Proposal: Captains' Huddle

[momack2]

I think we should have a "Captains' Huddle": a (bi)weekly meeting for wg captains to exchange updates, surface needs, and discuss complex cross-wg efforts/decisions. This would be (best effort) required attendance for wg representatives to make sure we had full coverage over project workstreams.

Example content:

• Status update on the main focus/actions of each working group (packaged and posted for the entire project to gain visibility)
  • Plan to fill this out async ahead of time so we can focus our updates on blockers / discussion topics
• Request from cluster to go-ipfs for a feature to unblock desired functionality
• An important cross-wg decision on an "awesome endeavor" or how a feature should work across js and go

Proposed agenda / notes format: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LcDSGmOLx_GfQSPF-rA4q8gST6H98UZrKJJgO3LQ3Jk/

Why not in the IPFS Project WG Weekly Meeting?

Right now, our ipfs project wg weekly meeting is focused on roadmapping and creating efficient project processes. That focus is important, time sensitive, and already running over our hour-long weekly meeting. I think trying to combine that with a more tactical status update meeting would likely cause us to run out of time for one of the two objectives. I don't think the "captains' huddle" (what I'm calling this) and the "project WG weekly" (planning, tools, vision) have to necessarily be the same thing if there is both more content than a single meeting and not all captains want to be involved in the latter. However, if everyone is planning to attend both every week - then we might as well have a single longer meeting (1.5 hrs).

Feedback

Captains, I'd love your feedback on this proposal! @olizilla @diasdavid @Stebalien @eingenito @meiqimichelle @hsanjuan @lidel @pgte @mikeal @eefahy @alanshaw

Comments welcome! Please vote with "thumbs up" for 2 separate meetings, "heart" for one single long meeting, and "thumbs down" for not having a "captains' huddle" at all. You may use "celebration confetti" as pure excitement without any form of voting. ;)

[daviddias]

@ipfs/working-group-captains

[hsanjuan]

Hello, I am critic of throwing general meetings on the table. I can elaborate but very shortly I'll just say we have many alternative avenues (sync, async, written ones) to achieve these goals and I've been using them without any issues so far. This are my two cents, I know it may not apply to everyone.

[lidel]

I feel ambivalent on this. I agree with Hector that there are async ways of signaling needs, but at the same time the call could produce a neat record of condensed status updates across all WGs for entire community.

Some notes on having a separate Captains' Huddle call:

• Updates: if we have ~1h call with ~10 captains that realistically gives us ~5 minutes per WG
  • Thats good, WG updates will be brief, just highlights + links.
    • easy to prepare: captains pick the most interesting updates from their weekly syncs
    • easy to digest: recording or notes could be good alternatives to following meeting calls/notes of all WGs (will recording land on YouTube?)
  • Rule of thumb: every WG gets max 5 minutes. Additional time needs to be added to agenda beforehand to ensure we don't run out of time if someone wants additional time to discuss something cross-wg
• Maximizing value, minimizing pain: if we choose to do it, the huddle should occur less often than sync calls of individual WGs to keep meeting count low and updates exciting. This means bi- or even tri-weekly.

[meiqimichelle]

Thank you for raising this @momack2 for discussion! My first thought was yes, a coordination call would be helpful because I would like a better way to understand what's going on across WGs and share status and raise blockers. Then, heard @lidel 's point that in an hour, that means we'll only get 5 minutes each. There won't be time for all the things @momack2 suggested as potential topics.

So, out of the things @momack2 suggested such a meeting would be helpful for, how do we do these things now? How might we do them better? Here's where my thoughts are (and I'm looking forward to @hsanjuan 's further elaboration).

Status update on the main focus/actions of each working group (packaged and posted for the entire project to gain visibility)

I'd like to know how people do this now -- if there is no place for a succinct, written update that could be shared broadly, then I think this would be valuable, like @lidel was talking about. (The info could also feed the community newsletter Jenn is working on, so we get a two-for-one out of it.)

Request from cluster to go-ipfs for a feature to unblock desired functionality

Same question -- how do we do this now, and is it adequate? I think whatever we do now, this could be improved. We should have a place all WG Captains or community members can go to review this in case we can help remove these. There may be a way to get this without the meeting -- could we align on a GH tag across repos that we can pull into one Waffle board? And/or! Is that then the most useful thing to do in a Captain Huddle? Review that board, and plan actions together on how to address the blockers, instead of status updates.

An important cross-wg decision on an "awesome endeavor" or how a feature should work across js and go

After @lidel 's calculation, it's clear we don't have time for this, unless this is the entire meeting every week/two weeks/x-cadence. It seems like this would be better done in ad-hoc sync or async discussions. Raising which things we should discuss (much like the blocker suggestion above) -- maybe that would be useful to consolidate somehow. I'm not convinced one way or the other here -- perhaps what we do day-to-day already raises these conversations enough. Things that aren't moving would get raised as blockers, if we can improve that type of tracking.

[hsanjuan]

I'd like to know how people do this now

We open issues where they should be open, and we keep tabs on repositories, issues, discussions, keywords that affect us, and include those that may help in them. We scan IRC logs and remain available. We ping people when we are waiting for something (through different available channels).

