Update Five for the Future Documentation to Support Company and Contributor Onboarding and Retention

[harishankerr]

As discussed in the dedicated Five for the Future session at the 2023 Community Summit, and further analyzed in this Make/Project blog post, lack of information on resources on how to go about Five for the Future emerged as a major blocker - both for companies and self-sponsored contributors wanting to pledge their time.

A great way to fix these issues would be to create new documentation in the Five for the Future site that will support both 5ftF organizations and self-sponsored contributors in helping them find their way through their contributor journey.

After some brainstorming, I have arrived at a list of contents that we will need to prepare to update the Five for the Future site, and I'm listing them below:

• About Five for the Future: Explain Five for the Future, Clearly articulate what counts as a contribution as mentioned in Clarify and communicate 5ftF definition #119
• Individual Contributor Guide: How to pledge, benefits of consistent contributions, contributing consistently and sustainbly, growing as a contributor, FAQ
• Company Guide: Why pledge & benefits of contributing, How to create a pledge, Onboarding and starting to contribute, Set up a contribution team, Contributing effectively - Internal company contribution days, contribution sprints, identifying projects, potential list of projects to contribute to, FAQ, Company case studies (related to Modify the text on #5ftF as an individual contributor's role has changed.  Marketing-Team#317)
• PR Materials/Resources for Five for the Future
• Update Five for the Future White Paper for content and visualization
• Get Help!

For now, each checkbox represents a new page (or section) in the Five for the Future website, however the final presentation might differ, after we sync with the website redesign project.

[harishankerr]

I have started working on this project, and I have created Google Docs to track each task:

• About Five for the Future
• Company Contribution Guide
• Individual Contributor Guide
• 5ftF PR Materials/Resources
• Updated Whitepaper

These documents only contain outlines for now, but we'll be adding content to these docs.

[naokomc]

I added the "Onboarding: How to start contributing?" section of the Company Contribution Guide doc.

Here's the direct link to the section.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LmnhHX1aU4hn7aoZE2um9tNBaiRaoOTJXhjdmyTaZjA/edit#heading=h.2gxgm4z7ygae

[kafleg]

I'm not sure if we discussed this or not, but we also need a team that will closely communicate with the company management who is supporting the 5FTF program.

This team can give feedback about the contribution they made to the WordPress project and can also make them interested on supporting more members/hours for the WordPress project.

[peiraisotta]

Added the following sections to the Individual Contributor Guide:

• How to pledge
• Benefits of consistent contributions
• How to start contributing consistently
• Sustainable contributions
• Growing as a contributor

Added the following sections to the Company Guide:

• Benefits of Five for the Future for organizations and how to achieve them

All sections are in-progress. Feedback and comments are welcome.

[patriciabt]

The remarks I often get from smaller companies when I tell them they should join, is:
"Why 5%? we do not want to commit to give 5% of our resources"
(last time last week!)

It may even prevent them to have one of their employees to contribute even only 1 hour/week (2.5%) or even for some months 4 hours/week (10%) or more when their employees are for example organizing a WordCamp.

The problem they see is that's it's an ongoing and non-fluctuable commitment.

If you could clarify this point in the documentation, I think it would help.

Another point is to show in the documentation that this is a community project, not an Automattic project, I had a lot of reactions about that confusion.

[patriciabt]

Overlaps with [Documentation proposal] Guides and templates for contributors to propose "Five for the Future" to their employers #11 in the contributor-handbook repository