Wikimedia Technical Committee/Facilitator's Guide

The facilitator uses a set of defined communications practices to prepare, document, and share committee activities.

Creating the agenda
Each planning meeting records its agenda and minutes in a private Google Doc. To create an agenda:


 * Make a copy of the template (requires access to the Technical Committee Google Drive), and rename the file with the meeting date.
 * Copy action items from the previous week’s meeting minutes into the “Status of our action items” section of the agenda.

Sending the go-around email
One or two days before the planning meeting, the facilitator should send a go-around email to [mailto:techcom@wikimedia.org techcom@wikimedia.org] with a link to the agenda doc. Access to the notes doc is managed through the shared Google Drive, so you can safely ignore Gmail if it prompts you to grant additional access before sending the email.

Template

Subject: TechCom Go-around YYYY-MM-DD

Hi all,

Here is the agenda/notes doc for this week: Please reply with your go-around or any agenda items.

 is scheduled to do the board grooming.

As a reminder, here are the action items from last week’s meeting:


 * 

This week's public RFC review meeting will discuss  ( ).

Thanks!

Taking meeting minutes
During the planning meeting, the facilitator should take notes by subject and speaker, providing links to relevant Phabricator tasks and updating the times shown in the agenda to reflect the progress of the discussion.

To complete the minutes:


 * Extract action items into the action items section.
 * Summarize the minutes into 3-10 bullet points, and add them to the public notes section.

Public notes example


 * Discussed: Strategy for PHP interface changes . This RFC proposes policies and strategies to mitigate problems arising from the need to change PHP interfaces that are implemented by classes defined by extensions. In particular, it proposes a separate policy that defines the stable interface for use by extensions, see .


 * Discussed: Reconsider how we run QUnit unit tests . This RFC proposes restructuring unit tests away from using QUnit.


 * Discussed: Serve Main Page of WMF wikis from a consistent URL . This RFC proposes serving a wiki’s main page from the domain root. The configuration option has been merged as disabled by default, and the RFC is ready for discussion with stakeholders.


 * Discussed: Need to clarify consequences of approved RFC Define criteria for setting explicit PHP support target for MediaWiki . Guidelines established by this RFC should be available on mediawiki.org, including process for announcing changes to the PHP version required for core on wikitech-l.


 * No IRC meeting next week

RFC review meetings
When scheduled, RFC review meetings directly follow planning meetings and take place in #wikimedia-office on Freenode.

Sending a reminder email
An hour before the RFC meeting, send a reminder to wikitech-l.

Example

Subject: Up next: RFC discussion about versioning of the new core REST API.

This was already announced in the last TechCom Radar email, but in case you have missed it:

In an hour, we will be talking about the versioning mechanism for the new REST API in MediaWiki core: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T232485

You can join the discussion on the #wikimedia-office channel.

Chairing the meeting
We use MeetBot commands to manage the meeting and generate notes. See the example notes from 2019-05-29.

Use the bot to start the meeting, call out #info for the meeting summary, and end the meeting. The chair should also collect questions, remind people of the current topic, and try to facilitate a structured discussion.

Public minutes
Following the planning and RFC review meetings, publish the public minutes section of the notes to mediawiki.org as Wikimedia Technical Committee/Minutes/YYYY-MM-DD.

Template


 * Hosted Freenode Discussion on
 * Minutes:
 * Log:
 * RFC Last Call until YYYY-MM-DD: 
 * Discussed:
 * RFC review meeting scheduled for next week:  YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM UTC (HH:MM PT, HH:MM CET) on Freenode in the #wikimedia-office channel

Radar newsletter
Once the public meeting notes have been published to mediawiki.org, send out the TechCom Radar newsletter to [mailto:wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org] and through the mediawiki.org newsletter.

Mailing list
Template Subject: TechCom Radar YYYY-MM-DD

Hi all,

Here are the minutes from this week's TechCom meeting:


 * :  

of the planned discussion topic.> As always, the meeting will take place on Freenode in the
 * IRC discussion next week: 

See also the TechCom RFC board <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mediawiki-rfcs/>.

If you prefer you can subscribe to our newsletter here <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:TechCom_Radar>

Mediawiki.org newsletter
From the newsletter page, select Announce, add Wikimedia_Technical_Committee/Minutes/YYYY-MM-DD as the page title and TechCom Minutes YYYY-MM-DD as the summary.