Reboot / re-recruit for labs roles

[rufuspollock]

To run Labs better it would be useful to:

1. Clarify roles need doing
2. To plan how to recruit for these in an ongoing, systematic manner.

All roles would be performed on a voluntary basis though we may be able to resource a part-time community manager / supporter at Open Knowledge International who could support and help in various ways (as well as standing in when needed).

What we do:

• [ ] define roles
• [ ] prioritise
• [ ] recruit

General Points

• Most roles have a 6m or 1y term
  • That way people know what they are taking on and that it is time delimited and they can choose to renew or not.
• Need to define clearly what is involved in a given role so people know what commitment they are making

Team Roles

Leads and Management Team

• Leads: they are the "chair" of Labs, responsible for team meetings and getting its job done
• Team: small group (3-6) who act as a board for Labs

Activities

• Develop and maintain a "strategy / roadmap" for Labs - what projects do we want to see created, what does Labs support etc
• Key decisions - e.g. to support or host a project, to provide support to a project etc
• Manage and direct resources
• Run hangouts
• Maintaining key assets like website
• Inspire and coordinate labs activity
• Respond to enquiries

Advisory Group

Emeritus labs leads and other key figures ...

• clearly defined role / activities (maybe we even split these up and recruit for each one)

Sysadmin

See #142 - establish informal sysadmin team

Outreach and Communications

• Blog

Project Maintainers

Owners of projects who are responsible for their upkeep and development.

[rufuspollock]

/cc @danfowler @markbrough @jgkim @davidmiller ...

[davidmiller]

@rgrp Great starting point! +10 to this initiative :)

Short-med term wouldn't have bandwidth for anything other than Advisory Group I suspect.

[jgkim]

@rgrp +1 (maybe 10 ;)) to this initiative.

[rufuspollock]

@jgkim great stuff - would you be interested in participating in some capacity :-) ?

[jgkim]

@rgrp not 100% sure, but maybe a member of the management team or the advisory group? of course, if I'm qualified. ;)

[danfowler]

@jgkim @davidmiller still interested?

[jgkim]

@danfowler I don't have much time at the moment, but my answer is still "yes."

[danfowler]

As a follow-up to our hangout last week (pad here), it looks like we have a team forming:

• @davbre
• @davidmiller (advisory group)
• @jgkim (advisory group)
• @loleg (I assume you are still keen to remain as a lead)
• @mattfullerton (you too :)
• @pdehaye (core datasets managing curator)
• (me)

Do I have this right? @flowsta are you interested in contributing, as well? @andylolz, do you have your powers back ?

As a first task, it would be great to have someone put the next newsletter together sometime before the beginning of next week using the list of current submissions and any other interesting activity around Labs projects. Any takers?

We could also start planning the next hangout. It would be great to invite @jbenet as a guest speaker to talk about http://ipfs.io/.

Also, please take a look at this post and leave any suggestions for improvement: https://discuss.okfn.org/t/open-knowledge-labs-outcomes-and-outputs-nov-2015/1594/3

Cheers :sunglasses:

[andylolz]

@andylolz, do you have your powers back ?

I do thanks! Will start hacking in earnest on data pipes in the next week or so.

[flowsta]

@danfowler Yes, I am interested in contributing! I'll take a look to your suggestions

[jbenet]

@danfowler thanks! happy to talk about ipfs and whatever is relevant/useful. :+1:

[todrobbins]

@rgrp @danfowler what other roles are in need of filling? I'm ready to assist.

[danfowler]

@todrobbins Great! Let's chat! https://gitter.im/okfn/chat

There are a few things that need doing, the most important of which is shutting down our last server and assisting with a migration of all things that were once hosted on the server to Heroku.

https://github.com/okfn/okfn.github.com/issues/457

[todrobbins]

Do we need to recruit roles again at this point? @rufuspollock @serahrono @Stephen-Gates

Or maybe I've lost track of current roles and this is merely a personal issue 😆

[Stephen-Gates]

Hi @todrobbins I don't believe I'm in any role. I contribute wherever I can and recently have focused on:

• https://github.com/frictionlessdata/example-data-packages (you could argue I'm the maintainer of this but really I just got it to supporting the v1 specs and illustrating some patterns. I don't have the programming skills to take this further)
• https://github.com/frictionlessdata/specs (adding clarity from use and nudging patterns along)
• https://github.com/frictionlessdata/website (writing a guide or two)

All of this is in the context of creating Data Curator.

[rufuspollock]

@todrobbins we do need to re-recruit, that's correct. /cc @serahrono