Hi, sajolida (2021-02-03): > I've curated ⅔ of reports since 2017
(I've asked sajolida for clarification privately as this is very different from the data I see. But anyway, this should not impact the analysis I did below.) > but I won't curate them anymore. > This monthly report dynamics has been recurrently frustrating for me. > What I envisioned as a way of communicating within the project, > connecting with the rest of the world, and celebrating our achievements, > has felt broken for me for years. I've put a lot of energy in the past > to try to change this but I don't have this energy anymore. I'll find > elsewhere the information that I need from them. Thanks for expressing your feelings and sharing your plans! Historical context ================== FWIW, here's what I remember from the last project-wide discussion on this topic: - Our starting point was that in the past, very few people were writing these reports. It was done from scratch, looking at Git history, changelog, Redmine, etc. This work was very tedious. At some point, the very few people who were doing this work wanted to stop. - We decided to make everybody responsible for writing their bits of report if they wanted, while the person assigned to a report "only" has to coordinate & curate it, so that: - Curating takes much less time, and is now feasible by many more community members (it does not require following All The Things anymore) ⇒ the curating workload can be spread more evenly. - The writing workload can be spread more evenly. Analysis ======== Here's my analysis of how it went in practice wrt. our initial goals: - In terms of spreading the curating workload Apart of the aforementioned "very few people", a few community members took responsibility for curating reports: - 2020: 2 people (5 reports) - 2019: 3 people (5 reports) - 2018: 4 people (5 reports) - 2017: 3 people (6 reports) Thanks! I would say that on the "spreading the workload" aspect, this attempt has only been partly successful: on the one hand there's been more community involvement than in the past, which is great; but on the other hand more than half of our reports are still curated by the same 2-3 people, which is not sustainable at all, so we're back to square one. - In terms of writing bits of reports As far as I can tell, very few people have been writing bits of reports. There's a huge overlap between the set of people writing their bits of reports and the set of curators. Also, since these very few people, put together, are members of almost every Tails team, the contents has kept covering the vast majority of our work. On the one hand, it's good because it means our reports are not as incomplete as one may have feared. On the other hand, it means the attempt to spread the writing workload more evenly has totally failed. My conclusion is that overall, this new setup did not reach its goals: the work is less tedious for sure, but most of the work is still done by the same few people. In order to make this problem visible, I've also de-assigned myself from 2021 curator roles. And now? ======== I still think these reports are very important in terms of "connecting with the rest of the world"¹, which matters in terms of relationships with our upstream & sibling projects, communication with our users, and in terms of fundraising. So I would be sad to see these reports stop for too long. I'm not up to trying yet another iteration of "everybody will do their bits and the workload will be shared", aka. the community magic dust. I need a more formal setup, that is sustainable without sajolida and myself, and with clear roles that reflect the importance of these reports to us. The first setup idea that I came up with: - technical writers act as writers and editors, i.e.: - use our internal team monthly reports to write good quality contents, with a communication style that's consistent with the rest of our communication (for example, shorter than this email :]]] ) - define a strategy, e.g. in terms of frequency (it could be that monthly is not the best, I dunno, I'm not trained at this kind of communication) - welcome contributions from volunteers and decide what to do with them - other teams share info, needs, expectations, and feedback with technical writers about the intended audience they have in mind for these reports (e.g. FT about Debian & Tor people, fundraising about potential donors, etc.) At this point this is meant to be half a proposal, half a conversation trigger. Perhaps you disagree with my assumptions and goals? Perhaps you have other ideas? Also, this proposal is clearly not perfect. For example, in an organization with more resources, folks trained/experienced at communication would handle the communication strategy and act as editors. In our current situation, my impression is that technical writing is the closest skill we have in-house to communication, hence this proposal. Finally, I'm fine with either putting the reports on hold, or publishing them only when someone volunteered to curate them, until our technical writing capacity has increased sufficiently to cope with this additional task. I understand it is a matter of mere months now :) [1] Wrt. "communicating within the project" and "celebrating our achievements", IMO we now have better tools. _______________________________________________ Tails-dev mailing list Tails-dev@boum.org https://www.autistici.org/mailman/listinfo/tails-dev To unsubscribe from this list, send an empty email to tails-dev-unsubscr...@boum.org.