@Ali Thank you for the nice work on this survey! This report, and the survey answers it contains, are really helpful to understand the situation better, as well as have everyone’s opinion.
I agree with many of the points made - it’s a good occasion to fix them, the pressure on the processes made the inefficiencies more visible. It could both help providing relief now, and make us more resilient to overload in the future.
In terms on action items on this:
+1
The way we are currently progressing on these fronts:
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Confirming new core members:
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As mentioned on Capacity & process issues - Update , “the recruitment managers and the recruitment process seem to produce a good stream of newcomers currently. We have had 6 newcomers added over the last month, though we’ll still need to see how many core team confirmation they turn into. In the meantime, we have paused accepting new projects”, thanks to efforts from Fox in We are having difficulties with capacity. How do we address this? and related discussions/adjustments in Hiring pace.
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There is also @braden 's initiative to turn the trial into a test project, to accelerate the decisions on core team confirmation, being implemented in the recruitment process by @shimulch : Log in - OpenCraft
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Redefining and simplifying roles: We are working on several simplifications and merges of roles this sprint, with handbook PRs being reviewed on:
- the merge of the epic planning and sustainability roles by @tikr in Log in - OpenCraft
- the simplification of community engagement roles by @braden on Log in - OpenCraft
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Allowing for more specialization:
- One initiative in that area is the project manager role that @tikr is leading, which should aim to enable team members more interested in the project management aspects to take more of it, and take over from cell members who prefer to focus on code. Log in - OpenCraft
- There are also discussions around a developer advocate role from @nizar (see Proposing a Developer Advocacy Role) and project-based cells from @adolfo (see Project-based cells)
We are all participating to the reviews on the points listed above through Log in - OpenCraft (and the related tasks for each cell), so we’ll discuss many of these points on the handbook PRs next week.
I also started preparing the follow-up survey, to get a better feel for what everyone is thinking, and making sure that we’re ready and ok to switch to the new changes, once the PRs are merged. The current rough draft is at Log in | Typeform - it still needs work (add open answers, URLs, refine the questions, etc.), but I’ve added most of the main questions I had noted, so if you see any missing question don’t hesitate to add a slide or a comment there. I’ll do another pass next week before publishing it - which should be once all the related handbook PRs are ready for the wider team review, so likely Wed-Thu given the timelines for reviews listed on Log in - OpenCraft.
This is something that I’m hoping we could get out of the developer/contributor advocate role that you are suggesting in Proposing a Developer Advocacy Role @nizar ? Having more time dedicated to this would be useful, I agree. I still do some of this work, like 121s, but we need to be able to scale this aspect.
Having someone in charge of maintaining the handbook actively, and taking care of what is describe here, seems useful yes. Part of the current issue is organizational debt coming from a lack of such maintenance. If OpenCraft is an open source project, then the handbook is part of its source code - it needs to be maintained. Maybe that would also be something part of the developer/contributor advocate role @nizar ? Or any of the community-related roles we have been discussing?
That’s definitely part of the pass on simplifying the sprint planning that @nizar is leading: Log in - OpenCraft with a great contribution on this by @giovannicimolin at https://forum.opencraft.com/t/sprint-retrospective/1012/85