End of Q2 goals
Roadmaps - keep us true and in sync
Summary:
In Valencia we had the opportunity to spend two days together where we built roadmaps for all the different spheres of Tor. The value of this meeting is immense and we can't waste it. Those roadmaps are the first path we've drawn for where we want to be, it will change for sure, but is a structure that can be used to help organize everything else and keep us in sync. They were created in a moment where everyone was together and thinking together on the same issues, my goal is to use this to sync with sponsor stuff, organization building stuff, development stuff, user support and so on. We are all connected and these roadmaps reflects it. We should continue to using it as a reference and continue improving, rethinking it.
Problem to solve:
Tor needs to adopt a common process for documenting and keeping track of everything. Currently that is no formal way, some ideas has been proposed and adopted, but nothing that is used by everyone. Not having this we make it difficult to know what is going on around the organization. And due to how Tor operates (90% of the time you are working remotely) is crucial to facilitate the access to this information.
End Result:
Roadmaps should:
- reflect:
- sponsor deliverables
- team's priorities
- dependencies
- things we want to do to make Tor better
- other things that will be identified along the process
- be constantly updated with honest status and estimations
They will be fully done via Trac by using it's ticket system and it's roadmap feature. Projects documentations and other more in depth stuff will be done via wiki. By organizing this with Trac tickets we will be able to create specific queries to answer specific questions. Example of use case questions:
- What was done on March for SponsorXXXX ?
- What work on release x.x.x is related to a sponsor, and who are these sponsor?
- How much work is on person X plate?
- Person X will to take paternity leave and wants to plan for his absence - he wants to share with his team the tasks he needs to hand over while away.
- At a dev meeting a team wants to reaview the past ideas to plan what to do next about a project
Simplify - simplify process, build routine and organize information so is easier for everyone to obtain answers whenever they are looking for information.
Summary:
To support the goal above and clean the path for us to move forward is important to simplify our processes by building routine exercises or support those that already exist (i.e. weekly dev teams meetings). These are the tools in witch the community will operate and coordinate between themselves. And the most important thing for this goal, is to organize the information and facilitate the access to it.
Problems to solve:
Pain points identified so far that I should address:
- A lot of things hanging around with unknow status that I check and take what the action should be (update the status, close the project, revive the project.. etc):
- Vidalia
- ~~Torify / not supported anymore component need to be removed from trac ~~
- Tor VM
Tor Cloud- Stegotorus
- RPM packaging
- Blog #10022 (moved)
- Follow up with the effort to simplify user support and documentation
- Follow up on tasks from Valencia meeting lead by Sebastian: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2015WinterDevMeeting/Notes/SupportingUsers
- Simplify our support process and set it up to scale. For that I want to help support folks simplify the following list of how an user can get support today (see below) and re-organize it in a way that we can scale:
- blog
- helpdesk
- mailing lists (i.e. tor-talk)
- irc channels
- support.torproject.org (101 emails)
- phone number
- stakeexchange.com
- trac/ticket
- trac/wiki
- website documentation
- various FAQs
- Look to do the same for documentation on how to volunteer
- Keep up with tasks
- so many people need to understand the status of tasks, here are some use cases:
- Developer: because he/she is working on it, depends on it, reported it or is managing the project this task belongs to
- Finances: keep up with organizing our budgets, making sure we get payed by our sponsors, making sure we are not loosing opportunities for funding our work etc
- Media: to respond reporters questions, to know what is going on in order to build promotion around launches and educational/outreach materials that the press can pick up on
- Volunteers: so they can easily identify what to help with, help us identify what we are missing, add to the tasks by maybe doing a translation for a language we were not planning to do etc
- Right now is hard to do so, there are different ways on how to document a task on trac, so you need to learn how each team does it's thing.. or really be good on finding your way around on trac and irc
- so many people need to understand the status of tasks, here are some use cases:
- Reports
- There is a need for reports to keep the flow of information going but the currently solution is not working for different reasons:
End Results:
Solve the unknown status list. Have the plan to simplify support and documentation efforts in motion and with a concrete goal of how we want this to look at the end. For instance if we will do email 101 support, how we can have template + training going on to increase the volunteer base for that and therefor support more users in more languages.
Same for documentation, we already have the plan to simplify our FAQ and we will do it, once we are done we should decide on the frequency that we want to review and update it again. Will be building with these initiatives with the community to ourselves in shape for growing.
Everyone knows how Tor uses Trac tickets and knows how to find their way around it. Reports - build a solution in which the community feels safe on providing such reports and come with the best way to provide them to the different consumers of such information (accountants, ED etc).