Collaborative Working Sessions - RB Community

RB Community

high level

• 1: let’s build community.
• 2: how to we carry work on year-round, and how do we get topics to keep advancing with less rediscovery?

discussion

• things that can happen outside of this summits:
  • working groups.
  • repos where work and notes accumulate.

• centers of gravity.

• is there a repro builds github org?
  • (yes actually – empty and unused.)
    • (wait who owns this?)
  • the website lives on debian’s “salsa” infrastructure.
    • for which we love their volunteer of services…
    • but the ease of involvement is a little… could be improved.
  • will there be objections to this?
    • … in our small group? no.
    • worth raising this but…
    • seems like everyone values getting in the place that’s easiest to access to the most people, and right now… github ranks pretty high for this.
  • alternatives?
    • tangled.sh ?
    • gitlab ? (whose?)
    • codeberg ?
    • the content is git, so we are not critically worried about being forced to move in the future. Putting it where it’s easily engagable now is the priority.
• there are a lot things that could move into a repro-builds github (Or Whatever) org….?
  • the website!
    • EVERYONE WANTS THIS TO BE MORE ENGAGEABLE.
  • there are other examples?
    • rebuilderd?
    • reprotest?
    • diffoscope?
    • strip_nondet?
    • S_D_E spec?
    • build path spec?
    • … it’s less clear that these need to be radically more engagable in the same way that the website does.
    • things that are RB specs? YES, let’s move all of those.
  • agreement that step 1, in any case, is the website. it’s the most burning situation.

• object level thing that’s not git: dns.

• does the community needs to grow? is that really a goal?
  • analogy: the RB community is similar to telling people to wash their hands before preparing food. Does that need a large organization? Perhaps not.
  • another way to grow is in increasing alignment instead of increasing numbers.
• “creating places for alignment to happen”
  • enabling “vote with your feet”
  • (we have a lot of this within the summit! where do we make this happen outside of the summit, the rest of the year, for even more people?)
• structure and governance…
  • we would like a larger committee that’s involved in the small set of things that do need governance.
  • example of a thing that needs governance: there are some small updates desired to the CoC….
    • we can invite comments on this (and we do that)
    • but things could move more decisively if a steering committee was a clearer thing.
• interesting study:
  • “contributor ladder” is a concept developed by Drupal…
    • it has many levels.
    • it talks about how people on each rung should be helping reach down and pull more people up.
    • it would be useful to ask people what they’re finding challenging for frictional as the move up in such a legible structure.
• there are some organizations that talk more explicitly about sustainability from a monetary perspective.
  • doing work without sustainable resources is a big recipe for burnout.
    • -> not addressing with this doesn’t make the problem go away.
• CAN WE MAKE WORKING GROUPS? WHY NOT? CAN THEY MEET PERIODICALLY? WHY NOT?
  • how do you make a working group?
  • how do you list the working groups for discovery?
    • -> probably this is just a website page
      • list the…
        • mailing list
        • meeting time and link
  • things we’re really worried about:
    • enough attendance at a regular cadence.
      • -> this is a challenge even if we have plenty of engaged people, because a most people have a multiple-loyalty situation: and the other binding (e.g. usually a distro team or similar) is usually stronger.
    • platform exhaustion – which venue is the minimum?
      • mailing lists can be … mailing lists.
      • irc has had limited engagement when tried historically by this group.
      • video platforms? (which?)
      • note that different platform types have different virtues – text-based mediums are great for agreeing, not so great for disagreeing and for idea thinktank. Video has different affordances. (Not saying either is better: just different.)
  • things we want to not get stuck by:
    • timezones are hard – you can’t pick an infinitely accessible one – pick something and do it anyway.
      • if there’s enough demand for a time that favors a different timezone – that’s great make another one.
• alternative to continuous working groups: “Call for Participation”
  • blast one of these to the mailing list!
  • one-time request for time!
  • focused on some topic space!
  • this is an option for when a full working group would be a potentially tall ask.
  • this doesn’t require heavy construction in advance – it’s just a community familiarity with the idea that this is a way to ask for engagement.
  • (arch mentions: we have done this! it works great!)
    • (example: did this for onboarding package testers. Later: saw explosion of new accounts for package testers!)
• working groups that might be good to have.
  • RB website and core materials engageability working group.
    • what it says on the tin.
  • RB outreach working group.
    • address issues like where we could make more in-person events (see below).
  • Diffoscope PR review working group.
    • help would be welcome!
• getting more in person events…?
  • events around other events is a way to approach this while amortizing the costs that people would experience.
  • more event types (beyond our summit of high-engagement people)!
    • e.g. hosting IRL AMA, perhaps at Fosdem or other events that are a good nexus for that.
• do we want to create a more explicit decision process for general reuse?
  • without this, the default is naive consensus – which is actually bad: it can only proceed in a lack of no, which is very difficult in large groups; and it also lacks a timeout where the decision is resolved… it’s very problematic.
  • can we do this for reuse?
    • maybe.
  • in practice? working groups will probably make their own decisions about this.
    • (if this distills to reusable stuff over time – great)

summary

As part of developing a more engageable community:

• the website is moving to github.
• we want to form a small working group to do this website migration work (after the summit).
• this working group will be a live prototype of a “working group” structure, where we’re going to have a small, focused group to work on this specific problem.
• and we’ll hope to derive some reusable patterns from that.

We are interested in:

• incubating that working group concept;
• incubating other way to reach out to each other for engagement – for example a community convention of “Call for Participation” on the mailing list;
• and we’d love to have more human engagement situations in other events, e.g. an RB AMA at Fosdem (and things like that).

And in the recursive theme of making progress and keeping it rolling: This is stuff we will start. And treat as (community structure!) prototypes. And roll forward with.