Onboarding into collaboration for contributors without prior GitHub experience

Description

Discussed in the Office Hours on August 22, 2026 #3640. Agendas and tasks live on GitHub, and the same ten to fifteen people read them. Many contributors have no GitHub account and no linked profile, which also prevents their contributions from being credited. A decision is needed on what onboarding should look like from now on.

Work steps

• Assess the three options: more work in Google Docs, the new notes feature in WordPress, or an introduction to GitHub as a workshop
• For the workshop, define the minimum scope: reading, commenting on and assigning issues, plus the basics of Markdown; forking, branches and pull requests stay out of it
• Decide on one option and document the reasoning
• Check whether the mentoring sessions for new contributors can include GitHub
• Anchor the result in the onboarding material and in the handbook

Context

Mentoring sessions for new contributors do not cover GitHub; they cover the WordPress.org profile and Slack. That is why the agenda is published as a blog post again, which is a workaround. The effort for a workshop is smaller than expected, because only issue work and Markdown are needed.