I’ll try to keep this one short, but in any case, the TLDR is that we’re once again looking for a new chair, this time to guide the group to Maple. If you’re interested, reply to this thread. Feel free to state your take on the future of the group while doing so: it would be healthy to have some discussion up front.
After a week has passed, on July 12th, 2021, I will round up candidates and open it up for community voting. A week after that, the candidate will be validated by the group during the BTR meetup of July 19th, 2021.
Why so soon?
Leading Lilac was both challenging and a great experience: see the retrospective thread for details. I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity, and a better community. Lilac is not perfect, but it turned out better than I’d hoped for! Thank you all for your hard work.
Going forward, though, and particularly in light of the recent acquisition, I believe that the group will need a chair that has more time to dedicate to it than I will (or did!) - or somebody that is simply more efficient. For reference, I averaged about 5 hours of work a week for 6 months; but the peaks were much higher in the beginning and in the end.
How about the other roles?
We should revisit them as well: it is possible (even likely!) that the next chair will be vacating one of them. But I’ll leave it up to each assignee to announce whether they’d like to continue, or not. And up to any community member to volunteer, of course: if you’d like to do so, just holler!
@arbrandes Thanks again for the work that you’ve done as chair of the BTR. It was truly inspiring and I think you’ve set a standard that will no doubt keep the group going!
I posted my “candidature roadmap”, but I also have some questions about the tasks that you had to do as the chair. Time commitment is a concern that I have about the role but I think as long as I have a clear view of what to expect I can make it work.
How would you break down the tasks that you had to do as the chair?
Which of those did you take on because no one else was available?
Thanks, @BbrSofiane! In particular for your roadmap: I’ll comment on it there. Great questions, too:
In decreasing order of total time commitment:
Writing original proposals (includes time thinking about how to solve problems), ADRs, wiki pages, and forum posts (including the periodic updates)
General text communication in the forum (answering questions), on Slack, on issues, PRs and ADRs (including reviewing them), and wiki pages
Testing releases, trying to reproduce reported issues, coordinating such tests between group members (includes writing tickets when necessary)
Organizing and holding the bi-weekly meetups, including posting the video recaps
Branching and tagging releases (including point releases) with @nedbat
Helping (you, as it were ) manage the issue board and just generally making sure issues were not forgotten
It’s less that no one was available, and more that some of them should probably go to separate roles so as to spread the load. As I see it, the chair should always at least review the group’s output, but they shouldn’t necessarily do the work themselves.
Case in point, the periodic updates to the forum: as we discussed during the last meeting, these take time to do well, but need not necessarily be done by the chair. I actually think that they would be best done by a new secretary role: while the chair leads the video meeting, a secretary can take notes and later format them into an update. This would probably speed up the process. When I wrote updates, I often had to go back and re-watch meetings because I didn’t have time to take notes (which is hard to do when you’re also leading it).
General communication (aka community liaison) can also be separated from the chair role (and technically it already is), though it might make sense to bunch it up with the suggested secretary role. Whatever the case, though, I figure a good chair will have to keep up-to-speed on most such communication.
Release management is also technically a separate role, already: there’s no reason the chair has to do branching and tagging. Like the community liaison role, I just volunteered because it made sense at he time.
I think that covers it. Does it answer your questions?
It is with great pleasure that I announce @BbrSofiane as the Build-Test-Release group’s chair for the Maple release cycle!
The attentive reader may have noticed there was no voting process, as previously announced. This is simply because Sofiane was the sole candidate. He was unanimously confirmed today during the meetup.
) manage the issue board and just generally making sure issues were not forgotten
