Wikimedia Technical Committee/Processes

T125218

Overview
ArchCom has a number of web pages and a number of routines that the group performs on a weekly basis. These include: Members of ArchCom should budget roughly 20% of their time fulfilling architectural leadership goals. Furthermore, the team often relies on facilitation help from non-ArchCom members.
 * Private video call
 * Public IRC meeting

This page is expected to become documentation of the ongoing responsibilities (e.g. routines and habits) expected from ArchCom and the supporting members.

Meeting Prep

 * Through the week, RFCs accumulate in the "Inbox" column of the Archcom-RFC board.
 * The meeting organizer prepares the public agenda/minutes:
 * Template: Architecture committee/MeetingNoteTemplate (include with )
 * Collection of past minutes: ArchComMinutes
 * Placeholder made for private doc
 * Attendance is private, but everyone is invited to add items to the agenda for the next meeting (additions from outside of ArchCom are suggestions which ArchCom members may decline)
 * Shortly before the meeting (typically 60 minutes prior), the organizer copies the agenda into a GDoc for realtime collaborative editing.

ArchCom Planning Meeting
Goal: Provide clear, collaborative and timely counsel on architectural decisions. To do this, ArchCom attempts to process the latest RFCs and review anything that has been overlooked. The group should also give a space of other business and conversations between the Committee members.

Agenda:
 * Agenda bashing: summarize agenda and offers opportunity to alter it
 * The Committee checks anything that has been put into the meeting agenda. These are usually from committee members
 * Shepherd status check and action item review
 * Ask each ArchCom member about their RFC-related shepherding work
 * What is the "tension level" of your RFCs (w.r.t. author tension)? Is the tension level indicative of priority?
 * Last week+this week’s RfC office hour
 * Ensure we're making appropriate forward progress on last week's RFC
 * Make sure we have a good plan for chairing this week's ArchCom RFC Office Hour
 * RfC inbox triage ArchCom-RFC workboard
 * note: this part of the meeting is evolving per T125865- Assign RFCs to ArchCom shepherds
 * If the group agrees the task is important enough for a shepherd, attempt to find an assignee in the meeting
 * If there is no logical/available shepherd, move it to “needs shepherd” and it will be triaged in the ArchCom RFC Office Hour
 * If the task needs more discussion, assign committee member to comment on the task, and add it to the backlog column.
 * Queue for future RfC office hours
 * Ensure proper ordering on "Ready for RFC meeting" column on #ArchCom-RFC workboard
 * Any high priority RFCs that are being neglected?
 * Other business
 * ArchCom's descretion
 * Review proposed agenda for next week's RFC meeting on the google doc.

ArchCom RFC Office Hours
Time: Every Wednesday from 2pm -3pm Pacific

Goal:

Publicly discuss, sort an assign tasks in the "Ready for RFC Meeting" and "Needs Shepherd" columns.

Agenda:
 * All attendees join the "#wikimedia-office" chat in IRC. Meeting chair starts the meeting.
 * The meeting chair pulls tasks from the upcoming event in Phabricator for discussion and posts tasks in the chat.
 * Attendees discuss details.
 * The task should be handled so that it is either: Set to "Stalled", assigned, moved to the correct column (or any combination of these)

Note: The meeting is time boxed. Interaction and discussion are more valuable than task processing.

Meeting facilitator between-meeting responsibilities

 * Meeting facilitator copies committee meeting minutes from Google Docs to mediawiki.org
 * Post IRC minutes to Phab event
 * Extra credit: post full minutes in Phab Paste
 * Post upcoming agenda to upcoming Phab event
 * Closer to the date, announce the RFC meeting agenda on wikitech-l

Followup shepherd duties
work in progress!


 * Contact authors of RFCs to triage and ask them if they want a meeting
 * Propose working groups?
 * Contact people on older RFCs to see if they can move forward?