Not everyone is on top of everything. I don't think captains are on top of everything either. There are different people on top of different "interest/responsability" areas.

Then every project does releases, changelogs, blogs, updates in IPFS weekly, tweets etc. so that when something happens we kind of hear about it some way or another, along the rest of the community.

I think from the outside it seems like the IPFS world is a big mess with no coordination, but it's not so. [Engineering wise at least], we are generally very well coordinated across projects because we keep tabs on all the different channels and bring discussions to their right forums (decentralized fashion), including libp2p. It may not work all the time for everyone, but I also don't think a general captain's sync meeting brings any added value to the mix (it may make things worse by adding yet one more channel).

As I said, just my two cents :).

[olizilla]

I had thought the IPFS Project WG meeting would be that; open to all captains and those interesed in co-ordinating the streams, and chance for anyone who felt their cross-cutting concern wasn't getting enough traction through the usual channels, to discuss that.

I'm keen for more face-time, and I hear you on the point about the project meeting being fully eaten up by roadmapping right now, but my hope is that will settle down. I'd rather not have 2 parallel co-ordination meetings, but that we make good use of the one.

I think we should think about the roadmap as seperate task that needs a lot of calls for us to work through the details, and move it out of the Project WG meeting slot.

Also I take @hsanjuan point that we are following a bunch of streams right now. I'm in favour of a regular check-in being available on the schedule, but I think folks should only feel they should join if it is useful for them.

The recurring friction is finding a balance. Calls with a small number of participants who get to share how they really feel about things seem to be hugely valuable at unblocking things and highlighting issues that only get allude on github issues. Large calls with five minute slots of "what happend last week, what's next" feel like admin to me.

I feel there is a broader issue here of the friction around asking tech-leads to adopt practices that would be natural for a project management role.

[momack2]

Summary

• Everyone agrees we don't want to spend a whole meeting giving status updates between captains (feel that async is more effective for that exchange and this feels like admin)
• Like the option of a regular check-in being available on the schedule, but folks should only feel they should join if it is useful for them.
• "Huddle should occur less often than sync calls of individual WGs to keep meeting count low and updates exciting"
• It'd be nice have a place all WG Captains or community members can go to review asks and cross-wg blockers - and make sure we review and unblock them regularly
• There are different people on top of different "interest/responsibility" areas - captains aren't on top of everything
• We'd rather avoid 2 parallel co-ordination meetings and just make good use of the one.

Proposed Next Steps

• Let's avoid doing a synchronous "around the room" status update between captains (this would be time consuming!) - but there is value to collecting and disseminating cross-team updates separately
  • To that end, let's try an async captains' log that we fill out prior to weekly meetings (starting Nov 13) with any notable accomplishments / blockers / at risk items from our individual wgs
  • To track and check in on cross-team efforts/blockers - let's create issues on a single repo (like ipfs/pm?) for any large/important cross-wg endeavors (like https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/issues/1670) so that the project wg can check in on progress and help unblock as needed
• Let's use our existing working group weekly for this huddle and pull additional discussions about the roadmap process into a separate forum with invested parties (as we've already been doing)
• Let's make the huddle optional for busy captains, but do our best to source async updates across all different IPFS wgs to effectively notify the community and help captains follow up async

Plan is to discuss this (and any async comments) in the IPFS Project WG sync tomorrow - notes from that conversation and thoughts about next steps will be documented here!

[momack2]

Thanks again to everyone on this thread for their thoughts! We discussed this in the Project WG Weekly this week (notes) and decided to move forward with a more organic/distributed peer-to-peer model for updates and alignment for the time being and check back in next quarter to see if we need anything more structured.

New Proposal

Project WG members will organically find time in existing weekly team meetings and 1:1s to onboard on needs, status, and struggles for the working group(s) they are liaison to. Liaisons will help highlight areas of overlap or risk by opening issues on this repo, and if needed scheduling a time in the weekly project wg meeting for all relevant parties to attend, discuss, and decide on a path forward. The project wg weekly will also continue to be an open forum for all wg captains bring any thorny cross-wg issues about coordination, priorities, execution, or strategy.

[daviddias]

@momack2 would you like to distill down this conversation into a short proposal/decision doc (e.g. Title, Motivation & Current Shortcomings, Proposed/Evaluated Solutions, Conclusion) to get added to https://github.com/ipfs/community/tree/master/decisions?

[momack2]

@daviddias - I think this is still in prototype stage and I'd like to revisit whether this is solving our need for cross-wg communication at an upcoming project wg meeting (I unfortunately can't make the one tomorrow due to travel). I have not seen any issues added to this repo for areas of cross-wg collaboration/coordination, nor any items in that vein brought to the meeting, so I'm curious if we just don't have any issues along those lines or if they're dropping through the cracks (or just through the cracks in this process).

[momack2]

Update from the Project WG Weekly:

We have been doing the first part of this protocol successfully (sharing needs and status async via attending each other's meetings and having 1:1s), however we haven't been actively surfacing any insights or issues at the Project WG Weekly. We have added a section to our weekly notes to remind folks to take time for this step, and will pilot that change for the next few weeks.