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.

ArchCom Planning Meeting
ArchCom holds a private weekly meeting to plan community activity. The goal is to help 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, reviewing relevant Phab tickets (mainly on the Archcom-RFC board as of this writing in 2016). 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).

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

Topic-driven meetings
As of this writing in 2016, ArchCom typically prefers to have office hours center around a chosen topic, announced during the days prior to the meeting. The Good meetings page describes the meeting types (under "Taxonomy"), which ArchCom tries to use to classify which meeting type the upcoming meeting is anticipated to be (typically "problem definition", "field narrowing" or "consensus").

Triage meetings
When ArchCom can't agree on a topic, then a triage meeting for the Archcom-RFC board is a common fallback. The goal is to quickly discuss each RFC, prioritizing tasks and placing them in the appropriate column (typically: "Needs Shepherd", "Under discussion" or "Ready for RFC Meeting"). The 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?

Essential processes
The ArchCom chair has wide latitude in deciding how the group should function. This is intended to be list of ArchCom processes considered to be "essential", regardless of who happens to be the chair.
 * Meet weekly
 * Reliable communications
 * Document and maintain the documentation of the RfC process
 * Groom the RfC-related phabricator workboards
 * Keep the RfC-related phabricator tasks updated
 * Organize IRC discussions about RfCs, and posting the results
 * Approve (or deny) RfCs
 * Discussions about ArchCom itself
 * Technical discussions about RfCs