2022-12-09 Maintainers' Office Hours Notes
Originally created as a Gather whiteboard.
Attendees:
@Edward Zarecor @Kelly Buchanan @Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) @Feanil Patel @Sarina Canelake @Tim Krones @Michelle Philbrick
Agenda
Discuss how to get the most leverage from Project Managers working with PRs
Public Work Streams
PM's role in that
Goals for PR Project Managers
@Tim Krones and @Michelle Philbrick have been piloting a new role and we spent some time trying to specify what the goal of that role should be.
Goals for Project Managers:
Well maintained repositories by our developing definition -- OEP-55. This goal is shared by all stakeholders.
Increase the predictability, consistency, and velocity of pull requests
Community support
Ensuring that community members' PRs get attention when they don't have existing relationships or access to back-channels
Moving from depending on relationships to depending on standards and well-known processes
Continuously improving our contribution process
Identify and highlight pinch points
Remove friction
Help identify Maintainer needs
Highlight gaps in process/tools/documentation
Existing "Felt Needs"
Differentiate between 2U owned repositories from maintained repositories
How to make it clear that something is being pulled into sprint
Currently: manual steps, won't scale
Transparency into progress/status/timing
How do PM's interact with this process.
NEED: How can they know that something is planned for a future sprint?
Currently people put messages in tickets and Michelle just remembers things.
Summary of How We Work Discussion
For PRs in maintained repositories, the named maintainers will the point-of-contact for PRPMs.
For repositories that are not in the pilot that 2U “own” @Michelle Philbrick and @Tim Krones will reach out to the team name as owners in the 2U document.
For cases where there is no or slow response, PMs will work with @Kelly Buchanan and @Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) to get PRs unstuck.
We will check in on the back log in a periodic meeting rather than one-off pings.
TODOs
Other Notes
Managers at 2U may or may not know that there teams are on the hook
Not reasonable to treat 2U owners as maintainers
This is a risk or a gap
What is more formal role that could exist at 2U?
Question of how to get eyes on PRs that aren't in formally maintained repositories
Two processes?
Formal maintainership?
Kelly/Ned will act as escalation points for repositories that are not formally maintained until repositories are moved into the maintainership program.
TODO: tCRIL will start enabling checks after a cursory review pending a conversation with the tCRIL engineers at
Ecommerce can we find a way to allow the community to maintain this
Can 2U deploy from someplace other than where they are now?
TODO: Action item for 2U -- Ned and Kelly -- will find a way for 2U to deploy this from someplace else so that the community can merge PRs to the ecommerce
Ned and Kelly will come back with timing on when they think this can happen.
link to DEPR
ask for maintainer interest
use clear statement about 2U no longer supporting it
edx-rest-api-client isn't merging a pr because it would break ecommerce, and somehow the open ecommerce PRs are protecting us