Re: GitLab for the engagement team

[Nuritzi Sanchez <nuritzis stanfordalumni org>]

Hi Carlos, 

Thanks to you and Sri for helping us get this started! I've wanted to move to a kanban board / PM system for a while now and this is exactly what I was hoping for. I think we need to discuss how to use it better and start creating documentation, but what we have so far is a good start. 

Some other things we should figure out: 

• How can we make it easy for people to make accounts and join the Engagement project? Many will not be familiar with this kind of system, so we'll need step-by-step instructions. 
• Does everyone have the same permission level? 
• Can we make multiple boards for the Engagement team? Also, let's please not make random mentions to "marketing team"... as of now, it's just the Engagement Team and we also do marketing activities. 

Apart from that, we all need to understand that there will be a learning curve for adopting this new tool. We may need to run workshops (in person or virtually) to get people started using GitLab. We also need to create some kind of newcomers guide on our gnome wiki to help people get started. 

Overall, I'm really excited about the potential of this! I think that it's not just about current developers being motivated to participate in Engagement work, but also the other way around -- the more that Engagement folk can participate in the same tools that the rest of the community is using, the more likely they are to start working on other aspects of the project. I've seen a lot of interest from people who have wanted to join the Engagement team initially, but have hopes of easing their way into more development-oriented work. 

Looking forward to chatting more about this during our meeting in 15 mins :) I'll include the call info below in case others want to join too. 

Best, 

Nuritzi

Engagement Call Info

Friday, December 1 @ 16:00 UTC

Join the call: https://www.uberconference.com/gnome-engagement

Optional dial in number: 857-216-6156

PIN: 62777

Please see the agenda here: Engagement Meeting Agenda [1], and here's a copy of the proposed items so far:

Discuss during meeting:

 * Mozilla joint announcement for university clubs

 * GitLab for Engagement workflow 

 * Events in 2018 / SWAG Center expansion 

 * Patreon check-in

Do during meeting: 

 * Social media for December 

On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 7:16 AM, Carlos Soriano <csoriano gnome org> wrote:

Hey all,

Since I was not subscribed before, I cannot reply to the main GitLab thread. I want to put here the advantages and disadvantages I see of using GitLab for the engagement team.

I believe using GitLab for the engagement team will help improve some of the weakest parts. I focused on the interaction of the engagement team and the rest of the community, the tracking of dates, and assignee to tasks.

I think one of the biggest issues has been the interaction with the rest of the community . The engagement team is mostly a mailing list and IRC, but it's not close to any other part of the developer community and I have the feeling it didn't work as much as it could. Seems the developers ended up not interacting much with the engagement team, and the other way around. With GitLab you will be using the same infrastructure as the rest of the community and the developers can take a look what you are doing, how do you work, and what things have been happening to take as an example. Also, developers will be used to the infrastructure and will be more likely to interact with the engagement team. You can see this change already happened in the short live of the engagement project in GitLab.

For the tracking of dates, if I'm not mistaken it hasn't been done, and in my personal case with managing SWAG it already failed once. Not only that, but since there is not a comfortable infrastructure where to see what's going on, nobody knew I was going to fail to send in time the SWAG. I imagine something similar happens with publishing tweets or other social media for events.

Another issue is that since there is no clear way to have an assignee to a task (afaik), the task can be forgotten or missed and potentially the rest of the engagement team won't know who to ping to know the status of the task. This happened also for me with the SWAG, since probably not many people knew I had to send it.

In general, I think the current setup of just emails and irc doesn't work well, so I think some kind of tracking will be helpful, and if it can be close to the rest of the community, even better.

Now, I can see two disadvantages. One is that GitLab it's a technical tool, and because of that the UI could be nice but it's technical. Second is that it shouldn't feel like paperwork, it really shouldn't.

The good thing is that almost everything can be automated, so I spend some time today in creating good issues templates so you don't have to do any paperwork. I believe the only paperwork the engagement team would have to do is to close an issue when it's done.

To try to fix the technical barrier, I created some documentation with pictures and shortcuts links for common tasks. Take a look at the readme and specially to the wiki.

Let me know what you think; and feel free to ask if you have any question. I'll join the meeting today too in case you want to discuss it.

Best
--
Carlos Soriano
GNOME Foundation
Treasurer, Board of Directors

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Nuritzi Sanchez  |  +1.650.218.7388 |  Endless