Hello! As raised by @Jeff in the Team Leadership Election post, we haven’t discussed what the responsibilities for a SIG Documentation leader are.
Do you see it as a purely administrative role? How much organization should be left to the leader?
I have some ideas, I’m sure you do too. Let’s talk about how we want the leadership to be before taking an election. Although some responsibilities fall from the permissions, it may not be great to nominate ourselves without knowing softer responsibilities such as if we would be expected to chair SIGDocs discussions.
We’ve put the election on hold until this is discussed.
Adding new members / Approving membership requests / Making the group joinable without request
Removing members (either upon request or for moderation reasons) / Making it so members can leave
Promoting members to leadership (and therefore any future elections)
Unless we split ownership and have docs and translation as separately-lead entities (comment down below…), this means that it might be good to look for people who have an interest in docs, translation and leadership.
Currently myself and @coded have been doing this administrative work, we have also participated actively in discussions and tried to shepherd both our own and other posts along while facilitating participation from everyone else.
This isn’t exclusive to leadership, but I think it is quite nice to have people who take ownership for a group and aim to steward discussions. While that theoretically doesn’t have to be the people who have group ownership on Discourse, in my opinion it is a good idea for it to be.
I also see the leadership role as someone that can make consensus, someone that can say “we’ve been discussing for a while, let’s run a poll and go with it”. Again, this doesn’t have to be a person with permissions, but I believe that someone should take ownership of doing so, and this does seem a decent role to include it in.
My opinion is that we should do so, by the way. Translating and writing documentation are very different jobs. For example, I do not speak any languages except English and absolutely should not lead the translation group.
If we do this then the translation and writing of documentation will have to interface closely together, that may well become another role that our up-to-4 leaders would have to take on together.
Yes, it is a good idea for leads to facilitate official polls and discussions regarding whatever actions the SIG plans to move forward with. This would give a more cohesive structure to how the group interacts in a productive way. Say, for example, there are recurring discussions about changing the docs style guide or something; It should be the role of the leads to bring the relevant information to the group’s attention and get everyone’s thoughts and opinions on it before moving forward.
At some point we will want to have voting infrastructure up, but for running the voting process I would look to Kubernetes for examples. In particular elections require 3 voting members to be given the responsibility of overseeing the voting process. Notably, the ranking members are not on this group to avoid a conflict of interest.
Sure, that makes sense. At present we had planned to use Discourse polls, I understand you have a better system which can be used in the future. I certainly had planned to nominate myself as a candidate. Given this, I should probably not have been in the organization of this at all. I’m happy to step back if people would like, or let someone else take over election administration
Presumably there should be some term for leadership (or some way of calling a new election) which hasn’t yet been discussed. We can change it later, but it should be agreed upon beforehand so that people know what responsibility they’re signing up for.
Yes, all of the elected roles will have limited terms. The commitment we can make right now is that our roadmap outlines the first full election cycle to begin at the end of Phase 5.
No you’re totally fine! IMO keep doing what you’re doing. Run a poll, get the quick and dirty stuff done while we don’t have a gigantic community and we can work towards a more formal, standardized process. Really, I love the initiative you folks are showing!
I think we should define what the responsibilities are as they come. Right now with the launch of the soft fork, leadership should just be focused on onboarding everyone who wants to join, and organizing comms between them. Like I said in the other thread, we should just be working on essentially copying the current docs, and migrating it to whatever software we choose – this will probably take some time and has a lot of work to do, but to me doesn’t seem like necessitates a lot of structure. Leadership should just be organizing things, and taking ideas and making sure those ideas get enough spotlight for discussion.
Also, like @minion said in a diff thread, we should make a call this weekend or whenever to hash out the quick and dirty and get doing. If you guys are down, I or someone else could make a thread with the when2meet and we could plan a jitsi call just to see what the next week looks like.