Volunteer coordination and outreach/ECT Feb 2013 quarterly review

ECT Q1 quarterly revew agenda


 * 1) What BENEFITS have we already offered the organization? (where ECT has moved the needle)
 * 2)   What LESSONS have we learned?
 * 3)   What TIMELINE are we planning for the next 3 months?
 * 4)   What INPUT are we seeking? (list)
 * 5)   Q&A/discussion.

Benefits
Benefits we offer to WMF: And of course we offer participation, learning, & influence benefits to the larger community
 * More contributors fixing urgent bugs (hoo, Krenair, PleaseStand)
 * More maintainers reviewing staffers' and volunteers' code (especially Krenair and iAlex)
 * Bugzilla is a cleaner place to operate
 * Recruiting -- [number] of new contractors or staffers came through direct ECT nurturing or outreach
 * The new beginning of volunteering in Ops - see Dereckson's puppetizations
 * Clear, transparent broadcasting of WMF engineering activity
 * The start of a volunteer product management practice, benefiting admin tools, Lua, & data dumps
 * Supporting:


 * Movement goal of *participation*
 * Movement goal of *innovation*
 * https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper
 * https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities#Goals

Lessons learned

 * Events -- big ones should be rare, small ones should be easy
 * Followup, followup, followup
 * Lots of little points of contact work better for us than outreach on mailing lists
 * Lack of Ops time is a blocker, as is the RT usage
 * Also
 * Toolserver community is underutilized
 * Better tools and processes beat nagging re: activity statuses
 * User groups are harder to get off the ground than we'd thought?
 * Moving the needle on volunteer QA takes sustained effort
 * Volunteers need to be trained in what product management is & how to do it
 * Growing more maintainers is more sustainable than 20% time
 * WMF engineering doesn't have a consistent understanding and approach to open source development

Timeline
March through June 2013:
 * Code review trainings, with Chris Steipp?
 * More volunteers doing directed manual testing
 * Continued shepherding of mentorship processes
 * Amsterdam hackathon for community benefit (skillshare & sprinting)
 * Open Source Bridge for professional enrichment & ecology-building
 * CRM/tracing volunteers

Input we're seeking
We're trying to align the volunteer community with movement goals & WMF goals, but alignment has to be 2-way.
 * Do WMF colleagues understand the community better because of ECT?


 * Are we altering course *in a good way* to account for the community?


 * Are we achieving our goals better & faster because of community collaboration? Key question!

Community's tone. It seems like right now there's a better attitude on wikitech-l than there was 6 months ago; does that seem so to you? Why is this happening? We have some hypotheses...
 * Volunteer product management -- should we do it? Who/how?  what projects should engage in it?
 * (Ideas for activities: where is there no paid PM? What is James working on that's not VE?  What about important gadgets, bots, and tools?)
 * Where do our community members seem to want influence? Who specifically wants influence?  Perhaps we could/should reach out to them?
 * How can we structure and specify volunteer development opportunities to avoid cookie-licking? (see Happy-Melon's January mail to wikitech-l
 * "[Wikitech-l] LiquidThreads status") http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-January/057401.html

How urgent is it that we spell out the code of conduct? We don't know if the next blowup is around the corner

Eng communications -- how is this working for everyone? What are the big holes in engineering project documentation?
 * Would you prefer the status quo, or an alternative vision?

Alternative ideas include:


 * more aggressive outreach to multilingual community
 * get volunteers to write blog posts about their work & to be journalists for WMF
 * open up wikitech.wikimedia.org
 * check what's actually being read via spot checks, "if you're reading this email me" notes
 * offloading more work to Signpost or Kurier?