Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Maps retrospective 2016-06-30

Format
This retrospective was conducted using the "Five finger retrospective" format.

Action Items from last month

 * Yuri: create a longer-term roadmap/vision
 * Discussions happened; needs to be written up. New action item created below.
 * Max: investigate making puppet manifests more self-sufficient
 * Mostly done; waiting for Guillaume to wrap it up
 * Guillaume: upload (documentation) diagrams to commons
 * Not done, will do. Action item added below.
 * Guillaume: restart conversations about opening up rights on production boxes
 * I'm not actually ready for this conversation yet... It will come, but later
 * Kevin: Create phab task to improve Elastic Search GeoData tests
 * DONE: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T137257
 * Kevin: Send email reminder about meeting more frequently but shorter
 * DONE (sent 2016-06-07)
 * Chris: write a draft of "what we learned" from interactive maps conversations
 * DONE - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CKoerner_(WMF)/Work/Lessons_learned_from_maps_conversation

What happened since the last retro (June 6)

 * Wikimania
 * wv rollouts
 * GeoShapes

Thumb: Thumbs up--something that went well

 * Code is improving rapidly!
 * Launched ENwv, RUwv, community is experimenting at DEwv, FRwv
 * Got GeoShapes semi-production
 * Team is collaborating rather than fighting :)
 * Yuri handling the conversation on Wikivoyage regarding Maps (50+ replies!)
 * Feeling to be working FOR and WITH the community +++
 * Announcing on the community traveller's pub was very efficient to get feedback, bugs, feature requests (< hard to track all the bullets and sync the phab tickets, onwiki discussions and actual live deployments all together).
 * Front end code got a large refactor, WV implementation code also got (is getting) a large refactor. Cleaning it was exhausting but now puts us in a much better state for adding and maintaining features. ++
 * Good rework on the productionizing! (Жульен & Max)

Index finger: The ONE thing you want people to know (about how this team has functioned over the last month)

 * GeoShapes is a great new feature!
 * What about the presentation at State of the Maps US?
 * We probably want to allocate some time to documentation next month/quarter?
 * Are these up-to-date? Can't we improve them?
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Kartographer
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Kartographer
 * Needed:
 * Document the Kartographer front-end code,
 * the different resources available ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T134079 )
 * how to use the public APIs directly (without the / tags)
 * the WV implementation code,
 * tips on how to contribute
 * how to enable on a wikivoyage site

Middle finger: Something that did not go well

 * Every little change with ops requires a week-long discussion
 * Concerns about balance between autonomy and top-down control
 * Would prefer isolated maps servers to avoid concerns about impacting other services
 * We are in a confrontational relation with Ops. This needs to change, but I'm not really sure how. I'm sure there is work to do on both side though...
 * Checking participants' calendars before scheduling meetings
 * (This was in reference to a recent case of double-booking)
 * hard to track all the bullets and sync the phab tickets, onwiki discussions and actual live deployments all together (copied from "thumb" above)
 * CL could track and manage the wiki conversation, and make sure actions become phab tickets
 * Chris did great managing the dialog with community earlier...the work continues, and Julien is feeling pressure to do (some/all) of it
 * Would be great to have Chris officially assigned to geohack work

Ring finger: Something about relationships--within the team, between teams, other

 * You all might not see it much, but having a team of liaisons I (Chris) can talk to is like having a (small) army behind our work :) ++
 * It is sometimes hard to collaborate with other teams (e.g. outside Discovery) simply because everyone is busy with their own thing
 * We should be slightly more proactive working with other teams
 * Re-reading SoS notes helps. Should doing so be mandatory?
 * Do we have any clue of the content (and purpose) of Katherine's keynote at State of the Maps US?
 * Not to my knowledge, Yuri will try to talk to Juliet
 * Yuri need to prepare his own presentation

Pinky: A little thing that would be easy to overlook

 * I really appreciate Alex Stinson's input on how the GLAM folks could use Maps. We should keep examples of uses cases in mind (always).

Action items

 * Kevin: Invite Guillaume to next maps retro
 * Yuri: Publish long-term maps roadmap
 * Julien: Make sure work progresses on the State of the Maps presentation
 * Julien: Follow up on documentation improvements
 * Guillaume: upload (documentation) diagrams to commons (carried over)
 * Kevin will schedule a meeting to discuss ops/maps relationship
 * Kevin will schedule a meeting with Yuri and Chris to figure out wiki conversation <-> phab tasks
 * Kevin: Propose making reading SoS notes "strongly encouraged"
 * Yuri might email Discovery asking for examples of maps uses that he could cite in the presentation