Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2014-04-15

2014-04-15

Planning for the Zürich hackathon

What is our definition of success for the hackathon? Last discussion: more code, less talk; but the social aspect shouldn't be underestimated either

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Berlin_Hackathon_2012/Retrospective

Ask people at the beginning, what they want to do, ask again at the end, and compare. Not to evaluate directly, but to help reflecting whether the hackathon had been useful for them. We have asked in the beginning of Berlin & Amsterdam, there was an evaluation at the end but no comparison with their initial goals

This is similar to scrum meetings, it is useful to ask for the comparison at the end of the sprint, not just for the answer but fir the exercise of reflecting on the work done.

How? Survey. Post-its (red, green). Online...

Sumana suggests:

• Flow for conversations before the conference and right at the beginning
• Interviews via IRC, video chat, etc. ahead of time

Session beginning - end. Each cluster exposes their goals / evaluation. Mic available for other people.

• Hashtags in badges or name tags; or blank stickers if there's no room on the name tags; or badges
• Hashtags for topics on pole+cardboard signs on tables based on topics collected earlier (interviews, Flow discussions, registration comments). "Hashtables"
  • switch hashtags on each day to encourage people to sit somewhere else

Goals defined in advanced are ok. Some of those will be evaluated after three months, and this is also fine.

Planning for the ECT meeting in Zürich

• Review our 2013-14 goals, what we did, what we didn't do, what we did that we didn't expect to do, what we learned

• Annual goals for next fiscal year
  • Especially interconnection with other WMF teams, chapters, community liaisons...
  • Let's get Rob's opinions before, if possible.
  • Setting a diversity goal for Engineering community?

• Swap tips. Like product management does. How to share more learning.

• Should we structure more our 'project management' using Phabricator if it happens?
  • I hereby veto Trello and Mingle and any other proprietary tool :) but Phabricator would be worth a try

Action item: Read _The Art of War_

Sumana talking about PyCon

(we did not get around to this)