launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Karl Fogel <karl.fogel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 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?

No questions -- this sounds fantastic!

IIRC you said you're taking the first rotation, so I've added that fact
to https://help.launchpad.net/HelpRotation and then templated out
week-long rotation slots through March, 2010.

People can just add themselves, after consultation with their managers
and teammates.  I'd be happy to take the second week; we can figure that
out when we talk tomorrow.  Once this current week is over, we can
remove the old schedule from the bottom of the page.

When it makes sense for someone to take two weeks in a row, they can
just combine those rows.

-Karl