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Community Team Meeting Minutes

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Christian Luhmann edited this page Sep 30, 2022 · 13 revisions

September 30, 2022

Agenda

  • PyMCon
  • Office hours
  • NumFocus summit

Minutes

  • Next office hours will Oct 14, 2022

  • Tomi agreed to do a bambi-focused session of office hours approx. 2 weeks later

  • Highlights from NumFOCUS Summit by Ravin

    • Community was a big topic during the summit.
    • PyMC working sessions was a model of reference.
    • NumFOCUS will scale up on events like PyData.

  • Christian gives an overview of PyMC open source work sessions that occurred summer 2022 (and gave rise to the PyMC study group)

  • Details here: Data Umbrella PyMC 2022 Open Source Report

  • Discussion of events that can increase exposure of PyMC out in the community.

    • Events like PyData (NYC and Global)
    • Host sprints at these events.
    • PyData NYC (pydata.org/nyc2022) is Nov 9-11, 2022.
    • PyData Global (pydata.org/global2022) is Dec 1-3, 2022.
    • Ravin suggested a lightning talk to review PyMC v4, aesara, GSoC, and the PyMCon Web Series
    • Have a PyMC mini sprint, office hours, or Q&A session?

  • Web series

    • TO DO
      • Deploy the website on a new repo, it has enough information and can be deployed.
      • Get Netlify working in the public repo.
      • Get docker running.
      • Open issues on how to make the CFP better.
    • Concerns
      • Is the website fully functional?
    • Proposed timeline
      • Get the website working in a week.
      • Open the CFP for a month, by mid November we might have enough submissions to kick off the web series.
      • If we are publicizing at PyData NYC, then we should sync the CFP/deadline with the conference
      • First event might be end of November.
    • Suggestions
      • Think of bigger PyMC events for the future (In-person or hybrid)

  • Discuss on how to get more people involved in PyMC after GSoC or have more recurring contributors.

    • Invite them for sprints/working sessions?
    • Get other activities happening outside of GSoC and involving them in those activities.

  • Posting meeting minutes

    • Can we share it on Discourse?
    • Also discussed the possibility of having an "admin" repo for this sort of thing

  • Next PyMC Community Meeting: 2022-Oct-28

2022, August 26

PyMCon

  • Christian will submit a PR on the CFP, the review of which can help to polish off:

    • The Review Process
    • How to submit FAQ
    • What to avoid
    • What if my proposal is not accepted?

  • Make sure the submission form includes a question: "if your submission is not accepted this quarter would you want to be considered for the following quarter?"

  • We plan to push for submissions every time we have a PyMCon event (when we have relevant people's attention)

  • The timelines of reviewing, submissions, and the events themselves will all be synced so that we only have a single timeline rather than 3+.

  • Ravin will submit a PR regarding permissions, governance document, etc.

  • Marketing

    • Materials, style guide, logos looking good
    • some ongoing discussion about accessibility of color scheme

  • Website is up and looking great

    • need to figure integrate style guide, etc.

  • Communication channels needed on website:

    • CFP
    • COC violation reporting mechanism
    • General contact (open questions about how this would work)

  • Put together an example library of common submission types and the activities (and timing) needed for each:

    • "Traditional talk/presentation"
      • speaker records video
      • video posted to pymc_devs youtube channel
      • link to video posted on discourse
      • questions posted to discourse thread are compiled for some period of time (e.g., the week after the video is posted)
      • speaker records "Q&A" session in which he/she answers the compiled questions
      • speaker does live/synchronous post-talk Q&A session on discord
      • etc.

