2021 July 13 W&A Team meeting notes and recap

Project Discussion
1

Hi all, here is a brief recap of today’s Websites & Apps Team meeting.

Meeting agenda

  • What happened?
    • In a short amount of time, we can began fielding feedback from various Fedora folks:
      • getfedora.org revamp
      • Working with CPE/Fedora Infra and Fedora Design
      • Easyfix revamp
      • On-boarding newcomers who are interested in contributing to a web development project
      • And still run an Objective!!
      • phew.
    • We felt a lot of things: not listened to, misunderstood, ignored, not given the benefit of doubt.
      • Brief open floor for anyone to share kind but honest words.
  • What is happening?
  • What next?
    • How can we be more kind and excellent to each other going forward?
    • How can we better support each other as a team?

Next steps

We ended up with three outcomes emerging from our discussion:

Objective and Development meetings

We recognized current meetings were more focused on development aspects. Development is important! But the work for the Objective has a different focus that encourages us to look at program management, teamwork, and collaboration. We acknowledged a need for meetings that are easier to wrangle than 10-20 people meets.

To that end, a fortnightly meeting is being set up with the Objective Co-Leads and Mentors.

Backend/Frontend teams

There was good discussion about the pros and cons of creating two new sub-teams within the Websites & Apps team: a Back-end and Front-end team. Both teams need to occasionally align, but their focuses are in different areas and different stakeholders in Fedora. For example, the Back-end team would collaborate more with Fedora Infrastructure and CPE teams, while the Front-end team would work more closely with Fedora Design. The monthly or fortnightly meeting between the two teams is a chance to sync up on common issues and coordinate on shared work.

To that end, a proposal will be shared back with the wider team for review by the Objective Co-Leads.

Picking and prioritizing our projects

We should be deliberate in the projects we choose, and know who the necessary stakeholders to work with are before undertaking a new project. The getfedora.org website revamp is complex because it requires interacting with internal Red Hat teams for approval. There are likely smaller projects we could choose to start with first, work on together as a team, and then trial in a low-stakes staging environment. We could work with necessary stakeholders once we have something ready to take to production.

@lilyx mentioned Fedora Bootstrap as a component instead of a standalone project. Working on something like Fedora Bootstrap could have a wide effect because of its use in several Fedora websites already. For example, it would be easier to improve mobile responsiveness by implementing it in a common front-end package or developer library when folks build new websites for Fedora.

Scoping and narrowing down projects to work with will be an ongoing discussion with the team.

Thanks!

Thanks everyone who attended today’s meeting! I’m optimistic about our next steps and where we go next. :stars: