Tech Team Meeting 2007-05-04

Agenda

Friday May 4, XX PM US/Europe, earliest 8am NZ time (May 5th)

• New developers
  • Patch-buddies for new developers?
  • Q&A for new developers
• Teams
  • What to do (and what not) in the subteams area
  • Meetings upgrade team needs a developer
  • Quality assurance next steps?
  • Community end of Idea to feature issue (there might not be enough progress and new thoughts about this) (Anu)
• NDA
  • Status?
  • Would it help to hire a lawyer instead of rely on their pro-bono work (since it is very important)?
• Tech collective Rotterdam
  • Who would be able to attend?
• Sysadmin
  • Status of the new servers
  • Getting an overview of the server architecture
  • DB update plans and who can help
  • Help from Diederik (dutch sysadmin)

Minutes

Present: Casey, Walter, Morgan, Anu, Maija, Thomas

NDA

• stage: final draft - lawyer signed off, goes back to admins so they can see the final write-up (no major surprises expected as this has been discussed in depth)
• not just for the tech team, org wide
• cs-specific instead of off-the-web
• international coverage
• goes to admins after this call
• release: shooting before the next admin call on tuesday (probably tomorrow / monday)

Sysadmin status

(Casey)

• as of may 7th, we will have approachable server admins 24h on weekdays
• this should enable more stability for the servers
• 3 new servers online today / tomorrow

Walter needs an overview of the physical servers, software etc so that his friend can take a look & propose an action plan (meeting with Walter & friend & the admins was successful)

(NDA-restricted)

DB update plans

(NDA-restricted)

Rotterdam Tech Collective

• proposal in the final stages, to be discussed in the admin call (?)
• Will most probably need some marketing on the site - Walter will contact Shai who could work on this

New devs and teams

• "patch buddies" needed for new developers
  • Current core committers need to sign up as volunteers for this (to be asked in the mailing list). Requirements: to be able to review the code, and make sure it works flawlessly before committing.
  • Anu will handle assigning buddies and would like to volunteer to check up patches before this is done
• Casey: it would be good to have "buddies" otherwise as well - to make sure everyone new has someone to contact when needed

Teams

• what to do & not to do?
• As per Walter's suggestion: dba, sysadmin, qa, communications,
• (Anu) premature, individual qualities should be considered rather than categorize by teams, and focus on smoothing out decision making

process so things are not unnecessarily stalled

• To be "committeed" as we clearly don't have a consensus view on this just yet

Leadership circle

(Thomas calls in...)

• Announcement to be made:
• Ambassador's group (just Global or general?)
• Developers
• Front page news item (Heather is working on an article to post there)

Meetings upgrade needs a developer

(issue taken up by Anu)

• group is inactive, and we're lacking a developer taking charge of the changes
• to be asked in the dev-list

Quality assurance next steps

• Walter is working on this and would appreciate Joe's input as he's been involved with this before. We need
• a new release policy (who what when and where)
• new deployment structure: SVN branching should enable more stable development
• testing team (probably starting off with people already shown activity in this)
• svn branching
• timeline: after the weekend

Idea to feature

(Anu)

• postponed, as 9am really isn't the best time to be talking about it and there's really nothing new about this just yet. John's posting on the dev-list makes a whole lot of sense

Q&A

• No questions..