Monthly Community Activities!

Question

Some other Stackexchanges run weekly / monthly Community Activities and we thought it may be a cool idea to try out here. There isn't necessarily a schedule involved yet but we want to crowd source some ideas and get a general feeling of how often you may want to participate in these kinds of things. All of which would mostly be limited to their respective WPSE Chatrooms. We're thinking along the lines of...

• Open Floor to discuss community issues, ideas, and improvements
• Give back to WordPress, learn to contribute, find out ways to give back to WordPress
• Open Floor to discuss off-topic issues like plugin problems and such
• Review scrubs and general group site maintenance
• Group contribution to other open source projects

Have any ideas for better activities? Would you like to participate in any of the above? How often do you think these types of events should be? Good idea / Bad idea? Voice your opinions and thoughts below!

Answer 1

I really like the idea. We can promote these in our calendar sidebar ("events") in order to reach a wider audience.

For the schedule, I think we can start monthly and see how it works.

Possible topics or activities:

1. Improving our answer rate, cleaning up old questions.
2. Workshops: Set up a vagrant file for my site, Add unit tests to my plugin, Set up proper deployment
3. Woocommerce¹
4. Review upcoming talks someone wants to present at a wordcamp

A side result of these events are probably some good new questions and answers for the main site. Plus, we will learn to know each other better, which is, in my opinion, one of the most important factors for community building.

¹ Just kidding.

Answer 2

Group contribution to other open source projects

I think having community activities is a great idea to promote the WPSE and

As a web and plugin developer, I'd really like to see some form of a hackathon which allows community members to form groups and develop a new plugin/theme based on the event's objective.

Some ideas that came to mind:

• Each event has an objective/topic, nothing too specific as it should promote creativity, just a general goal for everyone to work on
  • Example: "develop a plugin that would help a nonprofit website"
• Members can form their own groups, work on their own (lone-wolf), or request to be assigned to a group
• The judges will comprise of members (in good standing) and moderators alike

For me, I am always open to working with someone on my next plugin, an event like this would definitely help me find someone to collaborate with.

The points above can obviously be expanded into more detail, but I'd be more than happy to help with setting things up and writing up a more concrete outline and plan.

Answer 3

I think it's a cool idea to have regular community activities, but the subjects you propose are quite "heavy" and might attract mostly the same fairly small crew that is active on meta and chat. So, I'll try to think of more lighthearted events, like generating WordPress memes.

Also, I think we should not only think of content for the event, but also marketing it to the wider community. I wouldn't mind, for instance, to abuse a question field on the main page to advertise the event for a couple of hours.