2023-06-07 team meeting

New contributor introductions

We set aside some time for our new summer 2023 contributors - Anshuman, Aritra, Maria, Shrey, and Varsha - to meet each other and the rest of the team.

Update about Kriti’s availability

Kriti’s more available now, and will be taking over team and project management. We’ll be figuring out our new post-launch direction and workflow in upcoming meeting. We’ll schedule these when everyone’s back from vacation.

Retrospective

We’ve had a lot of workflow changes since launch and with Kriti’s unavailability due to focus on funding – let’s talk about it!

What went well?

• [Kriti] We have users!
• [Dom] Few distractions: most of my tasks have to do with the main project I’m working on
• [Brent]
  • Enjoying having some external contact
  • I’m enjoying seeing people have ownership over various bits and pieces.
• [Pavish]
  • We’re getting user feedback.
  • The team splitting up responsibilites allowing Kriti to focus on funding.
• [Rajat]
  • Team taking up the responsibilites to let Kriti focus on funding.
• [Sean] Kriti seems to have gotten enough distance from day-to-day work to focus on funding
• [Mukesh]
  • The team splitting up responsibilites
  • Projects framework is good for organising work and responsiblities.
• [Ghislaine] Fewer distractions, and collaborating with more people in the team

What could have gone better?

• [Kriti] Progress on the product has slowed down significantly
• [Dom] Felt out of touch because everyone was involved in my project
  • Anxiety about project taking too long
    • Wasn’t too aware of what others are up to, so had trouble gauging if I’m keeping tempo
      • Actually, not sure if the anxiety about being fixated on a single project and knowing what others are doing are related
• [Brent]
  • I’m not sure what the overall direction is at the moment.
  • Each person can be absorbed in their own responsibilities, sometimes difficult (or at least guilt-inducing) to pull people away to help on your thing.
  • I think we’re not great (yet) at “mesh-network” visibility. I find it somehow more difficult to keep up with the state of various things.
  • No coherent ‘main goal’ at any one moment, at least not one discernable to me.
• [Pavish]
  • There’s no clear goal in sight w.r.t to development and that’s affecting my ability to think about features in product terms. Our initial goal was to get the release out, and now it feels we’re sort of swaying with the waves.
  • I’ve done very little development work the last month. It would have been better for me to code more.
  • It would have been better if our installation flow had been simplified before documenting them.
  • Release 0.1.2 has been very slow.
• [Rajat]
  • Having E2E FE test cases for reducing the no. of regressions for faster and confident releases.
  • All of us being in a single call after a very long time.
• [Sean] I had a hard time with team management. Difficult to see what everyone is working on, given our new processes. Hard to manage, given that Kriti still ultimately held responsibility for deciding on new projects. Seems like this is all moot now though, with Kriti resuming this role.
• [Sean] I have not done well with sticking to the timeline in my Usability Improvements project.
• [Sean] I have felt less motivated, less productive, more distracted, and lazier in the past few months. I would attribute this change primarily to the lack of clear team-wide direction and cohesion for us right now. I felt enthusiastic about working hard when we were pushing for the launch, but I feel groggier not that I’m not chasing a figurative carrot.
• [Mukesh] Issues were not specced out when installation project was written, caused a lot of problems later.
• [Mukesh] Each core contributor was involved in their own project and it was hard to pull others into your own project
• [Mukesh] ome of the contributions from non-core team members didn’t have projects, so it was hard to keep track of things
• [Mukesh] Most of the work I did was around the problems informed by the users. But I don’t know what is the direction/priorities of the product once these feedbacks are addressed.
• [Mukesh] It would have been good if we had tracked issues and feedback to prioritize.
• [Mukesh] User feedback tracking is hard
• [Ghislaine] Agree with focus and motivation - no clear process on how to apply user feedback, feature focus made it more motivating
• [Ghislaine] Agree with issues with not knowing product direction

Shout outs

We ran out of time to discuss these at the meeting.

• [Kriti] Pavish for managing the release and doing an excellent job at communication and coordination
• [Dom] Ghislaine for being great at user research
• [Pavish] Sean and Brent for helping out with the documentation PRs and review.
• [Rajat] Pavish for managing the release and Sean for providing really good feedback on i18n tech specs.
• [Brent]
  • Ghislaine for taking time with GSoC interns to help with design
  • Dom for doing so much GSoC setup and organization
  • Mukesh for providing useful feedback on SQL implementations and the potential pitfalls
  • Anish for taking on difficult SQL tasks.
• [Sean] Aritra for finding a reporting helpful bugs
• [Sean] Kriti for all her fundraising work! 💰
• [Mukesh]
  • Sean for his help with documentation
  • Pavish for his help with coordinating with the tester and planning the release

Ideas

We ran out of time to discuss these at the meeting. They will be discussed at future meetings.

• [Kriti] Future releases should go out at a regular pace rather than being tied to specific features
• [Pavish] Separate release owners for each release.
• [Brent]
  • Reduce the number of “managers”. We need some folks undistracted from coding.
  • Reduce the number of concurrent projects/responsibilities (as much as possible).