When I stepped into the role of Program Manager Program Managers (formerly Super Deputies) are Program Supporters who can perform extra tasks on WordCamp.org like creating new sites and publishing WordCamps to the schedule. for WPCredits in Latin America, one of the goals I set for myself was to explore new ways of bringing students and educational institutions into the WordPress ecosystem.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a growing interest in contributing, but we’ve also identified a common challenge: many institutions want to participate but simply don’t know where to begin. While WordPress already offers well-established contribution areas, integrating an educational community requires clear processes, supporting materials, guidance, and methodologies that make that first contribution experience approachable.

With that in mind, over the past few months we’ve been working on a series of pilot projects. The goal is not to create new contribution areas, but rather to develop replicable models that make it easier for educational institutions to sustainably engage with the contribution opportunities that already exist within WordPress.

Today, I’d like to share the first two pilots we’ve been working on.

Pilot 1: A Replicable Methodology for Introducing New Users to WordPress

The first pilot emerged from a very special opportunity.

During Patrones Hermosos, an international camp organized by Tecnológico de Monterrey and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which came to Costa Rica for the very first time and was hosted at Universidad Fidélitas, we had the opportunity to introduce WordPress as part of the camp’s learning experience.

Three students from the second WPCredits cohort at Universidad Fidélitas took on the challenge of designing and delivering a complete WordPress workshop for 40 high school students participating in the camp.

Across three sessions, they guided participants through creating their first WordPress website using Gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ while introducing key concepts such as website structure, the difference between pages and posts, content creation, digital privacy, accessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), and responsible publishing practices. By the end of the workshop, every participant had built and presented their own website, and the workshop achieved a 100% satisfaction rate.

My role in this pilot focused primarily on the educational side of the project. I worked alongside the team to design the learning experience, define the learning objectives, and develop the guides, templates, checklists, and supporting materials needed to both facilitate the workshop and document every stage of the process.

However, delivering a successful workshop was never the ultimate goal.

From the very beginning, we wanted the entire experience to become a reusable community resource. As a result, we developed a fully replicable guide that documents the methodology, roles, planning process, materials, recommendations, checklists, and evidence needed, so that any WPCredits student, university, or local WordPress community can organize a similar experience without having to start from scratch.

More than just a workshop, this pilot aims to demonstrate that an educational activity can also become a meaningful community contribution when it leaves behind open documentation and a methodology that others can adopt, improve, and reuse.

Pilot 2: A Replicable Model for Integrating Educational Institutions into WordPress Contribution Areas

The second pilot starts with a different question:

What does an educational institution need to successfully integrate into a WordPress contribution area and enable its students to contribute in an organized and sustainable way?

To answer that question, we selected Polyglots as the first contribution area where we’ll validate this methodology.

It’s important to clarify that this pilot is not simply about translating WordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/. Translation is the environment where we’ll test a much broader process.

Our goal is to document the entire journey an educational institution follows – from deciding to participate in WPCredits to having students make meaningful contributions to the WordPress community. This includes preparing teachers and students, developing supporting materials, creating guides and templates, coordinating with the community, providing mentorship throughout the process, tracking progress, and documenting lessons learned.

This pilot will be carried out in collaboration with the Costa Rican Spanish Polyglots team Polyglots Team is a group of multilingual translators who work on translating plugins, themes, documentation, and front-facing marketing copy. https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/ to contribute to the translation of WordPress.org into Costa Rican Spanish (es_CR).

The first institution selected for this pilot is Liceo Experimental Bilingüe José Figueres Ferrer, the first high school in America to join the WPCredits program.

Thirteen students are participating in WPCredits as part of their Community Service Program, creating a unique opportunity to connect academic learning with real contributions to the WordPress project. Because the school is bilingual, students will also be able to leverage their English and Spanish language skills while contributing directly to the Polyglots community and supporting the localization of WordPress for Costa Rica.

As with the first pilot, the objective extends far beyond completing a single contribution. We want to document every step of the process and build a methodology that other educational institutions can reuse when integrating WordPress contribution areas into their own academic programs.

If this model proves successful, it can later be adapted to other contribution areas, reducing the learning curve for new institutions and making it easier for more students to begin contributing to WordPress.

First meeting with students from José Figueres Ferrer Experimental Bilingual High School as we kick off our second pilot program. 🚀 What We Hope to Learn

Although these two pilots focus on very different experiences, they share the same purpose.

We want to better understand what helps educational institutions become active participants in the WordPress ecosystem and how those experiences can be transformed into open, well-documented, and easily replicable models.

Each pilot will help us identify what works, what can be improved, and what resources can help universities, schools, and communities avoid starting from scratch when introducing WordPress into their educational and contribution initiatives.

As both pilots continue to evolve, I’ll be sharing the results, lessons learned, and resources we develop, with the hope that they can serve as a starting point for many other educational institutions around the world.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, or similar experiences. I truly believe that one of WordPress’s greatest strengths is that our best ideas grow when they’re built collaboratively.

Props to @peiraisotta and @celigaroe for reviewing this post.

#wpcredits