Contributors' Meetup Refactoring

TL;DR :running_woman:

The periodicity of the contributor’s meetup has been reduced from biweekly to monthly and will have a different focus. Also, an asynchronous biweekly update of the work of the WGs and other community highlights will be posted in Discuss.

Background :chart_with_downwards_trend:

As you all know, for more than 3 years, we have held the bi-weekly contributors meeting. This meeting responded to the need of having a discussion space for the main contributors of the community, including the WG chairs, and in general, a space for anyone interested in discussing topics related to the Open edX community and encouraging valuable conversations.

Currently, the meeting agenda covers the most important aspects of the work done in the WGs (working groups), and also leaves room for more general and organic discussion topics such as community events, new or ongoing projects, and summary of the Core Contributors sprint led by @antoviaque and @Dean.

After 1 year of hosting and leading this meeting, I decided to pause along the way to confirm if this space was solving the need we initially had (and still have) as a community. After analyzing the attendance and engagement metrics (can share them if anyone is interested), I concluded that this bi-weekly meeting, while sometimes resulting in very valuable conversations, had become a somewhat repetitive discussion space that revolved around receiving reports from the WG leaders. Today’s Open edX Community is very different from the one it was 3 years ago. It is much more organized, with collaborative spaces, information radiators, and meetings everywhere, so a meeting dedicated to reporting on the work done by the WGs is not necessarily what the community requires at this time.

In order to strengthen our asynchronous workspaces, decrease the meetings that community members feel they have to attend, and thus FOMO, and reserve the costly resource of meetings to actually drive valuable conversations between community members, I’ve brought this topic to the last meetup and we decided to propose a change.

Proposal :bulb:

  1. Posting asynchronous updates every 2 weeks. Each of these updates will cover the topics that were reviewed in the agenda of the previous meetups. @Natalia_Choconta will collect the information she can from the wikis of each WG and we will centralize the result in a single post, which will be published together with the sprint review/retrospective that Dean publishes every 15 days. In addition, we will notify the leaders of each WG to add any additional information, requests for help, or announcements that they feel should be highlighted in this space. The first one has been published today, and you can see it directly in Core Contributor Sprint Retro - 18 February 2023 - 04 March 2023 - #8. The idea is that this asynchronous space will generate discussions and engagement that can nurture the meetup much more.
  2. The contributor meetup will continue to be held, but it will not be biweekly, but monthly. It will take place on the third Tuesday of each month, right after the publication of the second asynchronous update, hoping that this will lay the groundwork for the discussions that will take place in the meeting. The agenda will be more flexible and will depend on the topics proposed by the attendees.

Expected outcome :chart_with_upwards_trend:

  • Better use of Community forums
  • General community updates are organized in a single site
  • More engagement from WG leaders
  • Fewer meetings and less FOMO
  • More valuable and engaging meetings

As always, we look forward to your comments, questions, and feedback. Nothing is set in stone and we will adjust processes to always serve the community, not the other way around.

5 Likes

Fully agreed :100:

Thank you for taking the initiative to make this adjustment @jalondonot . Your work leading this meeting this past year is much appreciated, and I’m looking forward to the new structure going forward. :raised_hands: