Community WG vs Core Contributors

@antoviaque @jalondonot

I was noticing that there is a wg-community repository but no official “Community” working group. Instead it looks like that repo is being used mostly to coordinate work for the Core Contributor program.

  • Does it make sense to rename that repo or to move those issues to the public-engineering repo?
  • Relatedly, we had a project board that I was calling “Community” which I realized was equally confusing so I’ve re-named it to “Community Support and Maintenance” since a lot of the work that happens on that board is related to making sure the tooling that we need as a community is working as expected( CLA checker, auto labeling PRs and putting it on the Contributions triage board for CC Project managers, etc)
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@feanil Good point, it’s true that the naming isn’t super clear. The “community” working group & meetup predates a lot of the community structure, from a time where there wasn’t much else happening. Since then, the core contributors and the more formalized working groups have appeared, and the group is now more focused on more specific aspects - such as coordination/information between the other working groups, and of the work of core contributors in sprints. Like Nimisha said at the time, the role of the group & meeting is more alike to a “scrum of scrums”.

It could be worth renaming it correspondingly, as well as formalizing this better in a proper working group? Maybe a “Coordination” working group or “Contributors” working group (not just core contributors btw)?

@jalondonot @Dean @sarina @e0d What do you think?

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I’d like a name that conveys that the work is freely available for anyone in the community to work on. I cannot come up with such a name, I’m sorry.

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@sarina I thought that public-engineering is where work that is freely available to pickup wolud live.

I like the idea of formalizing this as a WG @antoviaque and then having the repo track work that this working group is doing.

  • Working group members would work on things that improve the community processes for all contributors. They would track this work in the wg-... repo.
  • All contributors and especially core-contributors are constituents of this group and so would be welcome to meeting/provide feedback on the work that’s needed to improve the community.

Something like this?

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@feanil Yup, that sounds good. :+1: For the scope, anything that improves the community processes, or even more broadly that is beneficial to the community and isn’t already covered by another group, could match well.

I’ll give some time for others to react in this thread, but if that sounds good I’ll start the process of formally creating the working group.

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There aren’t that many open issues, and the majority of those are “meta”; or, as @antoviaque put it above, “coordination/information between the other working groups”. Based on that, I think it would make more sense to keep them where they are, and instead rename the wg-community repository to whatever the proposed group ends up being named.

To be clear, this is my +1 to:

  1. Creating a proper working group that inherits the current meeting and the wg-community repository;
  2. Renaming wg-community according to whatever the working group ends up being called.

As for the name… I think putting any combination of “contributor” and “coordination” in the title would work. Contributors’ WG, Coordination WG, or Contributor Coordination WG all sound fine to my ears.

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Well summarized @arbrandes, I agree with this as well.

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@antoviaque looks like there are no major objections so can you start the process for formally creating the working group?

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Hi there! Even though I’m a little bit late in joining the discussion, I agree with your approach. I just have a few questions, though:

  • What is the established process to create a new WG? does it depend on the Community’s review and approval?
  • Since this WG would focus on coordinating the rest of them and improving the community processes for all contributors, the scope and potential impact seem quite big. Therefore, wouldn’t be better to bring more attention and eyes to this proposal?

As some of you know, I’m usually hosting the bi-weekly contributors meetup so I think I’m already part of this non-born-yet WG :sweat_smile:. Let me know if there is anything I can help with!

The process is described at https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3621519401/How+to+Make+a+New+Working+Group . I’ve recently gone through the process of formalizing another “informal” working group with the Larges Instances DevOps - you can see the steps I followed at Register the group as a formal working group - Discovery · Issue #12 · openedx/openedx-k8s-harmony · GitHub

Definitely - imho the process involves multiple reviews and collaboration on the definition. This discussion would already be one of the steps in attracting attention to it, but not the last one!

Yup, that’s precisely why I pinged you on this :slight_smile: You’re actually currently pretty much the informal chair of the informal group ;p And just yesterday you brought up a lot of great ideas to improve the group. So maybe you would actually be a better person to lead the formalization effort? I’ve offered to do it because I think it is important that this happens, and I’m happy to help as much as needed, but if you want to take ownership of that, I think it would be a good thing!

Got it! it seems the next logical step would be the announcement and chairperson. @Natalia_Choconta and I are going work on this and will publish the post during the next few days. Sending you an update soon!

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@jalondonot when you’ve finalized on a name, let me know and we can change the wg-community repo to match the actual working group name.

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@antoviaque @jalondonot checking back in on this, have you got a new name? I didn’t see the new group listed in the list of Active Working Groups

Let me know if I can help with any of that.

Sorry, @feanil ! It has been crazy these days and I didn’t have a minute for this last week. I’ll let you know once this is done throughout the day.

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Hey @feanil! sorry again for the late response. These last days have been quite messy :frowning:

I think we can go with Contributors’ Coordination Working Group, as Adolfo suggested. I’m now updating the wiki in Confluence and the announcement post. Thanks for your help!

@jalondonot sounds good, should I update GitHub - openedx/wg-community to wg-coordination? Do you want to keep using that repo?

Updating it sounds reasonable. Thanks @feanil!

@jalondonot I’ve updated the repo name but you’ll need to update the readme, and add the new WG to https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3707371565/Active+Working+Groups when you have some time.

@jalondonot Btw let us know if you need any help with this – happy to jump in to help unblock the formalization of the working group.

Hi @antoviaque. I finally got some peace of mind to unblock this and the wiki page is ready. What do you think?

Based on the How to Make a New Working Group guide, the remaining step is announcing the working group on the Open edX forums. Nevertheless, it seems I don’t have enough permissions to create a new subcategory on discuss.openedx.org underneath Working Groups. Could @sarina or @feanil please lend me a hand with this?

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