Update: The 2024 Incident Response Team cohort training is postponed from Q2, and will instead be held during Q4 of 2024.
Summary: Submit your Incident Response Team nominations by February 14, through the button below.
The WordPress Project Community Code of Conduct helps WordPress community members and contributors understand how we aspire to work together in “official” WordPress spaces. When people see behavior that doesn’t match the Code of Conduct, the Incident Response Team can assist in determining if the Code of Conduct has been breached and addressing situations that are in question of doing so. The Incident Response Team does not actively search for or monitor behavior. Instead, this team is a resource to the community for when things don’t go as expected. The Incident Response Team handbook captures the team’s current practices.
The first Incident Response Team cohort was onboarded to the team in December 2022, and it’s now time to train and onboard a second cohort of Incident Response Team members !
The work of taking and responding to incident reports requires a high degree of professionalism and emotional intelligence, and it is often invisible and difficult work. Because of this, individuals are vetted and need to successfully complete a 6-session, cohort-based training prior to joining the WordPress Incident Response Team. Read on for all the details!
How to Join the WordPress Incident Response Team
To best serve the community, Incident Response Team members need to be able to remain calm when faced with difficult situations and possess exceptional listening and communication skills. When responding to incidents, they need to be able to maintain confidentiality* wherever possible and think objectively.
Because of this, new members join the team through a nomination, vetting, and cohort-based training process. Please complete the form below to submit your nomination of who you think would be a good candidate for this team. Nominations are due by February 14.
Note: The Community Team also offers online training for incident response , covering topics like expectations when doing this work, how to take incident reports, and how to respond to reports. This training is available on Learn WordPress for everyone who is interested.
Nominations will go through a vetting process similar to how the Community team vets organizers. For Incident Response Team members, vetting will include:
- Making sure they are in good standing with WordPress
- Familiarity with WordPress and open 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. practices is a plus
- Perfunctory review of social media
- Checking for compliance with the GPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/ . The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html . This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples.
- Reviewing any examples of excellent communication
- Further, it is important that the Incident Response Team be diverse to reflect our global community, and this will be a consideration for the final make up of the team.
The vetting will be done by myself ( @ juliarosia ), @ adityakane , @ angelasjin , and @ samsuresh , and @ chanthaboune will give final approval.
It is our hope that Incident Response Team members can commit to being on the team for one full year. Depending on the volume of incident reports, they can expect to contribute anywhere between 2 to 15 hours a month. In addition, to help Incident Response Team members be well prepared, they are expected to successfully complete the required training prior to joining the team.
Training for the Incident Response Team
While anyone can complete the incident response training on Learn WordPress , potential Incident Response Team members will complete additional training alongside peers in a cohort. The cohort will meet synchronously six times (one hour-ish each), across the span of seven weeks, to discuss Incident Response Team training modules and practice through role play. There will be optional, highly recommended office hours and additional opportunities to practice learned skills.
In addition, Incident Response Team members will be required to complete DEI training that is applicable to WordPress’ global contexts.
The time commitment for this training will be approximately 2-3 hours per week at minimum, across seven weeks. Each session will be offered twice, to accommodate APAC, EMEA and AMER timezones.
As with any team, we will continue to bring on new team members over time. We aim to train and onboard a new cohort every 12 to 18 months.
Questions? Comments? Feedback?
What questions or feedback do you have? Share them in the comments below.
*A note on confidentiality: While the WordPress project tries to work transparently and in public spaces as much as possible, for the safety of community members, incident response needs to be treated confidentially wherever possible. However, anonymized, annual reports are published.
