that will never be me.

Zach (36:04):
Yeah, me either. It will never be me either.

Milana (36:09):
When I was writing meeting notes, I was usually doing it during the meeting, so I would just, when someone says meeting is over, I would just hit publish because I was doing that in. But the thing is, when you write meeting notes, as someone who already knows what the team is all about and who are the people, it’s really boring. But for newcomers, it’s a fast way to learn who is in the team, who is doing what, who’s in charge of what and what the team is actually doing. So that is in effect, the fastest way to get involved, to get to know the whole team and the people and what we’re doing.

Carl (36:54):
Yeah. Yeah. You’re definitely throwing them over the deep end, Hey, do you want to learn about everything all at once? And also we depend that you do a good job about it. So good luck. But it’s true, I think mean for the minutes. It’s just, I think it comes down to if your personality or neurodivergence type, it’s just for some people it’s just really hard to do it, but it’s not that they’re not useful. So yeah, I think it’s a better intro. The more you talk to me about it, the more I’m like, oh, this is a way better intro tool. It’s not just that I want to delegate it out, but also it’s kind of useful. But maybe that’s why in TV shows, it’s always the new guide that’s taking the notes. It’s always the assistant or something like that that’s taking notes. It’s, it forces them to learn what’s going on much more quickly.

Zach (37:51):
No, I would agree with that.

Carl (37:52):
And also, it’s useful for them because the more they write down, the more they’ll remember of the new stuff too. So they’re more incentivized to write. If you’re milana and you’re like, I know I’ll ask this thing. I’m just going to write really short notes, very little detail, and then, yeah, exactly. You have a lot more context. So the person that has less context will write probably more out because they just need to. Yeah, explain. Yeah, I mean, that’s like a teaching thing too. I find I wrote about this, but it’s like if you want to really learn something really well, you teach it back to somebody else. So it’s a bit like that, right? You’re learning about the thing and then you have to write it back and explain it to somebody else. So it really forces you to really learn it. Now I’m sold. All the new guys now are doing minute notes for me.

Zach (38:51):
Well, and the thing that I’ve found, speaking on that learning subject, there’s an educational approach called mastery learning. And mastery learning is self-paced, but it makes sure to engage every learning type. So it’s a combination of lecture plus reading, plus labs, plus testing, all combining into a total package that engages all types of learners at some point along the process. And that’s pretty much the same thing we should be trying to do on these teams, is engaging everybody in the ways that they retain and learn information. And so being the note taker for even just one meeting means that you have to actively listen. And then in addition to that, you have to write things down, which is taking notes will engage a different part of how you learn. And so you’re going to really quickly embed into what that team is doing because you are more actively involved in understanding where the team is because you’re taking notes about where the team is. So I think it’s a really ingenious way to get people involved. I really like it. And given that I just talked about mastery learning, I bet none of you could guess that the training team was the first team that I worked with in the WordPress community.

(40:30):
It’s been a lot of fun. That’s a great team. It’s actually how I met Josefa because she was on the training team at that time. So it’s been really cool to see her growth over the years. And now as executive director of the WordPress project, it’s just crazy to see the growth and what she’s done with the project since. So that’s the other thing is you never know who you’re going to end up paired up with on a team. You never know what they’re going to end up doing. And that’s a really cool part of getting involved is one, you never know what anybody else is going to end up doing, but you also never know what you’re going to end up with an opportunity to do because of getting involved. It’s the same thing with contributing to a WordCamp becoming part of the organizing team or volunteering for a team at WordCamp us.

(41:26):
I volunteered for the photography team, and because of that, I was one of the two photographers that was officially invited to photograph the keynote. And because of that, Matt and Josepha asked me for a photo that Matt then posted on his Twitter that this is stuff that doesn’t happen unless you put yourself there. So it’s one of those things where getting involved can open doors and it opens doors more quickly, in my opinion, than nearly any other activity in an open source community. Well, everybody’s listened to us talk about how important contribution is and how to figure out how to contribute.

Carl (42:08):
Oh, right. Meeting notes. I mean, that’s my takeaway from this episode. It’s like delegate the minutes and also you’re teaching them, it’s good for them. It’s not just good for you.

Zach (42:20):
Exactly. It has a dual purpose. But I’m going to take the time here because nearing our last 10 minutes to ask you both if there’s any last words you want to share with the community and about contribution, about the contributor orientation tool or any of the other things that we’ve discussed. So Alexander, why don’t we start with you this time? Yeah,

Aleksander (42:49):
Okay. Well, I would say the key takeaway is just to start contributing, not for expecting any result, but for yourself because you will get the result for sure. That’s imminent. You’ll become a better person for sure. You’ll see how things are done on the other end. You won’t see many other cultures or how it’s done in other cultures or how it’s even done by someone else. So at the end you see, oh, there is also this way. I would never think about it. And then by the time you become a better person, if you’re a developer and become a better developer by just not contributing, but interacting with other people. And then I would say it’ll influence your career for sure, because once you get those skills, you’re going to be advancing in your career for sure. So just start contributing is the most important step and not doing it for anyone else, but do it for yourself and do it. I mean, the WordPress has maybe the most welcoming community of all, I would say, and it’s really easy to get in. You just need to start. That will be my key takeaway.

