Starting a Quality Assurance Meeting/Team/Sociocracy circle

Starting a Quality Assurance Meeting/Team/Sociocracy circle

[Christopher Baines]

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Hey!

Following on from the governance discussion at the Guix Days earlier
this year, I'm not sure what progress has been made.

I'd still like to get the QA stuff in to a more sustainable state,
whether that means shutting things down or moving the services to be run
by the project/Guix Foundation and getting more people involved.

I know nothing about Sociocracy, but I did like what I heard about it at
the Guix Days, so I want to at least work out what a minimally viable
circle around this would look like, and whether there's support for
setting one up.

I think the domain of responsibility would include:

 - Making changes to Guix
   - Patches and patch review
   - Merging branches
 - "Supported" architectures
 - Processes, services and tooling related to patches and branches
   - qa.guix.gnu.org
   - data.qa.guix.gnu.org
   - The bit of bordeaux.guix.gnu.org that builds patches and branches
   - The bit of ci.guix.gnu.org that's used for branches
 - The "Managing Patches and Branches" docs
   - https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Managing-Patches-and-Branches.html
 - Tracking bugs/issues
   - issues.guix.gnu.org
   - debbugs.guix.gnu.org
 - Guix System tests

This probably isn't a perfect list, and I'm not sure Quality Assurance
is the right framing on this, but I think it's a good place to start.

Given there aren't any other explicit circles, I'm not quite sure what
to do here. I think it would be good if one of the maintainers
volunteered to be a member, and I think it would also be good to have a
member from the Guix Foundation SAC (which I am). I'm also not sure what
the ideal size is, but it's probably not two people so I think there's a
need for at least one or two additional people to volunteer to be
initial members.

The final thing is to have some regular meeting, ideally a less than 30
minute voice or video call every month, which would be about discussing
and making decisions on things in this area. If no one else wants to
organise this bit, I can commit to organising the meetings initially.

Any thoughts, questions or volunteer members?

Thanks,

Chris

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Re: Starting a Quality Assurance Meeting/Team/Sociocracy circle

[Andreas Enge]

Hello Chris,

Am Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 04:26:26PM +0100 schrieb Christopher Baines:
> I know nothing about Sociocracy, but I did like what I heard about it at
> the Guix Days, so I want to at least work out what a minimally viable
> circle around this would look like, and whether there's support for
> setting one up.

an excellent initiative, please count me in!

> I think the domain of responsibility would include:
> ...

All this makes perfect sense. I would like to include that we should write
documentation for the Guix Build Coordinator and all its related projects,
which will help us spread the maintenance load.

> The final thing is to have some regular meeting, ideally a less than 30
> minute voice or video call every month, which would be about discussing
> and making decisions on things in this area. If no one else wants to
> organise this bit, I can commit to organising the meetings initially.

I do not wish to organise in the sense of leading the discussion, but
we could use my BigBlueButton conference room at Aquilenet.

Andreas

Re: Starting a Quality Assurance Meeting/Team/Sociocracy circle

[Felix Lechner via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.]

Hi Chris,

On Wed, Jun 19 2024, Christopher Baines wrote:

> Any [...] volunteer members?

If after the dust settles there is still space for one more, I'd be
happy to participate as a trainee.

Kind regards
Felix

Re: Starting a Quality Assurance Meeting/Team/Sociocracy circle

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Christopher,

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> skribis:

> Following on from the governance discussion at the Guix Days earlier
> this year, I'm not sure what progress has been made.

None, I’m afraid, so what you propose is a great step in that direction.

OTOH, teams are picking up steam, and AIUI, the missing steps to turn
teams into circles (in the Sociocracy sense) are well identified:

  • recognizing their autonomy and agency when it comes to making
    decisions in their area;

  • having a “hierarchy” of teams/circles (where hierarchy refers to the
    scope of each circle and not to the authority of one circle over
    another one) with representative of each circle in the “higher”
    circle;

  • where appropriate, nominating people within circles to specific
    roles and responsibilities.

I really discovered Sociocracy when we discussed it at the Guix Days so
I’m totally a newbie, but that seems to match what
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy#Essential_principles> says.

From our discussions, I believe Sociocracy is designed primarily for
in-person interaction, where people can actually sit in circle and
ensure, with a baton, that everyone in the circle gets to express their
view.  We’ll have to emulate that in an asynchronous and on-line space.

> I'd still like to get the QA stuff in to a more sustainable state,
> whether that means shutting things down or moving the services to be run
> by the project/Guix Foundation and getting more people involved.

+1

> I know nothing about Sociocracy, but I did like what I heard about it at
> the Guix Days, so I want to at least work out what a minimally viable
> circle around this would look like, and whether there's support for
> setting one up.
>
> I think the domain of responsibility would include:
>
>  - Making changes to Guix
>    - Patches and patch review
>    - Merging branches
>  - "Supported" architectures
>  - Processes, services and tooling related to patches and branches
>    - qa.guix.gnu.org
>    - data.qa.guix.gnu.org
>    - The bit of bordeaux.guix.gnu.org that builds patches and branches
>    - The bit of ci.guix.gnu.org that's used for branches
>  - The "Managing Patches and Branches" docs
>    - https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Managing-Patches-and-Branches.html
>  - Tracking bugs/issues
>    - issues.guix.gnu.org
>    - debbugs.guix.gnu.org
>  - Guix System tests

Verbs are missing to some of the above: “Defining” supported
architectures? “Defining” processes, “maintaining” services and tooling?
“Monitoring” system tests?

It seems quite broad to me at first sight, but probably that’s just a
matter of clarifying what goes into each bullet point.  Overall that
looks great to me.

It’s much needed if we are to strengthen our QA infra and processes.

> Given there aren't any other explicit circles, I'm not quite sure what
> to do here. I think it would be good if one of the maintainers
> volunteered to be a member, and I think it would also be good to have a
> member from the Guix Foundation SAC (which I am). I'm also not sure what
> the ideal size is, but it's probably not two people so I think there's a
> need for at least one or two additional people to volunteer to be
> initial members.

I would expect maintainers to be the “top circle”, in that it oversees
the entire project, so with one representative of each circle in the
other one (“double linking”).

> The final thing is to have some regular meeting, ideally a less than 30
> minute voice or video call every month, which would be about discussing
> and making decisions on things in this area. If no one else wants to
> organise this bit, I can commit to organising the meetings initially.

That would probably be very helpful.

Personally I prefer not to commit for the moment (I feel overwhelmed and
am trying to figure out where I can be useful and where I’m not needed),
but I might join eventually.

Thanks for this initiative!

Ludo’.