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 activity digest template
Start a thread on Wikitech-l.

Subject:


 * TechCom activity digest 2020-XX-XX

Links:


 * Committee inbox
 * Committee board activity
 * RFC boad activity

Body template: Activity since Monday 2020-YY-YY.

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:

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.