Working Group Upgrades! #495
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Working Group Lead ChecklistFor reference, here would be the full set of activities WG Leads would be responsible for: One-time (not new, but added a couple required bullets):
Bi-weekly (every other week, 15-minute commitment)
Example bi-weekly updates:
Monthly (15-25 minute commitment):
Example:
Quarterly (15-30 minute commitment):
Example:
The new requirements for updates translate into less than an hour of 'new' work for WG leads. Many WG leads are, however, doing some form of updates, so for them, this will not add new time. Again, templates and guidance will be provided to leads. |
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These changes all sound great to me and I’m very supportive. in particular I think the clear accountability and buy in standards, coupled with the foundation folks working to make sure they’re lived up to will be great for making effective working groups. |
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I'm big fan of public updates and increased accountability. If open-source contributors sign up for certain responsibility then it only makes sense to hold them accountable; this is how open-source projects evolve and mature. Making all information easily discoverable for the public helps a lot of things. More people can discover what is going on in various WGs, engagement from broader community (not just people who can write code) goes up etc. |
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Hi @cuevasm, thank you for taking the time to write this proposal! I agree with @muneeb-ali that public updates are a good thing for open source projects, in part because the beget accountability and responsibility in addition to improving project discoverability. If I may, I'd like to propose an alternative working group spec that I hope will provide the same benefits, but with far less effort. The reason I'm having a hard time accepting this proposal is because the status quo for WGs today is to post daily updates on Discord (a 30-second daily effort), and this small thing has proven to be a mighty challenge to do consistently. This feels like even more work, and thus even more prone to lapsing. Ideally, WG members wouldn't need to undertake any effort at all, and the WG lead would only need to undertake minimal effort every two weeks (just a brain dump of what's going on) and show up for one additional quarterly meeting. I went ahead and made a Nakamoto WG Github gist to demonstrate what I had in mind. I believe includes all of the pertinent information for the WG I lead, and it appeals to me is because it provides a simple, low-effort but high-impact way of posting biweekly updates publicly (e.g. I just edit the gist) without any other WG member's involvement. Please let me know what you think 🙏 |
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First, I love this post and how actionable it is. It makes a lot of sense to have mechanisms for better transparency. I'm missing a few details that greatly impact my opinion about this proposal. To Judes point above about the amount of work and instead writing a "brain dump" for a post, it's unclear to me whether this proposal is suggesting regular brain dumps or wants high quality formal posts. Individual Proposal Thoughts & Questions1. All Working Groups need to fill in a complete brief and receive at least 15 ‘hearts’ on the Github discussion outlining what they intend to take on.
2. All WG leads commit to regular status updates posted on Github (details in the checklist).
3. WGs commit to sharing a process by which new contributors can join, along with their requirements for doing so.
4. Working Groups commit to a meeting/communication schedule and to establishing a fitting communication channel for ongoing async collaboration.
Summarized ThoughtsThis document is missing some key details that make it hard agree to. Standards are always a balancing act of allowing ambiguity to meet individual's needs and being standard enough to enforce uniformly, and I think this proposal leans too heavily in the ambiguous direction. Some key places where details would be helpful:
Without these details these standards are anywhere within the range of "this really doesn't include enough information to be helpful" to "this is an overwhelming amount of work." I'd rather have this in a document format than a GitHub post format. Maybe GitBook? I originally had a lot of questions about regular timelines and I had to read the followup to get the extra details. IMO these posts should be more self contained. |
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@AshtonStephens's detailed and thoughtful critique drives home an important point for me: the proposal, as written, creates a lot of cognitive overhead for WG leaders and members. It's not clear yet what an emerging WG standard will look like, and I'm not sure that it is currently a good use of time to go and hammer one out (given that Nakamoto and sBTC are looming deadlines). To address this, what if the Stacks Foundation simply created a Google Survey with which to solicit updates from the WG leads every two weeks? Then, the Foundation can focus on creating a standardized representation of all of this information without having to spend lots of WG cycles on coming up with and adhering to a detailed standard. This information could be stored in e.g. an Excel sheet or DB somewhere, so if we want to change that representation later, we can do so without a lot of manual work. Thoughts? |
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For those who don't have time to read through all the commentary above, I added some additional detail to the checklist in response to Jude and Ashton's input, mainly just emphasizing that the 'new time' commitment is fairly minimal and linking directly to example updates instead of vaguely referencing them. On a monthly basis, I don't anticipate these expectations to require more than roughly an hour of total work from WG leads. The visibility and consistency will be well worth the minimal effort, and as WG leads get spun up, they will have a lot of help :) |
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These expectations have been integrated into the 'Getting Started' information: Up now: Soliciting updated briefs from all WG leads and updating the 🟢 Working Group Index |
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Hey all, Working Groups were formally introduced late in 2022 and have since become a common way for contributors in the Stacks ecosystem to collaborate on various efforts. We’ve seen Working Groups focused on everything from topics and interests to specific technical efforts like sBTC, to collections of people with a particular skill set. It’s been great to see and we thank each of you that has participated in a Stacks Working Group.
This resource will propose additional structure (and resources) to Working Groups with the goals of:
If all that sounds lofty, don’t stress it. At the end of the day, we’re recommending a few small changes to how WG leads operate today and we’re even committing folks from the Stacks Foundation to help drive these changes early on. With a few tweaks, we believe we can better highlight the amazing work that is happening and draw more talented people to our cause of activating the Bitcoin economy.
Proposed Working Group Changes:
You can see the updated list of things WG leads would be responsible for below.
How the Stacks Foundation will help
Having been involved with so many WGs, our team has a unique perspective on the mechanism and is excited about how these updates can take WGs up another level and grow our collective bandwidth. We’d love to hear your feedback on these updated expectations below over the next 10 days. After that, the goal will be to make these new expectations live by October 1st, 2023 at which point we’ll reach out directly to WG leads to support them.
Rollout Schedule:
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