TOP Role Restructure

[I3uckwheat]

I have put a lot of thought into how roles should work in the community of TOP. Please take a look at this below and make comments.

If approved, I will make a proposal and plan of attack after the Tuesday stand-up.

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TOP Restructuring

Note: these roles should also be reflected on Github via the "teams" feature.

Roles

The roles below will allow us to add an intermediate role for people who are helpful, without giving them

Core (bright gold)

• Leaders of TOP
• Hold the "keys to the kingdom"
• Final say on community decisions / projects
• Manage the github repo
• Manage all lesser members
• Manage discord bots and roles

Core-Emeritus, Moderator-Emeritus (dark gold/dark blue)

• Have access to private rooms (except planning and administrative)
• No admin permissions or role permissions (github or chat)
• access to "lounge" room
• can be re-instated to full Maintainer

Maintainer (blue)

• Ability to help organize issues
  • tagging tickets
  • attaching PRs
  • closing bad tickets
  • merge permissions for curriculum
  • comment deletion
• Help maintain the rules in the chat
• Help out in the chat room with community events, game-nights, whatever they think is fit
• Basically purple, with a few extra permissions
• Permissions (Can be vetted with the audit log)
  • No ban permissions
  • comment delete permissions
  • add/remove the "loki?" role

points-club (purple)

• No special permissions, except for a private room
  • secret random rooms access? (cpp, gamedev, etc)
• gain enough points === automatic purple
  • Slightly automated headhunting of quality, dedicated, helpful people
  • Could be run on a "x amount of points per month" basis after threshold is met
    • Helps keep purple members to only those that are active
    • incentive to continue to help
• Sense of belonging which can help with retention of helpers

purple-peeps

• Leave as-is, but no longer add people to the role. They have the same permissions as points-club

Acceptance Criteria

Core

• Must be a mod first
• Continuing to be active with discussions about the curriculum
• Being active in helping moderate issues and PRs on github
• Goals align with the goals of TOP
• Be recommended by another maintainer
  • then approved by other maintainers
• Be of the highest quality

Maintainers

• Must be a part of the points club, or purple-peeps
• Be active in the chat for at least 3 months
• has shown trust and initiative in the chat and/or github

points-club

• Have a pre-defined amount of points for entry
• have not broken any significant rules or broken them consistently.

Pruning

Core and Maintainers → emeritus

Why:

• Helps limit the chance of someone leaving an abandoned github account attached to TOP's github, being "hacked", and wrecking havoc on the repository.
• Keep active people accountable
• Allow those who do not want to contribute anymore, but would like to hang out and chat to have a way to be recognized for their help, but do not feel the pressure of having to feel like they need to contribute
• Prevents the active team list from going stale
• Continues to show respect for their time here at TOP

How:

• If a maintainer or moderator isn't active for 6 months, they will be automatically assigned the "-emeritus" role.
• they will then be removed from the active maintainers on TOP, and moved to a emeritus group.
• Maintainers names will never be removed from the "significant contributors" list on TOP

points-club → removal of role

Why:

• Shows a living list of people who are currently being helpful and want to continue to contribute to TOP
• Helps game-ify the chat to encourage continuous help
• Helps prevent point-spam to just gain the role quickly just to lurk

How:

• Utilize the bot to monitor points being gained
• after a certain threshold, user is awarded the points-club role
• the bot can seek through the users with that role monthly and check the last time points were awarded and can remove the role if necessary.

[bycdiaz]

I'm wondering if the Maintainer-Emeritus & Moderator-Emeritus can be one role/discord color. Not sure that it needs to be two different roles.

Perhaps we can discuss this during the stand up but what would someone in an Emeritus role need to do to be reinstated?

[I3uckwheat]

@bycdiaz I disagree, there's a large level of distinction between a mod and a maintainer.

[KevinMulhern]

This is looking really good @I3uckwheat.

I really like the points system for getting people into purple. I think the points provide a really nice metric for who should be invited to join that team.

My view on this the separation between maintainers and moderators is that the maintainers role are people who want/are contributing to the curriculum/website. And mods are the people that are helping in the chat.

Our goal should be to get as many people in maintainer team as we can, the more people actively contributing the better TOP gets. The main problem with the current set up in my view is it's hard to know who is in a situation, time and interest wise to be actively contributing.

So I see the advantages in having a moderator role as it takes the pressure of people who don't have the time to be contributing to the repos and maybe feel obligated to since they are in the current mod team setup.

And it will make it easier for the maintainers team to have discussions and plan as they will know they people in that team are in a position to help with their idea.

I think it also provides a nice way of easing new people into contributing as we often recruit people into the mod team who are still going through TOP and may not feel like they have the ability to be making contributions yet.

With that in mind, I think if someone in the mod team or club purple start making a few contributions and want to join the maintainer team they should be no questions asked. And they can move between the two roles as their situation permits.

Sorry this was a lot longer than I though it would be when starting out lol

[KevinMulhern]

Oh a couple more suggestions, I think Moderators should definitely have ban permissions since their main responsibility will be looking after the chat. And I think they should have merge permissions on the curriculum to empower them to solve issues with the curriculum as its raised in the chat. Broken links, spelling fixes etc.

[I3uckwheat]

@KevinMulhern if that's the case, we'll probably want to add another role of "Admin" or something. I don't think we want too many people having the ability to delete the repositories.

I think we have different views on the weight of maintainer.

[I3uckwheat]

@KevinMulhern Another thing to mention here is we're trying to prevent the "too many cooks in the kitchen" like we have now. If we have a small group of people to direct TOP, we can keep it on a path and make sure things keep getting done. Somebody needs to lead TOP, and leading as a large, non-hierarchical group hasn't proven to be effective in the past.

[ryanford]

Do you really feel like we have too many cooks? It seems like most of the time we're on the same page with stuff. On that note, I can think of one particularly divisive issue where the team had differing opinions that's getting circumvented by the points-to-purple plan :thinking: Maybe we would benefit more from a formalized voting system.

[I3uckwheat]

@ryanford-frontend @KevinMulhern

I've made some modifications to the list. Can you review?

[KevinMulhern]

👍 After chatting with @I3uckwheat, we were just getting mixed up with some terminology. Looks good to me 🚀

[I3uckwheat]

@ryanford-frontend

I think i'm more worried about too many cooks in the future than currently. Though we do have a lot of inactive people that just come to debate and aren't the ones that are in the thick of it or doing the work. This makes it easy to never make a decision and a project gets lost to the discord black-hole.

Maybe we would benefit more from a formalized voting system.

I don't disagree, but I also don't entirely agree, but also I think that's out of scope for this topic.

[I3uckwheat]

Just to note, the one thing that is missing from calling this complete, is the automation part on emeratusing people

[I3uckwheat]

Here are the things that are not implemented yet:

• [ ] automation of adding of the emeritus role, this will take a LOT of bot work.
• [ ] automation of removing the club-40 role when threshold of points hasn't been met per month.

[CouchofTomato]

Here are the things that are not implemented yet:

* [ ]  automation of adding of the emeritus role, this will take a LOT of bot work.

* [ ]  automation of removing the club-40 role when threshold of points hasn't been met per month.

I'm not sure about the points per month thing personally. The biggest hurdle for a lot of people is they may on at times when TOP is quiet. In the morning UK time the chat is much less active as most Americans are not online where I'd say a large number of our active users are.

[I3uckwheat]

@CouchofTomato That makes sense, but there's other ways to track participation.