Team Practices Group/Onboarding

These are the various onboarding tasks for everyone involved in onboarding new hires to the Team Practices Group.

Manager tasks

 * Mail out welcome to the team email
 * Mail out welcome email announcement
 * Establish expectations about logistics (work hours, location, etc)
 * Add new hire to staff page
 * Add new hire to internal TPG mailing list
 * Review remote meeting set up
 * Review org structure and how the TPG relates to other teams
 * Ensure new hire is on relevant team meeting invites
 * Review health check survey process
 * Discuss nuances of working in our transparent, community-oriented environment
 * Establish expectations around engagement with teams new hire will be supporting
 * Review new hire tasks with new hire
 * Discuss what's appropriate for public vs private communication in our environment (err on the side of public)
 * Review the notion of 'assume good faith'
 * Add new hire to the team's shared Google Drive folder

Onboarding buddy tasks

 * Review TPG team docs, mission, values, and regular meetings
 * Review different tools in use for what, set up with relevant accounts (wikis, Phabricator, hangouts, IRC & relevant channels)
 * Ensure new hire is on main staff channels in IRC
 * Run new hire through IRC basics
 * TODO: add information on critical channels and the "hoops" you have to jump through
 * TODO: add information on how to use IRC for n00bs
 * Add to relevant Phabricator projects
 * Register up for a Phabricator account using the "Login or Register / Mediawiki" link, not the LDAP link
 * Ask (via email, etc) for that account to be added to the relevant projects
 * Team-Practices (Arthur)
 * Team-Practices-This-Week (Arthur)
 * Triagers (?) (grants ability to do bulk edits)
 * Project-Creators (grants ability to create Sprint projects)
 * Projects specific to teams you are working with (ask developers on the team)
 * Be sure to read the phabricator tips page in the links section below
 * Review pertinent mailing lists, help new hire subscribe
 * (See the list of lists in the links section below)
 * WMF All (if not already done by Arthur/HR/IT)
 * WMF SF or other local lists
 * TPG public
 * other...?
 * Ensure a basic level of wiki knowledge
 * See: https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Systems_guide_for_new_hires#Our_wikis
 * Visual editor vs. source edit
 * Discussion pages (including indentation and signing)
 * Subscribing to pages; enabling email notifications
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style
 * Notably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters#Section_headings
 * Sub-pages
 * Templates
 * Examples: User page, meeting minutes
 * Practice joining hangout in a conference room
 * Show new hire how to set up user pages using cool templates
 * Discus SUL (a recent change in the wikimedia ecosystem)
 * Set up one user page, on wikimediafoundation.org
 * Copy the template from another TPG user page
 * On all other wikis you have staff accounts on, edit those user pages to add links to the foundation user page
 * Discuss nuances of working in our transparent, community-oriented environment
 * Review staff/contractors page
 * Review the notion of 'assume good faith'
 * Review policy around editing projects with personal vs staff accounts
 * Ensure official portrait is used on user page and for icon/avatar in everything
 * Phabricator
 * Gmail/Calendar
 * Staff page, TPG team page

New hire tasks

 * Welcome email announcement draft
 * Add contact info to officewiki contact list
 * Review HR's onboarding docs
 * If you got a laptop but not a headset, request a headset
 * Set up user pages
 * Set annual goals
 * Add new hire to team page
 * Schedule regular 1:1s with manager (1 hour, recurring weekly)

Useful links

 * Office contact list
 * Team Practices Group documentation
 * Phabricator
 * How to create your Phabricator account
 * Key concepts for how Phabricator actually works
 * Mailing Lists
 * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Overview
 * Public mailing lists
 * teampractices list
 * wikitech-l - Mediawiki engineering
 * Wikimedia IRC channels

Links to engineering resources
While you may or may not be interested in actually hacking on Mediawiki/Wikimedia stuff, it will be useful to be familiar with these resources as you are supporting engineers at the WMF:
 * New hire information (on officewiki)
 * How to become a MediaWiki hacker
 * Mediawiki book
 * Security for developers
 * Developer hub
 * Performance guidelines
 * Architecture guidelines
 * Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team - the folks who manage our release pipeline
 * Deployments
 * Scrum of scrums

TPG Welcome email
Welcome to the Team Practices Group!

We're really excited to have you join us and want to make your first days/weeks/months both productive and fun.

Below are some quick links to get you started.

Our team: http://bit.ly/WMFStaff

Team portal: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group

Goals: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals

Chat: IRC #wikimedia-teampractices (freenode)

Email: teampractices@lists.wikimedia.org (Public default discussion list) wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org (Public Wikimedia engineering mailing list) tpg@wikimedia.org (Private internal team mailing list; public list preferred)

Task tracking: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/56/ (General backlog and inter-team communication) https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/1105/ (Weekly workboard)

If you get lost or are confused about what you should be doing, then grab one of your new team mates and chat over coffee, tea, milk, beer, etc.

We are happy to have you with us!