Five Ways to Participate in Five for the Future

What is “Five for the Future?”

Since 2014, the Five for the Future program has “encourage[d] organizations to contribute five percent of their resources to WordPress development.” According to the Five for the Future website, “WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg proposed this benchmark to maintain a “golden ratio” of contributors to users.”

So what does it look like in practice to contribute to Five for the Future? Your opportunities as a contributor can be as vast as the WordPress project itself. Whether sponsoring events to subtitling videos on WordPress.tv, there are many ways to get involved.

The best way to decide how to contribute is to review the nearly 20 different teams that make up Make WordPress. Within each team, skim the top welcome boxes, review meeting times, and read a few recent posts to see what the team has been working on. Then, consider your skills and availability. Many teams have a few low-lift ways to contribute occasionally for just a few hours, while others need more regular help.

Let’s look at five ways to contribute to Five for the Future.

1. Inclusiveness

Where can you go to find ways to get more people using WordPress and contributing to the community?

• Accessibility.
• Diverse Speaker Training.
• WordPress TV subtitling.
• PolyGlots – Translating WordPress.

2. Technical Content Creation

• Documentation
  • Docs Team Handbook: An overview of what we do and how to collaborate.
  • WordPress Documentation Style Guide: Style guide for WordPress documentation.
  • Block Editor Handbook: An overview of documentation contributions for the Block Editor / Gutenberg.
  • DevHub (developer.wordpress.org): The home of developer documentation.
  • HelpHub (wordpress.org/support): The home for all end-user documentation.
  • Documentation Issue Tracker on GitHub: The one place anyone can report a documentation issue.
• Training
  • Create a workshop, lesson plan, course, or discussion group.
  • Proofread content.
  • Draft objective statements and assessments.
  • Partner as subject matter experts with the team.
  • Audit all content for feature changes in WordPress updates.
• Marketing
  • WordPress update release communications.
  • Promote content for social media promotions.
  • Partner with additional Make teams for elevating opportunities.

3. Reviewing Submissions

• Themes reviews and approves themes submitted to the official WordPress Theme directory. The primary focus of the team is to help theme authors transition to block-based themes.
• Support manages the wordpress.org forums.
• WordPress.tv handles video editing and distribution of WordCamp presentations.

4. Coding

• Core has a variety of coding and developer opportunities: good first bugs for new contributors or a bug scrub. There’s more on the reports page, like patches needing testing, and on our feature projects page.
• Training maintains the Learn.WordPress.org site functionality in GitHub.
• Meta manages the site functionality of all WordPress.org sites in Meta Trac.

5. Testing

• Full Site Editing Calls for Testing to see how the latest features in WordPress will work.
• Mobile tests for the WordPress app on iOS and Android.

Get Involved

Are you interested in contributing occasionally or with a regular cadence? Getting involved in the various Make teams can be a great way to increase your skills, stay current about what is happening in the WordPress project, and give back to it.

For more great insights into the many ways you can participate in the WordPress project, listen to Josepha Haden Chomphosy’s WP Briefing episode about “WordPressing Your Way to Digital Literacy.”

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