launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Most of you probably know that Launchpad has a system in place called
"Community Help Rotation". The idea is that the Canonical Launchpad
devs each take a turn at being the front-line support for Launchpad
itself. This guarantees that support requests get dealt with, and also
that Canonical Launchpad developers are regularly grounded in the same
reality as our users.

This proposal suggests that we change the Community Help Rotation time
slot from being one day per developer per month to one-two weeks per
developer per year.

= Why are we doing this? =

Two reasons:
  1. More efficient use of CHR time.
  2. Better follow through of community issues.

1. The feeling among those doing Community Help Rotation (CHR) is that
the time is less productive than it could be. It takes a reasonable
amount of time to adjust to doing CHR, once adjusted it takes time to
do mundane tasks. These mundane tasks are often caused by simple bugs
in Launchpad. A week-long CHR would allow developers to fix these
bugs, thus reducing the load on LOSAs (a good thing in itself) and CHR
(allowing more focus on community support).

2. Many issues that come up during a rotation can't be solved in one
day. A week-long CHR step would allow the community help person to
actually follow these through to future days, which is more satisfying
for everyone involved.

= What are we doing? =

  * Changing the CHR roster so that each person is scheduled on for a week.
  * Switching to the new system on Monday next week, Oct 12.
  * Allowing the CHR person to develop & land patches that assist the CHR.

= What are the risks? =

  * The CHR person will do too much coding & not enough community interaction.
  * The CHR person will have too little to do.

= How will we know if we were successful? =

  * Less overhead & boring tasks for the CHR person, as measured by a
reduction in instructions on the wiki page.
  * Deeper sense of interaction with the community, measured by
non-structured feedback from each CHR person
  *

= Steps to implement process =

  * Update the CommunityHelpRotation policy page with the new process.
  * Draft a new community help rotation roster.
  * Put this on the wiki

Any questions?

jml