Last fall Andrea wrote about several challenges with the Five for the Future website that are preventing it from fulfilling its intended purpose. I’d like to start working on the first challenge of addressing spam or dormant pledges.
The Challenge
Many of the pledges have no recent activity on their profiles, or none at all; many only have personal activity (maintaining a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party in the directory, asking for help in the support forums, etc); and many don’t participate in the Making WP SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., where contributors primarily coordinate.
That inaccuracy weakens the value of sincere and active pledges. It also makes it difficult and impractical for team representatives to use the pledge lists to recruit contributors for projects. The lists for Core and Community have over 1,300 and 1,400 people respectively, many of whom seemingly have not contributed, are unlikely to contribute, and/or are inconvenient to contact.
Proposal
To help surface active pledges, I’m proposing that we email all pledged 5ftF companies to request that they review, update, and confirm pledged contributors, teams, and hours. If they do not confirm within a reasonable period of time, their pledge would be removed.
Longer term, 5ftF could better identify and credit both code and non-code contributions. That would also help to keep pledges up to date.
To do this, we could automatically detect contribution based on Profile activity, and automatically remove pledges from folks who haven’t contributed in the past 6 months. In order to do that accurately, though, we’ll have to start crediting more non-code contributions, which often aren’t reflected on Profiles.
To track those, each team could request an activity that’s important to them, such as writing documentation; making changes to a Figma mockup; moderating a WPTV video; etc. We could also add a few things that cover all teams, like attending a Slack meeting, and giving/receiving props in the #props channel on Slack.
Once those are added to Profiles, then we could add an automated task to the 5ftF site which would examine all pledges every day. For those who haven’t contributed in 6 months, we’d un-publish their pledge, and send them a polite email to let them know. If removing them was a mistake, or they’d like to start contributing again, they can contact their team repTeam 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.. Teams reps will be able to re-publish their pledge.
Feedback
What do you think of this proposed next step? Are there problems that aren’t addressed, ways to improve it, or is there a better idea altogether? Please reply before March 31st.