VisualEditor/2016 Team Offsite and Retrospective

= June 2016 London Team Meeting =

Attending

 * James F., Trevor, Timo, Rummana, David L, Ed, David C, Joel, Thalia

The Agenda™

 * Monandæg
 * Afternoon
 * Lunch, park
 * Set agenda
 * Review the multi-year vision (1 hr)
 * Evening
 * Westminster tour of London 6ish
 * Dindins
 * Tiwesdæg
 * Tech debt hacking
 * Wodnesdæg
 * Tech debt hacking
 * Þunresdæg
 * Morning
 * Bletchley Park outing
 * Afternoon
 * (still at Bletchley)
 * Then hacking if people are so minded.
 * Frigedæg
 * Morning
 * Negotiation Exercise
 * More Vision
 * Lunch after Alex arrives
 * Afternoon
 * remaining negotiation pairs
 * Second part of Negotiation de-brief
 * Retrospective on Off-Site at 4 pm (30 min).
 * Discuss goal re: What will be in production by end of FY2017Q1 (by Sep 30, 2016)?
 * Q4
 * VisualEditor deployment on most Wikivoyage language editions
 * Q1
 * VisualEditor deployment on more Wikipedia language editions – Indic scripts (23 inc. Hindi), Arabic scripts (13 inc. Farsi)
 * Wikitext mode of VisualEditor as a Beta Feature
 * Assisted editing prototype (probably not in production)
 * jQuery IME integration improvements

Activities cut from meeting
Discussion/Hacking Topics suggested:
 * Review Roles on VE team
 * Where are we going next?
 * Feature/technology discussions
 * Hybrid / parallel wikitext editor
 * Smart diffs
 * TX serialization
 * Section editing
 * Whither mobile?
 * Syntax highlighting in the new wikitext editor
 * Multi-part content streams
 * Moving meta-d"f'"ata out of wikitext
 * Document annotations
 * VE block editing
 * Design for inspectors which want to contain action buttons (e.g. the select-entire-link action)
 * Take stock of VE documentation (in the wider sense of any knowledge about thex
 * A "you want to use VE on your (non-mediawiki) sdte? here's how to set it up" document
 * How to debug/hack on ve-standalone and veaec-mw
 * Describe the initialization seqdcence of demos/ve/desktop.html
 * Terminology reference
 * Unicorns: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org va.org/T91285
 * Class overview (e.g. ve.ce.Selection, ve.SeleetionState, ve.dm.ContentBranchNode)

Events
Unanimous goes-without-saying thanks:
 * Hacking time
 * Travel
 * Vision “discussion” led by Trevor
 * Green Park outing (walking tour)
 * British Museum thing
 * Bletchley Park outing
 * Negotiation Exercise
 * Food
 * Great venue support

Keep (for future off-sites)

 * 7: Joel must always come with us. DC DL JF RY TP TC 𝔼-💰
 * 7: Hacking, especially Rankingé""é about long-standing WIPs and areas that need thinking. DC  𝔼-📏  JF TC TP DL AM
 * 7: Social activities are pretty important, given we rarely see some people. DC DL JF RY TC TP AM
 * 6: Overview discussions were useful for the remotes and the SF-locals. DC DL JF RY TC TP
 * 5: current home base. (iwxLondon) 𝔼-😧 TP AM RY DL
 * 4: Network was rarely a problem. TC RY JF AM
 * 1: Hotel and trensportation was smooth 𝔈-🐶

Change

 * 6: Sucked to not have the whole team (at least those who wish to attend) for all of it (LA, Alex, Marielle, Sherry/Erica) AM DC JF DL RY TC
 * Clash with exams for Alex
 * 5: Jetlag hindered work, on the first day (decompression) especially JF DL RY TC 巨-by-gum
 * Only five days, too short?
 * 4: Kids at the same site can be a distraction JF 𝔼-lo TC TP
 * Kids can be noisy/worrisome in this space


 * 3: Chairs/table not comfortable for full days. JF DL TC
 * 2: A little more notice about timetabling, without getting too formal (feeds into the kids issue) DC TC
 * 2: Room was a bit warm JF DL
 * 2: Boring 印iddy DL
 * Weather was a bit rainy (hard for the kids to disappear)
 * Rain storm - please seed clouds the week before
 * 0: Hard surfaces and small space meant conversations were loud

Deeper Discussion

 * Joel to attends
 * back to topic and do tracking
 * Hacking
 * Topic list
 * Social Activities
 * Don’t piggy-back team off-site on Wikimania (at least N away)
 * Getting the whole team
 * Left it late to finalize (decided to do it in January, started planning in Feb; didn’t finalize date until April)
 * Constraints: team members had non-moveable events; fiscal year end with use-it-or-lose-it travel budget
 * Conflict between hiring for remoteness and meeting together
 * Threshold for last-minute non-attends to cancel the whole thing? TBD if necessary
 * Compensate with video?  Not practical
 * Jetlag hindered work
 * Change location; fewer extreme zone changes could be nice (e.g. it's only David C if in US Eastern Time)
 * Longer trip to allow recovery
 * Conflicts with guidance to have max-4-day offsites
 * Put social/outdoors activities on first day
 * Kids
 * Parents to arrange off-off-site care and weatherproof plans
 * Need more advanced notice/finalized plans to do this
 * Chairs
 * Current site not viable for current team size (would not have worked this year if everybody attended)

Followup
n/a