Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2013-12-10

2013-12-10

ECT IRC meeting at 17:00 UTC via #wikimedia-meetbot ^connect

Meeting notes and IRC logs. (Backup copy)

Topics:

Meeting started by qgil at 17:01:47 UTC (full logs).

Meeting summary

Introduction (qgil, 17:01:54)
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team/Meetings#2013-12-10 (qgil, 17:04:31)
Google Code-in (qgil, 17:05:30)
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In (qgil, 17:05:38)
2. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In#mediaviewer/File:Wikimedia%20at%20Google%20Code-in%202013.png/0 (qgil, 17:08:17)
FOSS Outreach Program for Women (qgil, 17:19:37)
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_7 (qgil, 17:19:57)
2. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Monteirobrena/OPW (qgil, 17:26:56)
3. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/MediaWiki.org_Main_Page_tweaks (monteirobrena, 17:28:32)
Engineering Community team goals for January - March 2014 (qgil, 17:37:02)
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2013-14_Goals#Engineering_Community (qgil, 17:37:15)
2. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team#January_to_March_2014 (qgil, 17:38:26)
3. <andre__> my personal plans so far are on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Task_list#Plans_for_Q1.2F2014 (qgil, 17:40:17)
4. My plans will be: regular tasks (blog posts, reports, tech news) + continue to try to recruit people for tech news + devtools project, in a nutshell (guillom, 17:40:47)
5. ACTION: andre__ and guillom to detail steps to reach "Project management tools: plan agreed and started" in their personal plans. (qgil, 17:43:18)
6. ACTION: andre__ to bring the discussion about the best way to "report once, publish anywhere" in our next ECT weekly meeting. (qgil, 17:44:53)
7. https://korma.wmflabs.org doesn't seem to load right now, hm (qgil, 17:52:54)
8. http://korma.wmflabs.org/ (qgil, 17:54:48)
9. ACTION: EC team members to fill their sections under https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team#January_to_March_2014 by next Tuesday (qgil, 17:59:19)

Meeting ended at 18:00:15 UTC (full logs).

Action items

andre__ and guillom to detail steps to reach "Project management tools: plan agreed and started" in their personal plans.
andre__ to bring the discussion about the best way to "report once, publish anywhere" in our next ECT weekly meeting.
EC team members to fill their sections under https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team#January_to_March_2014 by next Tuesday

Action items, by person

andre__
1. andre__ and guillom to detail steps to reach "Project management tools: plan agreed and started" in their personal plans.
2. andre__ to bring the discussion about the best way to "report once, publish anywhere" in our next ECT weekly meeting.
guillom
1. andre__ and guillom to detail steps to reach "Project management tools: plan agreed and started" in their personal plans.

People present (lines said)

qgil (105)
guillom (27)
andre__ (23)
monteirobrena (11)
meetbot-wm (2)

