Re: Formalizing teams

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hi Ludovic,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hello Guix!
>
> I’ve been looking at our guix-patches backlog, at the great
> contributions we get but that stick there for too long, certainly
> discouraging people, and also at non-code initiatives (meetups, Guix
> Days, Outreachy, documentation, etc.) that we as a project could often
> support and encourage better, wondering how we could improve.

I think we're not doing too badly considering the tooling we have at our
disposal, but yes, there's definitely room for improvement!

[...]

> One idea that I like is to bring structure to the group, or rather to
> make structure visible, so that newcomers know who they can talk to to
> get started on a topic, know who to ping for reviews, and so that each
> one of us can see where they fit.  Rust has well-defined teams:

I've grown to like our apparent lack of structure; we interact globally
on any topic of interest and the discussions all happen in a shared
space, which makes it easy to stay informed with everything that's going
on (do we really need more mailing lists to follow?  I don't think so --
our current volume doesn't warrant it).

> Guix is nowhere near the size of the Rust community (yet!), but I can
> already picture teams and members:
>
>   co-maintainers (“core team”)
>   community
>   infrastructure
>   internationalization
>   security response
>   release
>   Rust packaging
>   R packaging
>   Java packaging

We'd have to include every language/system of importance to that list
(Python, Ruby, Emacs, LaTeX, Perl, etc.), no?

> In Rust, teams are responsible for overseeing discussions and changes in
> their area, but also ultimately for making decisions.  I think that’s
> pretty much the case with the informal teams that exist today in Guix,
> but that responsibility could be made more explicit here.  They
> distinguish teams from “working groups”, where working groups work on
> actually implementing what the team decided.
>
> How about starting with a web page listing these teams, their work,
> their members, and ways to contact them?  Teams would be the primary
> contact point and for things that fall into their area and would be
> responsible for channeling proposals and advancing issues in their area.
>
> What do people think?

Are our problems really organizational?  I think before attempting to
come up with a solution, we must analyze and agree on what it is that
needs improvement to help us move forward more efficiently.

Thanks for initiating the conversation,

Maxim