Project Cadence RFC

[chrisdickinson]

Hi folks!

I'm opening this PR re: project cadence for a couple of reasons:

1. The project has been a lot to keep up with (thank you for all of your contributions!)
2. We've been moving fast to keep up with the contributions (and because we moved quickly, we made mistakes)
3. I've experienced the effect of a lack of healthy boundaries (esp. around availability & decision-making) while participating in other large OSS projects, and I want to call this out specifically before it becomes more of an issue.

This PR attempts to set boundaries by making the project cadence explicit and calling out the need for more moderators.

As part of this effort, I'd like to welcome (& THANK) our new moderators with whom ceej and I will be sharing moderation duties:

• @varjmes
• @toddself
• @aredridel

I've been continually impressed by how they've comported themselves on the tracker, discourse, and elsewhere, their ability to guide technical conversations to good outcomes, & the way they've kindly (but firmly!) course-corrected folks when the conversations get heated. (Again: thank y'all for agreeing to moderate! 💞)

---

The feedback I'm looking for in particular is:

• After reading this, do you feel like you understand when work is going to take place?
• Does this feel like a comfortable cadence?
• Is this fleshed out enough? What is missing?
• What is overspecified?

[ceejbot]

I want to thank our new moderators so much for stepping up. <3 <3 <3 Thank you for your help in the past and the help you'll share in the future. And thank you all for the gifts of your time & attention on this project!

[workingjubilee]

Initial meeting thoughts

A meeting sounds good, but has no obvious positioning inside the week, so my brain started haring off in this direction: Accidentally falling into Monday -> Friday patterns can result in a different kind of unhealthy where people overwork through the week and then fall over and die on the weekend instead of enjoying it. Or Monday -> Monday, where they hustle on the weekend to make stuff happen.

Not to say you can or should accommodate all schedules, nor can you necessarily automatically make everyone take breaks. But an approach that might encourage better-paced patterns might be scheduling anything important on a semi-weekly basis, like these proposed meetings, around Tue/Wed/Thu so that all possible weekdays have passed by essentially and it isn't starting/ending in sync with the traditional workweek.

This should definitely come way below "what times actually work at all". It's more of a tiebreaker thing, I think.

Accessibility thoughts

I favor non-auditory communication a lot. It's easier to compose my thoughts. The project is in English, and that's a dealbreaker for a lot of people, but at least text can be read and parsed at leisure by people who aren't English first. And it already is possible to refer back to, as long as it is excerpted correctly. Whereas sound goes at varying speeds, is harder to excerpt and reference, and autotranscription via Google sucks.

Keeping a pace / to the minutes in text can be hard, though. Easier to self-distract. Tradeoffs exist.

re: questions

• Coordinate on weekdays sometime, work periodically until next coordination meeting?
• Not sure if I could make something every week. Plausibly, though. Seems worth trying.
• Not sure if the meetings would be structured to be attendable episodically as opposed to serially. If things felt like they required attending all the meetings after starting a chunk of work, or if attending only every other would be too confusing, then more likelihood of dropping out entirely.
• Not sure if the meetings would have a good method of bounding their time scope on the far end. Forever-meetings can attack FOSS too.
• Nothing feels particularly overspecified at a glance, but then, I tend to favor specifics.

[karagraysen]

Maybe not the place to post this so let me know if there's a better venue for it, but I'd be happy to assist with moderating among other things. I've been trying to figure out a way to get involved in the project but I'm a bit burned out from programming atm but excel at support and docs, which is what I do full-time at PSPDFKit :) Let me know if that's something I can help with.

Other than that, I wanted to add that I agree with @workingjubilee on the accessibility thoughts. I would like to add a couple ideas:

• There could be one or multiple people that folks who struggle with auditory comms can go to to have their questions/etc raised during the voice call.
• There should be written notes taken during the meetings that are shared publicly and that responsibility is rotated to prevent falling into unintentional biases (always giving that task to women for example).

Cheers

[toddself]

Project meeting cadence is going to be important to keep up especially in the beginning when a large majority of :sparkles:decisions:sparkles: will need to be made. I would say weekly until we've hashed out some of the underlying bits and then at least bi-weekly?

@workingjubilee had a great idea with tue/wed/thu; for some reason mid-week feels much less daunting than a friday (when i am frequently out my fucks to give for the week) and monday (when i'm trying to corral all those fucks so I can dole them out). Weekends are nearly impossible for me due to family commitments.

[chrisdickinson]

Adding this to the merge queue since we've been doing this (roughly, minus televised meetings) in practice for a couple of weeks successfully. I've talked to some folks at the JS foundation about maybe providing tooling for casting Zoom to Youtube, which I'd like to switch to as soon as is convenient.