Full log

17:01:47 <qgil> #startmeeting
17:01:47 <meetbot-wm> Meeting started Tue Dec 10 17:01:47 2013 UTC.  The chair is qgil. Information about MeetBot at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/46377.
17:01:47 <meetbot-wm> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
17:01:54 <qgil> #topic Introduction
17:02:01 <qgil> Hello! Welcome to our monthly Engineering Community team meeting.
17:02:20 <qgil> Some introductions: the team is formed by andre__ , guillom , sumanah (enjoying her sabbatical atm) , and myself: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team
17:02:43 <qgil> Any attendees not-idling for this meeting? Sa hi!
17:02:45 <qgil> say
17:03:01 <guillom> hi!
17:03:14 <monteirobrena> hi
17:03:35 <qgil> hi monteirobrena ! First time we "meet". We will tal about OPW.
17:03:47 <qgil> gosh: t a l k
17:04:18 <qgil> Anyway, new participants please wave when you read this line. Let's continue.
17:04:25 <qgil> The schedule of the meeting can be found at
17:04:31 <qgil> #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team/Meetings#2013-12-10
17:04:55 <qgil> (I'm still not sure whether URLs without the #link comand are also processed as URLs...
17:05:03 <qgil> Watch that wiki page to get notified about our the various incarnations of our weekly team meeting.  :)
17:05:12 <qgil> You can propose any topics. You can ask any questions. You can se the MeetBot commands specified at https://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot to improve the meeting notes.
17:05:23 <qgil> Alright, first topic:
17:05:30 <qgil> #topic Google Code-in
17:05:38 <qgil> #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In
17:05:46 <qgil> So far so good!
17:06:19 <qgil> From the point of view of the org admins, I think andre__ and me agree that the toughest point has been passed
17:06:25 <qgil> successfully
17:06:25 <andre__> yes
17:07:01 <qgil> GCI still requires work hunting for more tasks, but we are finding "mines"where we can dig multiple tasks, clones.
17:07:49 <qgil> Also, the average quality of the contributions is somewhat improving since "good"students tend to repeat, while the ones that have more dificulties tend to either go elsewhere or try with different tasks, fitting better with thir skills.
17:08:17 <qgil> #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In#mediaviewer/File:Wikimedia%20at%20Google%20Code-in%202013.png/0
17:08:37 <qgil> That is a nice graphic, and it took a lot of effort to get thse lines up.
17:09:03 <qgil> Th good news is, though, that we don't need to keep those trends in terms of productivity
17:09:40 <qgil> In fact it would be ok to relax the rythm a bit in exchange of getting new tasks more complex / challenging for the students that can crunch simpler tasks in a couple of hours.
17:10:07 <qgil> What really matters is to keep the buffer of +30 tasks open.
17:10:32 <qgil> while offering different types of tasks e.g. not 50% being clones of a single type of task
17:10:58 <andre__> Finding good and interesting tasks and mentors, yeah. :)
17:11:18 <qgil> I still wish we would et a more distributed involvement from mentors... Some are working A LOT (including external contributors, not official GCI mentors, reviewing patches and bug reports)
17:11:57 <qgil> While others still have to publish 1-5 tasks, and I'm not even succeeding at getting an email reply from them (not that I have insisted)  :)
17:12:21 <andre__> :-/
17:12:35 <andre__> if you need a grumpy guy nagging, I volunteer :)
17:12:44 <qgil> Well, I guess this is a good summary of the current situation. In the next IRC meeting GCI will be completed, and we will be hopefully still alive to explain it.  ;)
17:12:58 <andre__> hehe
17:13:15 <qgil> nah andre__ I think your contribution in the past... 5 weeks has been ESSENTIAL
17:13:21 <qgil> I couldn't have done it alone
17:13:33 <andre__> same to you. Big thanks!
17:13:50 <qgil> and now things are more manegeable, and it is good that you con put your focus i other tasks, while still helping occasinally as you do
17:13:58 <qgil> Ok, any questions or comments?
17:14:57 <guillom> We'll probably touch on this later, but I think that GCI has been weighing on other tasks, like the devtools project, whose schedule may be slightly delayed due to the work that has needed to be done on GCI
17:15:18 <guillom> I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing :)
17:15:42 <guillom> But I think we need to acknowledge it
17:15:51 <andre__> It's probably not only GCI but to some extend also other stuff I needed to work on, plus to a small extend also my lazyness :-/
17:16:14 <andre__> But we have an initial draft for a devtools discussion kickoff now, that we need to agree on and then we can go  public.
17:16:33 <guillom> agreed; I'm just saying, GCI had an impact on that project and other task
17:16:37 <guillom> tasks
17:16:56 <qgil> Yes, true. Then again ECT was asked to take on the Tools task when we had already decided to dive into GCI, and it came almost out of the blue (not the discussion on Project Management Tools, but the request to ECT to facilitate it and get actual results from it)
17:17:13 <guillom> qgil: agreed
17:17:17 <andre__> yepp
