Low response rate to the contributors reports

[antoviaque]

This issue is to follow up on a topic from the contributor meetup working group (imported from https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3934289923/2023-11-28+CC+Working+Group+Meeting+Notes )

Low response rate to the contributors reports

• Notes from previous meetings:
  • See the discussion in the last report, only 25% of core contributor respond. Is it lack of interest/use? Lack of core contributor work in the first place?
  • Xavier: Complex topic, linked to a lot of other issues - in a nutshell:
    • Ali Hugo performing core contributors interviews and preparing a survey about this
    • Some lack of interest in the outcome, not everything is interesting to all, need to refine the content, presentation & frequency
    • Synchronous vs async - reports use async tools, but most of the activity and culture of the project is on synchronous tools
    • Lack of activity from a part of the core contributors - might need to establish a “alumni core contributor” role, to still recognize past work, while making it clear who is currently active

[cassiezamparini]

Update:

@ali-hugo will be moving the survey questions into Typeform and (maybe) start sending it out to CC's in this sprint.

Please add any last bit of feedback to the Google Doc if you'd like :)

[ali-hugo]

Hi @cassiezamparini @antoviaque

I'm interested to know the purpose of these "Contributors Coordination" issues; is the aim to improve visibility? If so —I'm all for it— but I wonder if there's a way to make the wording more clear. I'm often pinged on things and am unsure what I'm expected to do (unless I read very carefully).

Also, there seems to be an overlap between the content of these issues, and what could potentially go into the post-meeting notes instead. Do we need both? 🤔 Pings for the same work in various places can get noisy.

[cassiezamparini]

@ali-hugo My understanding is visibility, and the fact that the CC Coordination group is the driving force behind these initiatives. But I see what you're saying. What may be better is that the "assignee" of a ticket on this board chat to the persons involved in whatever the "initiative" or "task" is, and then updates the task accordingly with minimal pings.

I agree though - getting random pings is noisy - and getting context can take time.

[ali-hugo]

@cassiezamparini

What may be better is that the "assignee" of a ticket on this board chat to the persons involved in whatever the "initiative" or "task" is, and then updates the task accordingly with minimal pings.

That would help.

I think it might also be helpful to determine when to use:

• meeting notes and/or
• forum retrospectives and/or
• Github issues

to limit noise where possible. At the moment it feels like there is a lot of duplication of content/notifications (granted, some CC's might find repeat notifications useful 🤷 ).

Perhaps this is something we can revisit once we have results from the survey. I'll add a reminder for myself.

[cassiezamparini]

@ali-hugo

to limit noise where possible. At the moment it feels like there is a lot of duplication of content/notifications.

100% agree!

[antoviaque]

@cassiezamparini @ali-hugo This board is where the topics discussed in the meetings are tracked. There is a ticket for each agenda item, based on topics people have raised during the retrospectives generally. Using tickets is useful to make sure we follow-up on the discussion, until the original point is resolved. It used to be a table on the list of agenda items on the wiki, but it was pretty cumbersome to maintain from one meeting to another: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3934289923/2023-11-28+CC+Working+Group+Meeting+Notes#%5CuD83D%5CuDDE3-Discussion-topics .

See the discussion about this change there: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3934289923/2023-11-28+CC+Working+Group+Meeting+Notes?focusedCommentId=3943301187

What are the notifications that you would not want to receive precisely? Note that you can unsubscribe from notifications on individual tasks, or at the level of a repo.

[cassiezamparini]

Thanks for clearing that up @antoviaque

[ali-hugo]

@antoviaque

It used to be a table on the list of agenda items on the wiki, but it was pretty cumbersome to maintain from one meeting to another

This is definitely an improvement to the table! 👏

What are the notifications that you would not want to receive precisely? Note that you can unsubscribe from notifications on individual tasks, or at the level of a repo.

I think it's less an issue of receiving too many notifications, and more an issue of receiving notifications for items that are not immediately clear. Take this issue for example: here are the things that were not clear to me when I first opened it:

• The title doesn't make it clear that the purpose of this issue is to follow up on a meeting topic, rather than to describe a specific task to be done
• The "action item" in the description is for me, but the the assignee of this issue is @cassiezamparini. That is a bit confusing
• Perhaps this "update" should be given a more obvious title - something like "Update from Feb 20 Meeting"

In short, it's just not super obvious what this ticket is for. I think a few small tweaks would go a long way to making ithese tickets more clear. Let me know if that all makes sense.

[antoviaque]

@ali-hugo OK, I'll see what I can do to improve these aspects when I do a pass over the board next.

[antoviaque]

@ali-hugo I just did a quick pass - I have added the mention "This issue is to follow up on a topic from the contributor meetup working group" at the top of the description of all the open tickets currently in the board (at least the ones I opened, I couldn't edit the other ones). For the current ticket, I have updated the description to remove your original action item - it was a copy-paste from the wiki page, and in the meantime the task passed on to @cassiezamparini so the assignee of the current task was more up to date.

Does that help? Let me know if you notice other things like that.

[cassiezamparini]

@antoviaque This is still on hold. Waiting for results from the survey. You'll see from the latest CC Check-in that we've had a 20% response rate on the survey so far.

[ali-hugo]

@antoviaque Adding that intro sentence makes the purpose of the issue much clearer to me. Thanks!

[cassiezamparini]

I've added in a new archive column @antoviaque. And I'm putting tickets like this here. These tickets overlap with the initiatives from the CC Enhancement processes.

[antoviaque]

@cassiezamparini Yup, it makes sense in these cases to continue or replace the ticket with the validated solution/approach. In a way, the approval of an action plan by the community on this is completing this ticket - though it will be important to measure the impact, after they have been in place for a while. Maybe we could have a ticket in the backlog for this? That would allow to close the tickets fully (currently it is still marked as open)