The Review Team has been playing around with ideas to get through our backlog of themes to be reviewed, so I’ve proposed an IRC meetup in #wordpress-themes on Freenode, tomorrow at 1700 UTC / noon US Eastern.

The model I have in mind is http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Bug_Hunts

In particular, I want to invite any new or wanna-be reviewers to join in; this would be a great chance to get started with reviewing, get your test environment set up and work through your first few reviews with help on hand to understand how the guidelines work.

We have just a few ground rules:

• This isn’t a meeting with an agenda: it’s a group work day. Drop in for as long as you’re available, and get as many reviews done as you can during that time.
• The goal is to crunch through as much of the queue as possible while helping and learning from our peers.
• All reviewers, however new or experienced, can bring questions about how to handle particular issues. Absolutely no penalties for admitting you’re stuck ;)
• Themers, you’re welcome to join in the discussion, try your hand at reviewing, or just lurk and learn the process. However, please don’t use this time to ask about when your own theme will be done — we’re taking everything in queue order, and we’d most likely just encourage you to sign on to review a few themes.
• For new or potential reviewers, more experienced people will try to help out as much as we can with getting started, working with trac, setting up your test environment and the like.