Engineering Community Team/2014-15 planning

In person at Zurich Hackathon


 * ECT goals / purpose currently: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team#Purpose
 * Sumana sees four contributor pipelines: devs, testers, sysadmin, PMish (triage, docs, PM)
 * proposes to concentrate on the first two pipelines
 * make steps for developers discoverable from gadget on local wiki to code/extension in global
 * discoverability both technical and social
 * Can people find answers to their questions? (e.g. getting answers on IRC, discoverable FAQ)
 * define 'success' as high-level, define areas where nothing is done (focus on), make hard traces for stuff we will not do
 * partnerships with other organizations; when should ECT be driving stuff and when the specific teams?
 * Good and frequent communication and giving back to FLOSS world; piggyback on good upstream infrastructure (Google SoC, GNOME OPW, WMDE Wikidata); expertise that we don't have to create (FB: Hiphop, Phab); keep an eye out on opportunities like that
 * (See photos) Three major bubbles: Community Health (Outreach -> Onboard -> Retention, Switchboard (information brokerage), Partnerships with outer orgs) || Bureaucracy/Platform (Processes (tech & social; like conflict management), tools (tech metrics), documentation) || Events (online & offline)
 * (TechNews more in a future "community engagement" area, which should also run communcation support)
 * Currently everybody's doing a little bit of everything in above three main areas
 * We compared https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team#Purpose against the four bubbles above
 * Current topics as our work
 * GSoC, OPW, GCI, FOA
 * RFC architecture, Data dev hub
 * Phabricator - tools migration
 * Finish Community metrics v1.0
 * Active partnerships (upstream, adjacent)
 * Integrate "usual stuff"/gruntwork here to make it more visible, as it can take up to 50% of day time?
 * To reduce gruntwork involvement, teach more other teams how to work in a way that they need less help from us / more "trusted" (e.g. in Bugzilla)
 * Events: Arch Summit, Hackathon, Wikimania
 * We organize, we help, we send participants
 * Events to focus on? (our own ones listed above, vs others like FOSDEM, OSB, PyCon)
 * Diversity as a common denominator in topics above
 * The way we work and if we are content with it, individually and as a team
 * Buddy system / Paired work: Two people involved instead of one (e.g. different paradigms: Pair programming and teaching each other vs one supervising the other, PM Tools Evaluation as a team with skills summing up)
 * Different motivations/methoids; Big/small projects; optional/overhead risk
 * Data-driven goals: Check when makes sense
 * Explain how we work individually
 * Remote work
 * Use as a team to be more structuredly working (than wikipages) via Phabricator, e.g. create dependencies, mark tasks as "can be done by volunteer"?