Talk:Volunteer coordination and outreach/ECT July 2013 quarterly review

Engineering Community Team quarterly review
 * July 9, 2013

In attendance: RobLa, Toby, Erik M, Philippe, Jared, Ken Snider, Andre, Chris M, Guillaume, Quim, Howie, Terry, and Tomasz Absent: Alolita Agenda: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach/ECT_July_2013_quarterly_review

Thanks to Rob Lanphier for taking notes.

Nurturing volunteers
(Sumana presents from the outline on wiki) Action item: Toby and Sumana to talk about info architecture (done)
 * Erik would like to see more internal conversations for knowledge sharing and heads up about changes that might impact others. (in context of weekly tech talks)
 * Philippe appreciates Guillaume's work on VE rollout :-)

Lessons learned
(more from the outline)
 * Mentoring - product management volunteers will be funneled through to LCA through Maggie.

Action item: Erik would like to follow up on OPW/GSoC interns -> hiring pipeline (done)

Next quarter goals
(more from the outline)
 * Erik: we should revisit the Bugzilla/RT split.
 * Ken: still getting up to speed. Spoke with RobLa about this.  Still need to understand the workflow.
 * Sumana: perhaps a meeting in August to move forward?

Action item: Ken and Andre to continue conversation, have a meeting/chat in August
 * Andre: one BZ feature missing: ability to make a comment that the requestor can't see as a notification
 * Andre: also see thread "telling the world about our rt email?" from 12/2012 on operations mailing list
 * Guillaume: let's use Redmine!

Questions
1. LCA/Community
 * Should ECT pick up the slack on other projects (LCA)? [Which projects will be getting liaisons after VE push ends? Should ECT pick up the slack on others?]

Howie: Erik: want to emphasize importance of Flow. Big, disruptive change that will need a lot of change management. Will be #1 priority by far.
 * VE will be high priority for forseeable future
 * Flow, Mobile afterward

Howie: for Flow, we might need to collaborate on workflow engine. (on-wiki software-readable metadata)
 * Are we duplicating effort at all?

Nope
 * Can we ask the liaisons to help us grow tech ambassadors membership by recommending it to likely community members?

some discussion of flow liaisons

2. We want to help increase our deployment frequency. Toby: Possible that Analytics might be able to provide usage stats for gadgets
 * Is automated testing the best way to help?
 * Is targeting very popular gadgets & bots like HotCat, Twinkle, and SineBot a good idea? What about user scripts?

Rob: is this a question about whether ECT should encourage volunteers to write tests for these tools/gadget?

Sumana: yes

Erik: seems reasonable as long as we evaluate whether this is working

3. We're identifying which upstream open source projects we ought to be making closer relationships with. We have a list of stuff we sometimes need security updates for. See also: Action item: Sumana to consolidate & prioritize
 * What should we prioritize?
 * Is there already an inventory?
 * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FLOSS-Exchange
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Upstream_bugtrackers
 * Toby: Hadoop
 * Quim: Ryan Lane and OpenStack (this is fine)
 * Jeremy: Bugzilla
 * Jeremy: Promoting Limn more (D3 library), Toby: discussion on whether it is necessary
 * Gerrit? Chad has a pretty good relationship with upstream, spoke with Will Norris

4. We aim to help more Toolserver tools move to Tool Labs (including a doc sprint in late July.) DocSprint in late July (Ryan, Sumana, Silke, Marc-André)
 * What should the specific goal be for December? Proportion of bots/tools moved to Labs?
 * Are there WMF internal tools that we need to move ASAP?

Erik: We need to ramp up our engagement on this in the coming months.

Let's check user pain points. Silke + Sumana action point: check pain points of users - Sumana to do