17:17:42 <guillom> I just wanted to point it out in case people ask :)
17:17:48 <qgil> Not a big deal: in the worst case scenario the Tools discussion can wait a couple of weeks while GCI has very hardcoded deadlines, and very measurable results.
17:17:56 <qgil> yes, god point guillom
17:18:00 <qgil> good
17:18:20 <guillom> GCI was underway, and not something we could drop or delay
17:18:28 <qgil> Any othr comments before moving to the next opic?
17:18:49 <qgil> (what is wrong wiith my keyboard?) I'll type slower
17:18:54 <qgil> h
17:18:59 <qgil> OH!  :)
17:19:21 <qgil> alright
17:19:37 <qgil> #topic FOSS Outreach Program for Women
17:19:57 <qgil> #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_7
17:20:28 <andre__> Yay!
17:20:35 <qgil> The good news is that we selected 6 participants, and I believe we have six good projects with 6 strong teams.
17:20:49 <qgil> monteirobrena among them. Hi!
17:21:00 <andre__> welcome & congrats!
17:21:14 <guillom> welcome monteirobrena!
17:21:37 <monteirobrena> thank you
17:21:45 <qgil> monteirobrena, I guess the fact tat you are here means... that you are already following wikitechl-l?
17:22:07 <monteirobrena> yes
17:22:27 <qgil> (I could have sent an invitation for this meeting to OPW and GCI mentors and participants, hm)
17:23:06 <qgil> monteirobrena, first impressions about the community? Do you want to pitch your project? Sorry for not warning you in advance!  :)
17:24:01 <monteirobrena> I'm getting used to the way of communication
17:24:35 <monteirobrena> I never used IRC before
17:24:48 <andre__> you mean IRC, talk pages, mailing lists, and the dozens of other things? :P
17:25:06 <monteirobrena> yes yes
17:25:20 <qgil> no worries, we have all been there once
17:25:45 <monteirobrena> So the project is about MediaWiki Homepage Redesign
17:26:24 <guillom> Oh, neat
17:26:44 <monteirobrena> we already have some discussion about the new layout
17:26:56 <qgil> #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Monteirobrena/OPW
17:27:21 <monteirobrena> and the idea is reconstruct it
17:27:34 <andre__> Bringing the design into our current times? That will be interesting.
17:28:22 <qgil> ... something that monteirobrena is not aware yet is that a couple of veteran contributors already contacted me concerned about this project and the potential trouble the OPW intern was heading to...  :)
17:28:32 <monteirobrena> #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/MediaWiki.org_Main_Page_tweaks
17:29:10 <qgil> The scope is to propose a redesign of the homepage that someone could copy&paste to the current home page
17:29:48 <qgil> Heather is the mentor for UX, and I will be helping monteirobrena in her interactions with the community
17:30:25 <qgil> I'm looking forward to see how a beautiful proposal emerges!
17:31:04 <qgil> If we get the new home actually changed or not during the OPW, that is another thing, and itdepends on community consensus. No pressure, really!
17:31:21 <guillom> Just a quick note (you probably know this already) that a trial and error approach works best with the community; i.e. draft a proposal, get feedback, use feedback to make another proposal, etc.
17:31:36 <guillom> iterative improvement using community feedback is the best way to make changes
17:33:04 <monteirobrena> guillom: absolutely #agreed
17:33:20 <qgil> Yes, the right process will be the first item I will discuss with monteirobrena , and you can expect an email from her to wikitech-l soon.
17:33:40 <qgil> Ok, any other questions/comments about OPW?
17:34:51 <qgil> PS: I'm a bit late on this, blaming GCI and other tasks here and there. I'm scheduling meetings with all the teams hopefully this week, although no teams have any blockers
17:35:09 <qgil> By the way, the official sttart of the program is... TODAY!
17:35:43 <qgil> Comments?
17:36:28 <qgil> (I should have typed more "#info"...)
17:36:42 <andre__> I didn't know it's already today. Nice, and good to know.
17:37:02 <qgil> #topic Engineering Community team goals for January - March 2014
17:37:15 <qgil> #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2013-14_Goals#Engineering_Community
17:37:47 <qgil> This link above defines the goals that the ECT has agreed with "Wikimedia"
17:37:59 <qgil> At least with the Wikimedia Foundation directors
17:38:03 <qgil> and...
17:38:26 <qgil> #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team#January_to_March_2014
17:38:54 <qgil> Shows how each f us plans to achieve those goals and other smaller tasks in the next quarter.
17:39:02 <qgil> The section is empty, hm...  :)
17:39:15 <qgil> guillom, andre__ , thoughts?
17:39:39 <guillom> Heh, well, I guess we ought to fill that out, yes :)
17:39:40 <andre__> my personal plans so far are on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Task_list#Plans_for_Q1.2F2014
17:40:17 <qgil> #info <andre__> my personal plans so far are on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Task_list#Plans_for_Q1.2F2014
17:40:24 <andre__> ah yeah
17:40:31 <guillom> My plans will be: regular tasks (blog posts, reports, tech news) + continue to try to recruit people for tech news + devtools project, in a nutshell
17:40:41 <guillom> hmm
