Engineering Community Team/Meetings

The Engineering Community Team organizes two public monthly meetings, always on Tuesday at 17:00 UTC: Check the Calendar for details about the next meetings.
 * ECT Showcase (last Tuesday of the month) - Showing completed tasks and sharing short term plans. Video hangout + streaming.
 * ECT Office Hour (second Tuesday of the month) - Pre-scheduled topics followed by Q&A. IRC.

We also schedule videoconferencing team meetings for the remaining Tuesdays. Their notes are also published here. If you'd like to attend please send us a request.

Meeting notes

 * For meetings hosted before October 2013, see User:Sumanah/archivedtldrmeetings

2013-12-10
ECT IRC meeting at 17:00 UTC via

Placeholder: Meeting notes and IRC logs. (Backup copy)

Topics:
 * Google Code-in
 * FOSS Outreach Program for Women
 * Engineering Community team goals for January - March 2014

2013-12-02
Quick retrospective on the November goals Planning Quick overview of the December goals Quim: Let's go through the Jan Mar quarterly goals next week.
 * Guillaume, Quim and Andre quickly went over their goals and accomplishments for November
 * Guillaume, Quim and Andre quickly went over their planned goals for December

Tools discussion

Quim: what is the problem we want to solve?

Andre: as discussed on the team-practices mailing list: we're starting to have many tools like bugzilla, RT, Trello, Mingle. Each team likes their tool for various reasons. Some teams have moved from one tool to another. Long-term plan: agree on 1 or 2 tools, preferably open-source. Big question: how much are the teams willing to compromise?

Chris: teams using Mingle are starting to move away away from our self-hosted instance, to a hosted instance (by ThoughtWorks, makers of Mingle)

Quim: ECT's work is to facilitate a discussion in order to reach to a common reference. The Gerrit discussion served to find a reference that was enforced. Here we are not trying to enforce anything, although we hope that the reference helps new projects and teams to choose them.

How to get there?


 * This month: define the field:
 * requirements we're considering
 * options we're considering
 * All that coming from a community discussion on the team-practices list
 * Next quarter: discuss, discuss, discuss, agree on the list of requirements and agree on the One Single Tool. And ideally, start implementation, show something in Labs

Andre: summarize discussions on the team-practices list, define a set of criteria and use it to build a table and see what tools meet them

Quim: There is going to be plenty of room for bikeshedding, and it's our role to prevent bikeshedding. We shouldn't have an opinion about the tool but our goal is to guide and facilitate the decision process. We need to identify the primary stakeholders: RobLa, Arthur Richards, S Page, and other people who are interested but don't need to be as involved in the process

One possible split of responsibilities for Andre and Guillaume: Andre starts discussions and facilitates them, Guillaume summarizes and documents (using s to avoid cyclic discussions). Guillaume will also see what we can reuse from the previous discussions that happened over the past few years.

2013-11-26
ECT Showcase meeting at 16:00 UTC via Google Hangout. Use to send your questions & feedback.

Featuring:


 * Google Code-in kickoff, and ECT related tasks already closed. Qgil, Andre, Guillaume.
 * Dashboard for tasks about technical communications
 * 10 students so far, 2 essays completed (in English and Romanian), 6 underway, 3 failed or abandoned
 * Tech news news: Guillaume.
 * Keeping the weekly rhythm, there's a good process now. Each week, the newsletter has been available in 12 to 14 languages, making it AFAIK the most translated weekly publication across Wikimedia projects. MassMessage has been deployed on all wikis and we've tested it successfully to deliver Tech news; we're waiting for the deployment of a final bugfix before switching to this delivery system.
 * FOSS Outreach Program for Women - Round 7, participants announced. Qgil
 * Bugzilla custom CSS cleanup: 16 unneeded CSS files removed, 6 left to stay. Andre
 * Bugzilla Etiquette: Initial draft created, looking for feedback. Andre
 * FOSDEM main track session accepted, and Wikimedia stand proposal submitted. Qgil
 * Technical Writer position published. Qgil
 * ECT Quarterly Review. Qgil

2013-11-19
Last week
 * FOSDEM: Erik Moeller's main track proposal "The Wikipedia Stack" has been accepted. No public page yet. Dimitar submitted an application for a Wikimedia stand.
 * Quarterly review: all went well. QA volunteers' priority was demoted. Chris mentions that this decision is in sync with the prioritization of goals to be presented today in their quarterly review.
 * Google Code-in going well; tasks are being claimed and worked on. Quim says: some tasks have already been completed with patches in Gerrit, which is an argument we can use to convince developers to become mentors of coding tasks.
 * Bug 54985 - Set up SecurePoll poll on enwiki for Arbitration Committee elections fell between the cracks. It was "normal" when it was submitted but then nobody noticed until last week, and now it is "highest". Andre will think how to avoid that requests like this are missed.

