At @ninianepress‘s DM request, I’ve added “temporarily” to step two about archival plans for current marketing assets. It was a poor assumption on my part that we were all reading this in the context of “for the duration of our experiment”.

Last month, I introduced the idea of a WordPress Media Corps. I’d like us to take some next steps with this experiment, with full and hopeful conviction about what this might enable us to do in the future if we can pave this foundation today. 

This change is intended to tackle the big obstacles for the year as shared in the 2024 goals post. Because the changes rely on important parts of the WordPress project and ecosystem, we need the change to be big enough to see quick impact, but small enough to manage with the time we have available. Therefore, and by design, the MVPMinimum Viable Product "A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development." - WikiPedia scope for the WP Media Corps is limited but allows for future growth and experimentation. 

In this post, I’ll share some next steps for the WP Media Corps and a recap of important context so that we all have the same starting point.

The background

In order to simultaneously tackle both obstacles in our 2024 goals post and alleviate a long-standing struggle in getting reliable WordPress project information to end-users, I would like to create a Media Corps that will enable independent WordPress marketers and media members to produce excellent quality content with less time and effort.

The hypothesis

If we get accurate information more quickly and effortlessly to WordPress advocates, then the audiences that rely on them for the latest news will end up with more awareness (of features, programs, and the community at large) and contribute to additional growth in the project.

The risks

The current plans for this experiment have a lot of Automattic involvement, which is not desirable long term. For now, it will help limit variables while we quickly test the hypothesis, and will avoid calling in another round of contributors without a clear concept of what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how we think we get there together.

Next Steps

As noted earlier, a change like this needs to be big enough to see impact but small enough to manage with the time we have. To that end, here are some next steps that will direct full efforts towards this initiative.

1. A new Make Media Corps team, blog, and 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/. channel will be created in the next few days. Any handbook materials and documentation that still make sense for this new team will be migrated to the new team blog. 
2. The existing Make Marketing Team and Slack channel will be temporarily archived once the new team is created so that people interested in WordPress marketing initiatives will be directed towards the WP Media Corps. The Marketing Team GitHub Repo will remain open for continued work on the WordPress Showcase and amplification requests.
3. Plans for the MVP version of the WP Media Corps will be published on the new Make team site so that future media partners and community members can stay up to date on how this project will progress and have ample opportunity to provide feedback. I have asked @rmartinezduque to lead this initiative. 
4. All contributors who want to give a whole-hearted go to this experiment, can join the new site and Slack channel.

Thank you

Marketing an open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project is a difficult and unique challenge. It’s especially difficult for a project like WordPress with software that supports myriad use cases, and a community that tends to a sprawling, multifaceted ecosystem that supports current and future WordPressers at many points in their journey. I’m grateful to the folks who have chosen to tackle this since 2015 and I’m appreciative of everyone who showed up to do the important work of figuring out next steps together. 

Thank you to our past Marketing team reps (see the list below) who have documented this team’s history and welcomed numerous new contributors over the years, and thank you especially to @bernard0omnisend @ngreennc and @ninianepress who served as the most recent group of team reps.

@rosso99 @bridgetwillard @mcdwayne @skarjune @joostdevalk @jenblogs4u @siobhanseija @mikerbg @harryjackson1221 @maedahbatool @yvettesonneveld @webcommsat @meherbala @oglekler @nalininonstopnewsuk @lmurillom @eidolonnight @santanainniss @nhrrob @sereedmedia 

And thank you to everyone who has contributed to the various efforts this team has made to market WordPress. While the Media Corps may not solve all of the problems that we face in marketing WordPress, I truly believe it gives us the opportunity to tackle some of our most immediate problems and hopefully open new paths to contribution. As with any new project, we won’t know until we try; and as with any experiment, we won’t know until we try hard.