17:40:47 <guillom> #info My plans will be: regular tasks (blog posts, reports, tech news) + continue to try to recruit people for tech news + devtools project, in a nutshell
17:40:52 <guillom> Is this how it works?
17:41:06 <qgil> Not that easy, I would say...  ;)
17:41:35 <qgil> "Continue evaluation of Project management / issue tracking tools." is not the same as "Project management tools: plan agreed and started"
17:41:52 <andre__> yes, need to break down things into substeps
17:42:03 <guillom> I think part of the requirements gathering will overflow into January, but the rest of the schedule looks good
17:42:20 <qgil> (the first sentence comes from Andre's plans, the second from the official ECT goals, and I can't even quote guillom , who has also responsibilities over this task.
17:43:10 <andre__> Currently I have three pages where I'm expected to put plans. And one day I will learn how to use transclusion in MediaWiki to not always fail in copy&pasting.
17:43:18 <qgil> #action andre__ and guillom to detail steps to reach "Project management tools: plan agreed and started" in their personal plans.
17:43:32 <guillom> agreed
17:44:34 <andre__> alright
17:44:53 <qgil> #action andre__ to bring the discussion about the best way to "report once, publish anywhere" in our next ECT weekly meeting.
17:45:16 <guillom> What is this about?
17:45:29 <qgil> guillom, any specific goals ref Tech News consolidation, or Tech Ambassadors?
17:46:02 <guillom> My goal is not to be needed for Tech news; which doesn't mean I won't continue to work on it, just that I shouldn't be necessary
17:46:10 <qgil> guillom, andre__ has been complaining (and we share the feeling) that reporting in many places is not optimal. Letś try to improve the siatuation, and letś talk about this next week.
17:46:22 <andre__> I started my planning on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Task_list , then https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team#Quarterly_goals was added, lately also https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_and_QA_Team#Dec-Feb_Goals
17:46:43 <guillom> Ah, ok; specificity helps me understand :)
17:46:47 <qgil> guillom, is that goal meant to be completed by the end of March?
17:47:38 <qgil> guillom, the one abot Tech News, I mean.
17:48:04 <guillom> qgil: no; it's not something I have control over. It's something I want, but unfortunately I don't have a magic hat out of which I can pull up interested volunteers to help
17:48:13 <guillom> :)
17:48:34 <qgil> guillom, agreed, but then it would be good to define an intermediate goal that you can influence by the end of March
17:48:52 <qgil> guillom, please think about this, and let's discuss next Monday, ok?
17:49:22 <qgil> Same for Tech Ambassadors, I think we all agree that we need to "improve" but it is unclear what is the goal and what is the next step to reach there
17:49:27 <guillom> ok, I'll continue to think about it; I'd love to hear suggestions about this, if you have any
17:50:29 <qgil> guillom, yes, the three of us (additional help is also welcome) need to squeeze our brains defining these reachable, measurable  goals
17:50:43 <qgil> guillom, at least the discussion about Tech News last week at wikitech-l was useful
17:50:49 <qgil> Anyway, about my own goals...
17:51:18 <qgil> "We innovate in Outreach Program for Women mentorship, and include new areas of engineering" is about completing OPW Round 7. No secrets.
17:52:00 <qgil> "We use a developer/community metrics dashboard to understand what's been languishing the longest, and improve the patch process" means that I need to get back to work closer with Bitergia. W are late, currently, and we still don't have a dashboard we would consider satisfactory
17:52:54 <qgil> #link https://korma.wmflabs.org doesn't seem to load right now, hm
17:53:30 <qgil> "We systematically reach out to FLOSS projects we rely on[1]" Sumana started this, and I hope Sumana can continue. To be discussed.
17:54:17 <qgil> I will have to help in a way or another while preparing Erik's session at FOSDEM about "The Wikipedia stack", and this will be a goal that I will add to my list
17:54:21 <andre__> wmflabs requires http://
17:54:24 <andre__> not https://
17:54:48 <qgil> #link http://korma.wmflabs.org/
17:54:57 <qgil> makes... sense........  ;)
17:56:11 <qgil> "Architecture process and queue of Requests for comment clean." this is a task for the technical writer that... someone (could be me) will mentor and help pushing.
17:57:02 <qgil> Another goals in my list will include overseeing Facebook Open Academy and probably preparing the new rounds of GSoC / OPW
17:57:41 <qgil> Another busy quarter, although in general I hope to be a lot less busy than this one.
17:58:04 <qgil> 3 minutes to go...
17:58:19 <qgil> Sorry for not leaving more time for comments/questions. Any?
17:58:50 <guillom> nothing from me
17:59:19 <qgil> #action EC team members to fill their sections under https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team#January_to_March_2014 by next Tuesday
17:59:39 <qgil> andre__, ?
17:59:47 <andre__> nothing else, no :)
18:00:13 <qgil> Alright. Thank you everybody! The meeting minutes will be copied to a wiki page.
18:00:15 <qgil> #endmeeting

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