How to involve the community in the ecommerce replacement project?

[nedbat]

The ecommerce team is in the process of designing a replacement for the edx.org ecommerce capability. How much of that work will be shared with the community? How can the community be involved in the design of the replacement?

[inventhouse]

Our plan has always been to involve the community, but we wanted to firm up the design a bit and have something more concrete to get feedback on. We now have some architectural foundations and a little proof-of-concept code, but have also been short-handed and investigating our choice of ecommerce backend vendor, so haven't had much time to put something together for the community. (Our choice of vendor need not impact other deployments, it has just been taking a lot of our time)

Some things we'd like help with from the OSP-WG (and which we'd like to help the OSP-WG formulate to benefit all teams) include:

• Recommendations for where & how to discuss design and implementation?
  • Discourse? Slack? Is substantial context needed, or just post a link to ADR 1?
• Recommendations to make the most of team time commitment?
  • We believe community involvement will be very beneficial long-term, but are short-handed and hope to make our communication and collaboration as effective as possible.
• Recommendations to mitigate bikeshedding?
  • We would like to get (and incorporate) input but don't want to re-litigate everything.
• Recommendations for directing enthusiasm / energy in productive directions?
  • This project is very young, which could be good or we could get folks bumping into each other or running off in different directions.

[nedbat]

@inventhouse these are all good questions. How would you like to pursue answers?

[davidjoy]

@colinbrash and I had a conversation a few weeks back about our strategy here, fwiw. @inventhouse, I'm assuming you and he are in sync on this. 😄 If not, he may have some takeaways from that conversation, not sure. Sadly I didn't take notes.

[inventhouse]

I am seeking input from the group about best-practices and the the questions I posted above; hoping for links to current documentation, articles, best-practice documents from other projects, words of wisdom, etc.

I will try to digest as much as I can to produce a draft best-practices document and a concrete plan to implement those practices in the ecommerce replacement project.

[feanil]

Some thoughts in-line.

Some things we'd like help with from the OSP-WG (and which we'd like to help the OSP-WG formulate to benefit all teams) include:

Recommendations for where & how to discuss design and implementation?

Start by posting here: https://discuss.openedx.org/tags/c/development/architecture/12/ecommerce

If the details are already elsewhere like in ADR 1 just link to that but providing a tl;dr; of what's going on and why in the discussion post would be useful.

It's okay to say things like, "We don't have all the answers.", "We'd love to hear your thoughts but may not be able to accomodate change requests as we focus on our initial milestones."

We believe community involvement will be very beneficial long-term, but are short-handed and hope to make our communication and collaboration as effective as possible.

This is a thing you can tell the community. Setting expectations and boundaries is always fine to do.

Recommendations to mitigate bikeshedding?

If you think the discussion is getting unfocused, call it out. It's okay to say things like, "I'd like to refocus the discussion on Y, if X is important can we start a separate thread to discuss X?"

We would like to get (and incorporate) input but don't want to re-litigate everything.

Your team still owns the decision that it makes in this space, be clear about which decisions are soft and which ones are hard to guide the conversation towards the items that are still up for discussion.

Recommendations for directing enthusiasm / energy in productive directions?

If you don't have clear ways of directing the energy, you don't have to do anything. You can also set boundaries if people want to help with something but you're not in a place to accept that help.

[nedbat]

Feanil's answers are great. I'd sum it up by encouraging you to approach this as an effort by a group of people, not by a corporation. Business culture teaches us that when speaking to people outside the company, we have to speak as the company. That puts up barriers, and introduces artificial formality. Those are important when the goal is to speak as the company, but get in the way when the goal is to collaborate as people.

Companies don't like to say "We don't know," but that is sometimes the honest answer. Speaking people to people makes it easier to work together.

[nedbat]

@pshiu what should we do with this ticket?

[nedbat]

@natabene @pshiu Can we say something here, or close this, or what?

[natabene]

We have a plan going forward, that we will announce during the ecom info session. We can close this.