Intro
We are writing this post, as we welcome the new team reps for 2022 into the marketing team – congratulations to @EidolonNight, @nalininonstopnewsuk and @lmurillom. You can read all about them on this blog post.
Today we celebrate the Marketing Team, thank the team reps who retired from the role at the end of January this year or in 202. We also thank all those who have contributed to the team in so many different areas since it began in 2014.
We have invited back all the team reps to the celebration event and reached out to other teams who have been involved to join us. Please do join us at 15:00 UTC (10am EST / 7am PST / 8.30pm IST). You can add the event to your calendar and get a reminder. The link to the event will be shared in the Marketing channel on Slack before the meeting.
Looking back at the last two years
Post by Christopher Churchill and Larissa Murillo
This post celebrates just some of the contributions and achievements the marketing team has accomplished.
As a team during the past few years, they have kept it growing and pushing it forward. They have also enabled participation and diversity at every step of the way, breaking down silos and achieving a consistent and high level of participation and contribution with facilitation being done mostly by non-sponsored contributors for more than two years.
There has been much work done to amplify messages from the other WordPress teams (Training, Community and Learn etc) and to support groups across the board such as the WP Diversity. Team members have supported them with marcomms advice, and lots of participation from marketing contributors in those teams as well. This cross collaboration has extended to the Docs team with HelpHub, the Full Site Experiment calls for testing, and supporting the Polyglots team Polyglots Team is a group of multilingual translators who work on translating plugins, themes, documentation, and front-facing marketing copy. https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/. with leadership and support for WordPress Translation Day for the past three years.
More than 75 weekly Meetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. roundups have been published on LinkedIn, long-term planning and introducing a features approach to the People of WordPress series, and multiple marketing team members have supported WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe with wider marketing, onboarding media materials, and with contributor initiatives.
The team completed a user testing and feedback exercise on project management tools and accessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), the learnings from that culminated in a migration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. from Trello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. to GitHub. Increasing the ease with which processes were researched, defined and established around: recurring repetitive tasks, ad-hoc requests, asynchronous contribution, and reducing language barriers.
After a successful pilot, the Marketing Team GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ instance is being migrated into the main WordPress GitHub. This will involve new documentation to support the integration and will give us the ability to leverage the newer features from GitHub. Additionally, multiple New Contributor sessions and workshops were held, for those new to the Marketing channel or team.
WP Marketing alongside other teams proposed a Frequently Asked Questions series to accompany releases. This aimed at anticipated queries from developers as well as non-technical end-users and meetups, and also helped other local Communities plan content on their local sites related to releases.
The team also worked on larger projects like the Core-to-Marketing information workflow, which analysed the current information flow taking place throughout the WordPress major version release process, and suggested an improved flow to help other teams gain a clear understanding of what is going to be released, so they can support the delivery of information to all the WordPress constituents.
They supported WordCamps, Meetups, and marketing team members as we acclimated (and continue to adapt) to new routines in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
One of the initiatives we began during the pandemic were the Marketing Team Coffee Breaks, open to everyone and providing an opportunity to sustain the team and help support each other during difficult times. It has been two years of holding these coffee breaks and we are glad to say that other Make teams have adopted them as well. The chance to meet and chat on a regular basis were part of the team’s ‘Staying connected’ initiatives.
Below we go into some of the individuals who have helped do this so please take the time to applaud these individuals if you can, we are a better community because of them.
Mike Reid
Mike joined the Marketing Team in 2015 and became a rep in 2016. He has been involved with WordPress and for many years in his local Meetup and as a WordCamp organizer. He has shared his knowledge on project management in communications through the Marketing Team and as an event speaker.
He was the Marketing/Release Comms lead for the 5.3 release, helped lead marketing tables during the contributor days at four WordCamp US events, and has been a WordCamp contributor at more than 20 events.
A keen team builder, Mike has been a supporter of initiatives to promote inclusion and provide opportunities for skill-development and learning more about WordPress. He led a number of the team’s brainstorming exercises, and was an advocate and ally for team members.
Mike is a Project Management Institute’s certified project manager and works for InMotion Hosting.
Harry Jackson
Harry joined the marketing team in September of 2017 and became team rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. in 2018. He’s based in the U.S.A and works as Products Manager for InMotion Hosting.
He helped run meetings, support new contributors, and took part in the project management. Harry also encouraged contributors to become more involved in the project. He stepped back in 2021, but has continued to be a supporter of the team.
In the Marketing Team, he has been actively involved in preparations for the showcase section redesign for WordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ and WordCamp US contributor days. He has been a champion for encouraging contributions from across the world, and been involved in his local WordPress community. He has run a number of task groups and worked to find ways to encourage contributors to participate in project board updates.
When not at work, Harry loves spending time with his wife, kids and dogs.
Yvette Sonneveld
Yvette has been in the Marketing Team since 2017 and one of the team reps since 2018. Based in the Netherlands, she is a marketing and communications professional.
From making her first WordPress website in 2005, she went on to be more involved in its community, becoming a WordCamp event volunteer, organizer and later a speaker. She is part of the WordPress polyglot Dutch translation team.
In Marketing, she has co-ordinated the team badges and the Update, and with others contributed to People of WordPress and other series, as well as taking part in the administration that goes with a team rep role. She has been part of the building of onboarding materials and took part in how the team supported WordCamp Europe’s contributor events.
Yvette recently became Community Team Lead for Yoast, after running her own in-bound marketing firm for a number of years. She loves walking in nature, yoga, and world travelling.
