Wikimedia Technical Committee/Processes

This page documents on-going routines for Technical Committee members. This page was originally created as the result of an audit of existing practices, tracked as T125218.

Members of TechCom should budget roughly 20% of their time fulfilling architectural leadership goals. Furthermore, the team often relies on facilitation help from non-members.

Weekly digest template
Start a thread on Wikitech-l.

Subject:


 * TechCom board review YYYY-MM-DD

Links:


 * Committee inbox
 * Committee board activity
 * RFC board activity

Body template: This is the weekly TechCom board review in preparation of our meeting on Wednesday. If there are additional topics for TechCom to review, please let us know by replying to this email. However, please keep discussion about individual RFCs to the Phabricator tickets.

Activity since Monday YYYY-MM-DD on the following boards:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/techcom/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/techcom-rfc/ Committee inbox: Committee board activity: New RFCs: Phase progression: IRC meeting request: Other RFC activity:

Public minutes
During the weekly planning meeting, the facilitator should take high-level notes that capture the main points of the discussion. Following the meeting, the facilitator should clean up and condense these notes (see previous posts for style and format examples), before posting them to:


 * 1) mediawiki.org, as a new subpage under Wikimedia Technical Committee/Minutes.
 * 2) TechCom Radar newsletter, by sending the new minutes subpage from Newsletter:TechCom Radar.
 * 3) Wikitech-l, as reply to this weeks "TechCom weekly digest" thread (or start it, if there wasn't one).

Radar newsletter on mediawiki.org
From the newsletter page, select Announce, add Wikimedia_Technical_Committee/Minutes/YYYY-MM-DD as the page title and TechCom Minutes YYYY-MM-DD as the summary.

Template for the Minutes subpage:

 E.g.: The minutes from TechCom's triage meeting on ….

Present: …

Hosted IRC discussion on   * Minutes: * Log:

Topic …

Next week IRC office hours

RFC review meeting scheduled for next week:  YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM UTC (HH:MM PT, HH:MM CET) on Freenode in the #wikimedia-office channel. 

Mailing list
Send out to [mailto:wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org]

Templates for Wikitech-l mailing list: Subject: TechCom weekly digest YYYY-MM-DD

Hi all,

 Here are the minutes from this week's TechCom meeting:

* :   

* IRC discussion next week:  As always, the meeting will take place on Freenode in the #wikimedia-office channel at HH:MM UTC (HH:MM PDT, HH:MM CEST).

Workboards: *  

You can also find our meeting minutes at 

If you prefer you can subscribe to our newsletter here 

Periodic welcome and practices email
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164538

Every 6 months around MW releases, send out a welcoming overview on Wikitech about current practices and policies, and highlight anything that may have changed.

Meet weekly
This seems to be important for cohesion and momentum. While many of the essential duties could be performed asynchronously, having regular time together has intrinsic value. In addition, several of the processes are more efficient and/or more likely to be done during a recurring meeting.

TechCom 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, TechCom attempts to process the latest RFCs and review anything that has been overlooked, reviewing relevant Phab tickets (mainly on the TechCom-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 TechCom are suggestions which TechCom members may decline).

Meeting chair copies committee meeting minutes from Google Docs to mediawiki.org.

Reliable communications
Committee members need to know how to broadcast updates to each other, how (where) to ask each other questions, and where to post or read status reports not specific to individual RfCs. (Updates about RfCs should go on that RfC's wiki page or phab task.) Email, a conpherence in phabricator, and IRC are all valid channels, but the group should have norms about responsiveness.

Discussions about TechCom itself
This includes discussions about internal business (e.g. membership, meeting schedules), and to work on continual improvement. Regular retrospectives (quarterly or every 6 months) would probably be helpful. Due to timezone issues, it might be worth experimenting with asynchronous retrospectives.