Milana (44:02):
Well, my answer is always to new people. Just be selfish and do it for yourself. Exactly. Don’t do it even for your job. Don’t even think about your career because you might change career. I did change career, so I started with documentation because I was playing with WordPress in my local, and I never thought I would be developer and documentation was wrong, and I’m like, hello, this is wrong. So I went and changed it and fix it. And it was after a few months, I searched something and I found my own edit to the documentation and I was like, oh my God, this is my own notes. I’m writing this for myself and still having thinking about becoming developer. I’m a classical musician at that time, and that was just a game. But it was interesting to me. It was very interesting, the learning and writing it down, and you really know something if you can document it, especially software.

(45:12):
So that was just my interesting path of learning what was interesting to me. And after a few years, I became a developer because of completely different things that happened in my life. So don’t do it for career, don’t do it. If you need something for your job right now, don’t do it for that. Do it if it’s interesting to you. And another thing to upgrade the idea from Alexander, I see a lot of new contributors coming at this moment. When community is large, there are many projects and they just split their attention to everything they want to do everything they want to work, they want to fix everything. First of all, you have to know the larger project, the smaller changes, you will not change thing with one blog post or one initiative. It’s a lot more difficult. There’s a slower moment, but also you will burn out in a month if you start to do everything.

(46:27):
So probably find two, three things that you really, really enjoy and make a schedule to do them throughout the week and don’t accept everything. It’s usually like, do we have volunteer to do this? And people are like, yeah, I want to do it. Do you want to do this? Yeah, I want to do it. And after that, you end up with 40 hours of contributions that you promised, and then you feel bad if you don’t do it or you do it badly, and then your health is first to go. So don’t do that. Find what you really, really enjoy, what you really like for yourself personally, and keep it slow. It’ll be there. All the problems that we have now, it’ll be there in a few months. Just take it, please.

Zach (47:20):
That is an interesting point. Things don’t just go away. They’ll still be there. The only things that go away quickly, our exploits, those are the things that we get rid of as quickly as we can, but everything else is still there. Right? The improvements that we’re making, I mean, we’ve just entered with Gutenberg. I think what’s going to end up being the largest phase of Gutenberg development, the whole collaboration aspect of what’s being worked on now is going to be a lot of work, a lot of effort. They’ll need people to test it. They’ll need people to design it. They’ll need people to document it. They’ll need people to create training for it. They’ll need people to do all of the things that we do as a community. So as we enter into this time of great change, I think that the need for contribution is only going to grow

Carl (48:25):
This new time of great change. There’s always been times of great. The rest a p I was a time of great change.

Zach (48:33):
It was. It absolutely

Carl (48:35):
Was. So there’s always a time of great change, so in this current, but yeah, I think one thing too, I’ve mentioned in business too is think more like a marathon and not like a race. Take it easy, don’t overdo it, otherwise you flame out. And basically, it was never a race basically. It was always a marathon. It was always a marathon. So think of yourself more than think of yourself. So you can last for a long while. You don’t want to come in and leave right away. I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen it too. Milana too. Especially with work camp organizing. Organizing is not one of them where you can actually take it really easy. So you see a lot of like, oh my God, this was so much. I’m out.

Zach (49:33):
Yes, no, I just want my profile batches. I’m in for that. Then out as soon as I get it.

Milana (49:38):
Oh, I saw that as well. Yeah, a lot of those,

Carl (49:42):
Yes. I mean, I’ve never been one for gamification. I finally got my core contributor badge after 10 years, I think.

Zach (49:52):
Yeah, I think all I have are WordCamp speaker and training team. I think those are the only ones I have. Well, it’s been great getting some time to talk with you about contribution today. How can people find both of you on social media or what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Milana (50:14):
I would say for me, the best way is through Twitter or X. Now, my username is a bit complicated, so it’s better to find me as WhatsApp, or you can find me at WordPress Slack. My username is Z Z A P. So that’s a bit easier

Aleksander (50:38):
For me. I think the Slack works best or the email and kind of a, so maybe LinkedIn profile or something connect. There are all the informations. Something I also wanted to say, one thing about contributing that came to my mind, maybe the best way to stay contributing longer works for me is to not contribute on what you do daily. So I’m calling all day, so I’m contributing to community or organizing meetups, which is totally different than what you do there. So you avoid burnouts or something because if you code all day and you contribute coding, it might end up like, oh, that’s too much for me, so maybe someone can try this part. It works for me.

Zach (51:22):
Sounds great. Yeah, I love it. Well, I want to thank both of you for joining us today, and Carl, as always, thank you for joining and being the other half of this doing my thing. Exactly. We mentioned at the beginning of the episode where you can find us. We’ll have show notes at the end of the episode talking about the resources we’ve discussed today, and we look forward to seeing you next month for another W Dev chat.