Right now, the Student Clubs pages on this handbook are mostly an agreement: what a club is, and what’s expected of it. They don’t say how a club should actually run week to week, who’s watching whether it’s healthy, or what happens when it isn’t.

Defining the full onboarding -> active process has been a top priority for our team this cycle, and we want to close that gap through the following proposal.

• Students deserve a better experience for the students actually running these clubs
• We need honest and easy way to tell which clubs are active or inactive (and why)
• Institutions need to be better prepared and guided to set up and launch a club
• We strive to have clubs that actually succeed and sustain themselves past their founding leadership.

Everything below is in service of one of those four.

The current pages don’t define a mentor Event Supporter (formerly Mentor) is someone who has already organised a WordCamp and has time to meet with their assigned mentee every 2 weeks, they talk over where they should be in their timeline, help them to identify their issues, and also identify solutions for their issues. role, a lifecycle from application to offboarding, any activity or health monitoring, a leadership succession path, a readiness checklist for the institution applying, or a way for the public page to show off active clubs (no logos linked to club sites, no showcase). Below is what we’re proposing to fix that, and what we’re holding off on until we have real data.

Here’s the proposed workflow to support the above:

• Institutions know what they’re signing up for before they apply. Right now the application page is just a form. We want a short checklist alongside it: who’s needed (a Faculty Advisor + 2–3 founding students), that the Faculty Advisor’s real commitment kicks in after setup, once they become the club’s ongoing mentor, and what’s explicitly not required (no curriculum changes, no budget).
• No club-authored playbook, no commitment agreement. Instead, we publish one shared guidelines doc with success metrics, and clubs set their own 30/60-day goals against it. Lighter to start, easier to keep current.
• Mentors Event Supporter (formerly Mentor) is someone who has already organised a WordCamp and has time to meet with their assigned mentee every 2 weeks, they talk over where they should be in their timeline, help them to identify their issues, and also identify solutions for their issues. focus on setup, not indefinite check-ins. A community mentor gets a new club launched (roughly the first 60 days), then hands ongoing mentorship to the Faculty Advisor, who has the continuity a rotating volunteer pool doesn’t. It’s also the only way mentor time scales past a handful of clubs.
• A real plan for graduating students. Today a club leader graduates and we lose touch by default. We’re proposing three paths: mentor their own club, mentor a different, newly onboarding club, or stay connected as an independent contributor. The middle option is also where new setup-phase mentors can come from.
• An achievable health score, not a binary label. Eight indicators (meetings, events, member growth, documentation, website updates, contribution count, engagement, reporting) replace a vague Active/Inactive tag. We dropped “organized a WPCC event” and “WP Credits participation” from the score: not every club can pull those off, and the baseline shouldn’t penalize clubs for stretch goals. Both stay valuable as things we track separately (more below).
• Planned institutional breaks. We also want to account for periods when clubs naturally need to pause because of institutional vacations, examination periods, semester breaks, or other major academic commitments. We’re considering allowing each club one or two planned breaks per year, during which the club would not be expected to maintain its normal activity cadence or be penalized by the health-check process. The exact duration, approval process, and how breaks affect monthly scoring are still open for feedback.

We don’t currently know which clubs are active, which aren’t, or why: that data just doesn’t exist yet. Before any of the above changes status for a real club, we want to run the health score against every currently recognized club and publish that roster as our starting point. That’s the first thing we’d do, not an afterthought.

In the next 30 days: run that baseline audit; publish the mentor, lifecycle, and shared-guidelines content to the handbook; publish the institution-readiness checklist and the graduating-student pathway; and link club logos to their sites on the hub page.

After that: an Active Clubs showcase on the hub page (needs the audit first), a real mentor-matching process sized to the new setup-only model, an offboarding workflow, and a lighter monthly reporting flow.

Curriculum change is slow and outside our control, so not every institution can integrate WordPress into formal coursework. A club can adopt a contribution activity (a translation sprint, a documentation day) as easily as a workshop, with none of that friction, and several activities already in the Guide (translation sprints, plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. testing, documentation review, contributor orientation) already count as real contribution work. We think clubs are an underused on-ramp into WP Credits specifically where curriculum integration is hardest, and wanted to flag that for the broader program leads rather than sit on it.

• Does the mentor → Faculty Advisor handoff make sense, or does it lose something?
• Anything missing from the institution-readiness checklist that’s bitten a club or school before?
• Any concerns with dropping the club-authored playbook and commitment agreement?
• Is 60 days the right setup window for community mentors, or should it flex by club?
• For program leads: does the WP Credits framing above match what you’re seeing, and is per-club tracking (without scoring it) useful to you?

If you can, weigh in by 30th September. We’d like to start the baseline audit in October.

Please comment with any questions below, and if you’d like to help bring this plan to life please reach out in the post or to me directly at @Muhibul Haque in the Making WordPress Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.