Other (non-PyMCon) Community Business

  • Reshama asked about getting volunteers for the PyMC OS Study Group
  • Now that the Data Umbrella Summer Sprint is done, need to schedule PyMC office hours
  • Get Tomi to schedule bambi-specific office hours

2022, July 29

Agenda

  • PyMCon

Minutes

  • Still targeting a September-ish "roll out" for the CFP
  • Submission form: agreed to use google forms→google sheets
  • Review process: blinding is a bit of a logistic headache,
  • Blinding/not may interact with the evaluation/assigning of mentors pipeline
    • who are reviewers?
    • how many?
    • are they evaluating above threshold/not or something more continuous?
    • how do mentors get assigned to submissions?
    • are mentors blinded to the submissions they are assigned or do they select based on familiarity/expertise?
    • states of submissions: no, yes now, maybe later
    • add to submission: if you are not selected for the current cycle, would you like to be considered for a future cycle?
  • assign pool of N mentors to top N submissions - everything can stay blinded up through this step
  • so reviews/evaluations need to be reasonably continuous
  • does every reviewer review every submission? we need at least decent coverage and “workload” per reviewer may depend on # of submissions/reviewers

2022, June 24

Minutes

  • We need to add contributors to Data Umbrella/PyMC sprint site
  • It may be helpful to create project board for various PyMC events/activities

2022, April 29

Todos from last time

  • None?

Agenda

Minutes

  • Office hours

    • Ravin will host the next office hours
    • Christian will figure out the office hours after that
    • Office hours every 3 weeks or so seems doable for now?

  • community manager

    • not entirely clear about proposal, need more info (Thomas?)
    • Thomas clarified and we discussed that social media/marketing were really the obvious community manager responsibilities that we have no concerted effort on
    • decided to hire a social media "person" to handle much of the manual aspects of these duties
    • Labs has hired a marketing intern and we may be able to use use this person for PyMC tasks as well
    • Thomas is evaluating this person (new hire) and will loop back once this is done
    • The rest of the team can contribute to sketching out boilerplate for recurring events/notices/posts
    • Team can also monitor and maintain a queue of items to be handled by social media person: events, office hours, blog posts, talks/videos

  • PyMC uncon

    • Thomas, Ravin, and Christian volunteered to "shepherd"/lead submissions/selections
    • Ravin will finalize website
    • rolling CFP or deadline(s)?
      • deadline focuses attention/interest
      • rolling/no-deadline is more flexible and may be less intimidating

2022 March 25

ToDos from last time

Agenda & Notes

  • GOVERNANCE.md edits

  • Discourse Questions

    • Adding categories
      • only Admin, Community Team
    • Delete other peoples posts
      • only Admin, Community Team
    • Moving posts between categories
      • only Admin, Community Team, PyMC Core Team
    • Who can edit other people’s posts
      • Admin, Community Team, PyMC Core Team
    • Pinning posts
      • Admin, Community Team, PyMC Core Team
    • Announcements
      • Only Admin, Community Team, PyMC Core Team can post a new topic
      • Any person can add an new post to an existing topic
      • Subscribe by default for everyone
    • Tags who can add?
      • People in Trust Level 4 can add tags (users)
        • Make a more precise proposal
        • And if they answer things
      • Everyone in PyMC Team can edit tags
    • Who can edit posts?

  • Office hours?

    • Debrief from last time
      • Do NOT post to twitter
    • technical side (platform?)
    • Schedule going forward?
      • discuss on slack, ad hoc meets are possible, keep momentum

  • Status of v4 when answering questions (i.e., when do/don’t we recommend the beta?)

    • bring up at general meeting

  • Anything else going on to be aware of?

  • PyMCon 2022 https://docs.google.com/document/d/19jWCd4OmwTksdIuLP7K6RWSCLepPQcdj4SB5cWfIASM/edit#

2022 February 4

Agenda

  • Welcome Martin Ingram 🎉
  • Finish the team goals (plus update/fix the description and name in the governance)
  • Discourse
    • tags/topics
    • labeling questions as "solved"
    • how to ask a question
  • Office hours?
    • pre-sprint?
    • post-sprint?
    • ongoing?
    • technical side (platform?)
  • Feedback on the website? https://pymc-devs.github.io/pymc.io/
  • PyMCon 2022?