Maedah has been a Marketing Team contributor since 2016 and became a Marketing Team Rep in 2018. She also contributes to translating WordPress to Urdu.
In marketing, she has contributed to note-taking meetings and has supported onboarding for new contributors, and facilitated sessions to help get them started.
She believes in the need for developer-friendly content and documentation, and works on content in multiple online outlets. She is a maintainer of local meetups relating to Girls Who Code and ReactJSLadies, and is currently a senior content developer at Vercel.
Maedah is also an open-source journalist. She has created a tech-training startup through which she has helped to train more than 2,500 girls how to code with WordPress.
Abha Thakor
Abha has been an active contributor to the project since 2017, and been involved in helping the team build or bring in systems used in not-for-profits and other tech companies to enable more people to be involved. She has also shared her training and mentoring background to support new contributors and those new to marketing and communications.
She is an experienced communicator, journalist and digital media professional working in a variety of sectors and new technologies. In her work with Non Stop Business Support, Non Stop News UK, and other organizations, she focuses on communications, accessibility and tech innovation. She joined the Global Marketing Team in the year 2017 and became an active contributor to WordPress from 2018. She was asked to be a team rep in 2020.
She has been a great asset to the team. She has supported the skill development of new contributors and consistently and diligently found ways to signpost for everyone helping a multitude of people (and in no small amount the person posting this) boost their confidence and enabling them to contribute to other areas as well. Her biggest strength is to take the team along and involve as many people as possible. She has a positive and creative outlook to any problem which arises. She has helped many WordCamps with planning and executing their contributor events. She is an active and notable contributor on several releases, and the Learn WordPress / Training and Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Teams.
She had a vision of making sure everyone’s contribution is acknowledged and this has led to the introduction of ways to help capture contributions more effectively and providing more open ways for people in different timezones to get involved, including the use of GitHub.
The Marketing Team is better off for her involvement in it and she’s helped moved the team forward in leaps and bounds.
Meher Bala
Meher joined the Marketing Team in 2017, bringing her skills from front end web development and hosting to support the communication of both the WordPress software and community. She was involved in the project and actions groups, coordinating tasks and helping new contributors become active members of the team particularly those for whom English was a second language. She became a team rep in 2020.
She has been involved with linking training and contributor events, supporting the development of tools and processes used by the team, and was one of the primary enablers for the WP Marketing GitHub Repository.
Meher is based in India and is a Meetup organiser in her local area. She has been involved in leading WordCamp Mumbai, was a WordCamp India organiser in 2021, and volunteered at a number of online camps. She consistently goes above and beyond to help anyone and devotes extensive time to the WordPress.org Community.
She has been a key person linking both the polyglots and marketing teams, and was also a WordPress Translation Day organiser for 2020 and 2021. She has brought a combination of development and marketing skills to the table in a way few can do as effectively as Meher.
Olga Gleckler
A WordCamp Contributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. in 2019 was the start of Olga’s journey in the Marketing team. From this event, she started attending the global team’s weekly meetings and contributing ideas.
She became more involved in 2020 and joined its projects and actions groups to support a range of administrative tasks and helping others to contribute, giving hours of her time a week to help grow the team. She took part in the team’s support of WordCamp Europe and the Polyglots Team, and joined the WCEU 2021 and WordPress Translation Day organisers in 2020 and 2021.
With her contribution to Support, she was able to act as a bridge between Support and Polyglots, and help them access marketing input from the wider team.
Olga first discovered WordPress in 2012 and believes it is the best choice for a content management system.
“The community turned out an amazing discovery. Here I found not only an ability to apply and develop my skill but also friends from all over the world who are thirsty for knowledge and eager to make a difference, people with open hearts and minds.”
From St Petersburg, Russia, Olga has also been active in the Russian WordPress community since 2017.
Professionally, Olga works as a WordPress developer and marketer, with a background in advertising. She brought this knowledge to help with the developer-related marcomms initiatives in 2020-2021, and has helped colleagues with how to follow trac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets and take part in testing.
She has had her own development agency and is currently employed full-time as a software engineer with a focus on WordPress.
In her free time, she is an amazing fiction writer.
We can not talk about the Marketing team without also lauding the contributions from the previous team reps @rosso99, @BridgetWillard, @jenblogs4u, @mcdwayne, and @siobhanseija, and to @skarjune who was instrumental in areas like the handbook.
Thank you @chanthaboune, @joostdevalk and @cbringmann for their support of the team.
Also thanks to contributors who have been part of the projects and actions groups, and task groups in the last two years and helped with the team reps keeping the team running or assisted in co-ordinating specific tasks, including: @lmurillom, @marks99, @vimes1984, @megphillips91, @yashwardhanrana, @majaloncar, @technocrews, @marybaum, @JillSMaxwell, @carike, @aurooba, @nullbyte, @agiledrop, @rahuldsarker, @chaion07, @michelleames, and everyone involved in so many different ways.
The Marketing Team is the result of the people who have contributed to it and is and always will be larger than the sum of its parts. Thank you to everyone and we hope you will continue the journey with WordPress.
Please take the time to give a shout-out to these individuals, who built the foundations and worked for years to help get the team to where it is today.
If you are interested in getting more involved in the Marketing Team, please:
The next set of team reps in the project will be elected in approximately November 2022. If you are interested in getting involved in marketing WordPress, come and join the next team meeting.
#learnwp, #marketing-team
