WordPress Community Team Suggests Adopting GitHub To Improve Collaboration – WP Tavern

GitHub is primarily used for code collaboration, but the WordPress community team is considering adopting the platform to standardize their project management tools.

Contributing to open source can already be daunting, but if you need to sign up for multiple services to access your team’s many spreadsheets, Trello boards, Slack groups, and other modes of communication, Onboarding new contributors becomes unnecessarily difficult.

A new proposal written by Community Team Lead Leo Gopal outlines the benefits of using GitHub as a central communication tool. These benefits include improved collaboration and communication using the platform’s commenting system, as well as the ability to track progress and assign tasks.

Gopal argues that standardizing on GitHub will increase transparency and accountability, and support better organizations with tools like issues, labels, milestones, and project boards.

“By adopting GitHub for project management and issue tracking, the community team standardizes how we work, makes it easier for new team members to get up to speed, and enables more effective cross-team collaboration.” said Gopal. “This standardization also makes it easier for community team members to track progress, identify issues, and make data-driven decisions.”

Other Make teams such as Learn, Hosting, Meta, and Marketing have successfully used GitHub to manage communication and prioritize projects. Gopal suggests that the community and his team learn from their efforts and adopt these tools his methods in the quarter as an experiment.

“If there is consensus after the first quarter that this is not a good fit for our team, we will go back to our initial projects and tracking practices and investigate further,” said Gopal.

Some participants in the resulting discussion are concerned about losing transparency and conversation tracking as they will not be linked to their WordPress.org profiles.

Weglot-sponsored community team contributor Juan Hernando said: “I don’t think the community team is particularly technical. Using GitHub can introduce certain barriers that haven’t been there before. For others, it can be a bit of a hindrance.

“I’m also concerned that discussions will move from this Make site to GitHub. We’ll lose the spirit of owning content (which is linked to our .org profile) and will be left with this space for decision-making and publishing.” We shouldn’t lose use of arguments like this.”

Gopal addressed this concern, stating that there is no code and that users who can work on Trello boards will have no problem adopting GitHub’s tools for their plans.

“Trello was used for planning, but review and summary times were often forgotten,” says Gopal. “There was no way the other team would know what we were working on and add it to the conversation. Exclude.”

Gopal said GitHub allows teams to incorporate benefits such as automation, quotas, and cross-team collaboration with advanced reporting capabilities. Overall, GitHub has the potential to increase the visibility of the work of people collaborating across teams.

Milana Cap, who helps organize the documentation team using GitHub for reporting issues and automating tasks, encouraged adoption of the platform and shared how the documentation team uses it.

“All the other benefits: version control, accurate contribution tracking, all sorts of project management tools, etc. You won’t find it all in one tool other than GitHub. I can’t recommend them all highly enough.” said Cap.

Discussion on the proposal is still open, and Gopal has opened a proposal vote for members of the community team to provide feedback on standardizing communication on GitHub.