Team Practices Group/Mailing list analysis

Executive Summary
Transparency is a core value at the WMF. The question was raised as to how the TPG has been balancing its use of its internal private mailing list and the public teampractices list.

The results below show that the team currently has a strong tendency to use the private list, and there appear to be opportunities for increasing transparency.

Findings
As of 2015-06-10, the private list has 7 subscribers, and the public list has 120 (of which 64 have an @wikimedia.org address).

This analysis covers messages sent between April 1 and May 31, 2015

Public List
11 threads (46 total messages)

Who initiated the thread?
 * 9 by TPGers (7 were by one individual)
 * 2 by other WMF/WMDE folks

What topics were covered?
 * 5 were of general “agile” interest
 * 6 were about specific issues being faced at the WMF

Private List
73 threads (235 total messages)
 * 41 threads were appropriately private
 * 1 was a response to an individual asking for TPG help
 * 15 referred to private documents (TPG or WMF)
 * 18 were for TPG scheduling issues
 * 7 were related to TPG-private WMF-private issues (e.g. retros and reorg)


 * 32 threads could/should have been public
 * 23 probably should have been public (about ⅓ might have needed edits)
 * 9 were on general Agile topics
 * 9 were related to team issues within the WMF
 * 5 were related to tools within the WMF (phab, megamatrix, flowcharts)
 * 9 probably could have been public
 * 2 were on general Agile topics
 * 3 were related to team issues within the WMF (including TPG as a team)
 * 4 were related to tools within the WMF (phab, phragile, MPL, Q4 goals)