Working Group Minutes/DWG 2014-01-05

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

DWG IRC Meeting

05 January 2014, 22:00 MET, in #osm-dwg

Present:

  • Ben Abelshausen
  • Sylvain Letuffe
  • Paul Norman
  • Frederik Ramm (minutes)
  • Eugene Sandulenko

Not present:

  • Henning Scholland
  • Grant Slater
  • Serge Wroclawski

For reference, last year's meeting minutes: Working_Group_Minutes/DWG_2013-02-07

Distribution of work

Currently, most cases are handled by the older DWG members. There's a consensus that we should try a new workflow whereby a "receptionist" would create tickets for incoming requests, and assign them to individual members for handling. The role of the "receptionist" (perhaps "member on duty"?) could alternatingly be taken by the older DWG members, or anyone who feels up to the task.

Ticket system/workflow

After reading Serge's email recommendations, DWG decides to try out the Roundup tracker to improve issue tracking and responsiveness. Workflow sketch:

  • Ticket comes in - initially by email to data@ just like now, but as soon as practicable, fed directly into tracker
  • Either "member on duty", or the software, creates a simple acknowledgement response
  • The "member on duty" assigns the ticket to someone, who will then receive an email message by the tracker and be expected to deal with the ticket without undue delay, or if they feel unable to deal with it, return it to the "member on duty"
  • If the "member on duty" doesn't know whom to feed the ticket to, they can put/leave it in some sort of waiting queue and ask people to take it on via the mailing list
  • The internal mailing list will be switched from data@osmfoundation.org to dwg@osmfoundation.org, so that the external data@ email can later be fed into the tracker directly.

We'll encourage Serge to set up a Roundup installation on errol for us to try, or work something out with the OSMF admins.

It has to be made sure that the identity of individuals is protected, i.e. we must make sure we don't let people view tickets in a browser and thereby reveal something about who complained etc.

Growth of group

We agree not to start another full-blown recruiting drive while we're still searching for the best way to organise our work, but if individual DWG members think that someone would be a good addition to the team, we'll discuss and potentially take them on.

Knowledge database

We'll evaluate whether Roundup has some ways of keeping not only canned responses but wiki-like documents. We would like to store information like

  • ready-made email and block messages, or message fragments
  • internal "rules of thumb" about how to proceed in certain cases
  • internal "how-to documents" about how to use revert scripts and similar tools
  • historical decisions/approaches

If Roundup doesn't have any capability of storing this, we'll set up a private Mediawiki instance.

Meetings

We agree to stick to written (not spoken) form of communication for now, and that a meeting frequency of 4/year is reasonable. We won't force four meetings a year but instead just call them when it makes sense.

Meeting End

23:45 MET.

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