User:RobLa-WMF/Blog

Good meeting hygiene
My focus this past week has been thinking about how the ArchComm can be more effective. I think we're making incremental progress there, but it's not without pain. I've been much more strident about good meeting hygiene, with clearer agendas, taking good notes, etc. That's not to say that I've done a great job of leading by example, but it's something I'll be pushing myself to be better about.

At my urging, we switched over to using Google Docs rather than using Etherpad, which pains me in many ways because of the (hopefully temporary) switch to a proprietary system. I would like to be able to take notes in meetings in a way that participants feel comfortable saying things that are confidential, and not have to worry about their comment being taken out of context in the public record. One way that I think we can do this is having discipline about reviewing meeting minutes in real time, especially in those cases where the participants know the minutes will be published publicly. Our Etherpad instance doesn't have good authentication, and doesn't have good offline behavior, whereas GDocs works relatively well when the connection is flaky and/or the server is flaking out.

IRC meeting
I think Phab is working pretty well as a scheduling tool, despite the rough edges. The IRC meeting earlier this week went well. I still need to make sure the transcript is posted and make sure that next week's meeting is announced.

Architecture Meetings
The main focus of my work today was the Architecture Committee work from today; first the smaller committee meeting then the IRC meeting. There's a lot of work needed to make this process make more sense to everyone. I have a number of action items out of this that I need to follow through on; for example, making it so that the setup and wrapup from the meetings isn't laden with a ridiculous amount of weird little scripty bits, but instead, we actually have the preparation and the followup from this meeting focus on the content, and not the tools.

Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016
I've been thinking a lot about this, and will probably jot out a little something for wikitech-l. I've already filed a couple of Phab tasks, and gave my spiel about us needing to learn from the IETF. My disappointment thus far is that some of the realtime responses I seem to get have the emotional feeling of "ah, that's nice you're passionate about this, but meanwhile, there's more important work to be done. More important people than you are asking me to do more important things.  Don't worry though, because ... I ... wouldn't want... you ... to be uncomfortable or anything"

I may be underestimating the impact this idea has, and that I need to just be persistent. I'm sure that there is a lot of legitimately important work that needs to be done, but I also get the feeling that there are a lot of people that are freaked out by what they think their managers are telling them, and feeling overly pressured by the demands on their time. We've got a lot of really important work and thinking to do, so it would be tragic if instead we instead focused on "manager happiness" as our primary metric.

RFC review meeting set up for tomorrow
See my wikitech-l email for more on this. One day, I might even link this

Maintaining a blog here
I'm going to try out maintaining a blog of my work stuff here. There are many, many ways in which this is probably the wrong tool for the job ("where's my RSS feed?"), but I'm doing it as an experiment in using some of our latest tech. Mmmm, tasty dogfood.