2021-06-08 Meeting notes

Owned by Heather Greer Klein
Last updated: Jun 08, 2021
3 min read

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Participants

  • @Heather Greer Klein

  • @Lynette Rayle

  • @Juliet Hardesty

  • @Jeremy Friesen

  • @Maria Whitaker

  • @Maxence Gévaudan

  • @Kevin Kochanski

  • your name here!

Agenda

Notes

Walk through “Challenges” section on promoting Working Group Contributions

  • Time, Acceptance, Skill, Frustration - what’s missing?

    • Time zones can be a challenge

      • The opportunity for high-bandwidth collaboration is limited

      • Even harder if the developer’s organization isn’t supporting them

  • Time

    • When time is out, it leaves things hanging, unfinished. Esp. difficult w/out organizational support

      • Probably need to organize iterations to complete unfinished work

      • Finish line becomes the clock, not the deliverable

      • How do we plan to wrap loose threads after a sprint?

      • Is this an unsolvable problem with Agile?

      • Are there situations where individual institutions take community work and finish it up?

      • Planning commitment to the next step/phase/sprint could help

        • With Hyrax-Valkyrie, there’s no scheduled follow up at times, which makes it hard to predict what happens next to the work

        • Ad Hoc invitations/calls for Hyrax Maintenance Working Group may be turning out to be effective

    • Communication at the local/organizational level can be an issue, institution may not be aware of the 6mo expected commitment for Maintenance Working Group

    • Put it on the Partner to weigh the needs of the community and check in there as they plan

      • Reactive planning is more common unfortunately

      • When there’s a standing expectation communicated to the Partners, they might approach a new year of partnership with an expectation to commit hours

      • May be more effective to tie these asks into the academic year

      • Noted that this year is complicated by folks returning to office

      • What is the Partner feeling about planning to commit in general vs. committing only for the things they have a vested interest in?

        • Intention via Roadmap is to be communicative about what future work might be, but there’s a disconnect between what the active developers see vs. what the Partner manager level sees?

        • May help to be more vocal about this in Partner meetings

    • Since the community doesn’t have to spend a lot of effort on fundraising (due to the Partner model), should we consider an approach of using that effort to request developer hours?

      • Jon Dunn is someone who has seen this as the responsibility of people at his upper management level - peer-to-peer cultivation of that expectation at the Partner level

    • Roadmap

      • Can we have Partners vote on priorities and use that to leverage engagement?

        • At least create a contact list of who to reach out to for resources based on who voted on what priorities

      • Roadmap may shift, ie, if the Hyrax Grant comes through, there may be new priorities

  • Organization and Productivity

    • Strong Project Management organization is important for a productive sprint

    • Potential Hyrax Grant includes PO, Tech Lead, etc.

  • Skill & Frustration

    • Tying back to good PO/PM - if tickets are clear, people can just run with it and that’s a huge help

    • Back to communication to Partners, being clear about the work and getting the right developers assigned based on skill can help remove frustration and increase productivity

      • This only works with targeted functionality

    • Competing efforts - Valkyrie for instance could free up a lot of resources and thinking capacity when it moves to maintenance

  • Common theme in this meeting: working groups for ongoing maintenance vs. targeted functionality have different recipes for success and need to be communicated differently

Action items

  • Partner meeting Friday:

    • Cultivate early buy-in on advance planned working group schedules

    • Communicate mutability of the ask (ie, 1 dev 0.5 FTE vs. 2 dev 0.25 FTE)

    • Feedback on how much advance planning they need to allocate resources

Decisions

Focus on partner communication, including setting expectations in advance, being specific about goals of WG’s when possible, and bridging the gaps between devs on the ground and upper management.