launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 11:16 PM, Karl Fogel <karl.fogel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.
>

I don't remember saying that. However, I can do it.

> 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.
>

I would much rather assign everyone a number and then allocate them to
weeks. This worked well enough for the older process.

Let's talk about this later today.

jml