Notes

  • Governance document needs to be updated with the name of community team (currently refers to the "discourse" team) and the team mission
  • On discourse will begin to try and "nudge" towards marking solved topics as solved. If it is clearly solved, then feel free to go in and mark it. If it's unclear, we can ask.
  • Christian has started a "how to ask a question" document. Ultimately it can go in documentation under community.
  • We may be able to insert the how to ask a question link and other related information into the template discourse users see when creating a new topic (need to investigate).
  • With v4 coming, we may need a way to distinguish v3 vs. v4 discourse topics. Sub-categories? Just tags?
  • PyMCon 2022 planning to begin "next month"? So March? Check in with Ravin.
  • Office hours
    • Data umbrella often uses office hours to facilitate sprints
    • Pre-sprint (1 hour): answer questions if users have already tried some of the initial contribution steps (e.g., the sprint cheat sheet)
    • Post-sprint (1-hour): deal with open PRs, reviews, helping to finishing up/follow up, etc.
    • Pre-sprint office hours should be 1 week before sprint (next week)
    • Post-sprint office hours should be 1 week after sprint (otherwise it collides with other team meetings)
    • Poll to make sure people can staff office hours
    • After the sprint, we will try out recurring office hours
    • To retain momentum coming out of the sprint, we can keep the office hours contribution-focused in the short-term
    • After that we can broaden to other topics
    • e.g., we can have someone(s) give brief presentation(s) then open to Q&A
    • We could also have nominal topics for each meeting (e.g., time series, GPs, etc.) though we wouldn't have to stick to them if people have other things they want to discuss.

ToDos

  • Update governance document
  • Poll re: staffing of pre-/post- office hours
  • Explore discourse custom topic templates
  • Leftovers from last meeting
    • Initiate asynchronous discussion about 1 vs. 2 communities
    • Start a document about improving discourse management (Ravin)

2022 January 6

Agenda

  • What is the community team?
    • Discourse
    • What else?
    • PyMCon?
  • StackOverflow?
  • PyMCon
  • Discourse
    • Help desk (current discourse activity)
    • Recurring events/activities?
      • More entries in the "Sharing" topic (e.g., blog/notebook posts/discussions/breakdowns?)
      • Q&As?
  • Paid Discourse account?
  • Team procedures
    • Delegation of discourse questions to team members?
    • Elevation of discourse questions to github issues?
    • "sub-optimal" questions (see this pymc-examples issue)

Notes

  • What is the Community Team?
    • mission = grow the community
    • also "marketing" of pymc (e.g., twitter)
    • PyMCon seems like a community-related activity even if it involves people beyond the community team
    • The community team is primarily focused on discourse and answering user questions there
    • Community team is responsible for making sure discourse is functional, but isn't exclusively answering questions (others can answer questions, and team members have other responsibilities)
    • Get energy/momentum infused into the community generally and discourse specifically (e.g., get the community pitching in to answer questions, discuss, etc.)
    • Short-term goal seems to be to get discourse management "in order" (i.e., efficient)
    • Longer-term goals can incorporate other spaces and wider community
  • Improving the efficiency of discourse management:
    • We should probably start utilizing discourse tags/labels more/more optimally (e.g., liberally assign tags to posts)
    • first priority is that ever Q gets some sort of response (even if it's tagging someone)
    • tag/delegate questions to team members
  • Do we want one community or two?
    • Two is roughly developers and users
    • One is everyone
    • The answer to this question influences lots of other choices (e.g., do we use github discussions for development-related discussion or do we use discourse?)
    • Having the community see more developer "presence" on discourse might be good
    • github issues are sometimes more appropriate for discourse and certainly vice versa

ToDos

  • Solidify mission statement
  • Initiate asynchronous discussion about 1 vs. 2 communities
  • Start a document about improving discourse management (Ravin)

Relevant docs:

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