Planning
 * Andre must update his quarterly reviews. The rest of quarterly / monthly goals is up to date.
 * Activity pages for ECT:
 * Andre to decide whether to add one for collaboration tools or rename Bug management, increasing its scope
 * Merge "Mentorship programs" and "Volunteer coordination and outreach" into "Outreach"
 * Create one for Upstream relations

2013-11-12
ECT IRC meeting at 17:00 UTC via

Meeting notes and IRC logs. (Backup copy)

Topics:
 * FOSS Outreach Program for Women
 * Google Code-in
 * Engineering Community team quarterly review

2013-10-29
ECT Showcase meeting at 16:00 UTC via Google Hangout http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3Gl-oR2ucU Use to send your questions & feedback.

Featuring:


 * Google Code-in ideas page. Qgil
 * Technical communications/What you can do? guillom
 * GSoC & FOSS OPW wrap-up presentation and lessons learned. Qgil
 * Community metrics: Who contributes code. Álvaro del Castillo
 * New guided bug entry form for Bugzilla newcomers -- andre
 * InlineHistory in Bugzilla, showing metadata changes between the lines -- andre
 * Tech/News — has resumed a weekly publication schedule, is translated into at least half a dozen languages every week. guillom
 * Pywikibot migrated from Sourceforge to Bugzilla; import script by Legoktm, imported 400 tickets, triaged 100 tickets over the weekend -- andre
 * Wikis devroom @ FOSDEM accepted (call for participation). Qgil
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/c/technology/ and Technical communications/Tech blog activity . guillom
 * New experimental process for Engineering Community Team/Meetings. Qgil

2013-10-22
Google Code-in (selection by Google by Nov. 1; program starts on Nov 18; then it lasts about 7 weeks, until Jan. 6)
 * We're going to apply; this is about many many small tasks, each one taking ~2-3 days for a 13-17yo student to complete during their free time
 * Programming: only 1 of the 5 areas of this program. An opportunity for other areas: QA, doc, marketing, design
 * No critical mass last year
 * ECT, QA and Design teams are the only ones concerned at the moment; other teams aren't really prepared for this yet. We may involve them later on during the program, when we/they see progress on other tasks
 * Mentors must respond/review tasks within 36h, and ideally within 24h
 * < Discussion about QA's involvement in google Code-in >
 * Andre: triage-related tasks.
 * Guillaume: Can think of 3 tasks at the moment, one is recurring every week so that makes a few more, another one can be reused a few times as well
 * Quim suggests: Documentation pages to update (use outdated or similar), writing small tutorials (step by step), screencasts, etc. Guillaume will ask the Liaisons team
 * Quim: will find community management-related tasks

Other topics:
 * pywikipediabot bug day
 * ECT Showcase, if there is anything to plan.
 * Things Guillaume may have missed that you really want him to know :)

2013-10-15
Full log.
 * We agreed to prepare Wikimedia's application to the Google Code-in program:
 * qgil: set up Google Code-in page and Google Form with the info agreed here so far
 * qgil: agree participation with QA, UX
 * qgil: coordinate with ECT for outreach tasks
 * andre__ and qgil : triage EASY bugs focusing on code and documentation.
 * We agreed to use try MeetBot in the next ECT meeting on IRC. Instructions.
 * andre__ and qgil to focus first on Google Code-in, and then plan Bug of the Week on November, according to the results obtained.
 * Guide to plan monthly goals: what completed tasks do you want to show at the showcase meeting?

2013-10-01
Experimenting with ECT meetings
 * Quim: would like to work more as a team. We're working well as individuals at the moment, and it's working well overall, but we might be able to work even better together


 * Also, we ought to work more closely with liaisons, community advocacy and the communications team at the WMF


 * And work more closely with "the community" (discussion about what this entails exactly)


 * Monthly check-in: what did we do, and what would we like to do. (reuse monthly report)
 * i.e. like quarterly review, but more lightweight and monthly. Also relates to Rob's wish of getting that monthly showcase of what was done.
 * And liaisons / LCA / Comms could be invited to that monthly retrospective / sync-up
 * One public Google hangout per month; two week later office hour on IRC
 * Release management and QA have now their own meeting. Still invited optionally to ECT meetings and we are open to topics proposed by them.