Editor of the week role change proposal

[jakfrost (Stephen Snow)]

Hello fellow editors!
I think it is time to review the editor of the week role and possibly make some changes. My thoughts are that the role should be split somewhat, and in the spirit of the Unix mindset of one thing doing only one task well, my proposal is to make a role that is solely the meeting chair for the week, focused only on the meeting and running a good one, editors should freely take on this role whenever they are capable to, and the selection could be done as it is now for the EOW role.
The other aspects of the EOW role are truly being done asynchronously by the active board members currently.
The move to this forum for article proposals has been a great success, with the added exposure in the community very evident. It also introduces a scheduling push that runs in the same asynchronous fashion as the discussions do. This is apparent currently with the amount of “in progress” articles usually around 5+ and “in review” around 2+, with nothing scheduled until Jan. 4, 2021. (Aside from this Thursdays article @bcotton is publishing).
So what do we do (if anything, seeing as this is the holiday season afterall) with the apparent bottleneck our current scheduling model is exhibiting?
Back to the EOW role, with meeting chair taken off the table as part of the role, it could then be focused on the other aspects of it’s responsibilities. Which are fairly extensive on their own,
They include the following, but are not limited to just them so please comment as you see fit…

1. Moderate comments on published content along with authors
2. Contact authors of articles which are in progress to see if they feel ready to move them to review.
3. Monitor the discussion area at discussion.fp.o for new article ideas and make sure current ideas are being care taken through the process
4. Help new contributors wherever possible.
5. Check test schedules for upcoming schedule requirements

There is very likely more I missed. Basically as stated at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-magazine/editor-of-the-week/
Just some thoughts on the role.

[glb (Gregory Lee Bartholomew)]

Hi Steven:

A finer-grained set of responsibility designations sounds reasonable to me.

@jakfrost

So what do we do (if anything, seeing as this is the holiday season afterall) with the apparent bottleneck our current scheduling model is exhibiting?

I could be wrong, but I suspect that the main purpose of the weekly IRC meetings that are creating the scheduling bottleneck is to force multiple eyes/editors to skim the articles that are going through the system for potential problems (licensing problems, technical taboos like disabling selinux, using unsupported or out-of-date software, etc.).

The IRC meeting system was established well before Taiga was introduced into the workflow. I’ve noticed that the Taiga columns parallel the IRC meeting stages. If we want to eliminate the bottleneck of the weekly meeting, it might be possible to do asynchronously with Taiga what is currently being done synchronously at the IRC meetings. Maybe we could require multiple “looks good to me” approvals on cards in the “review” column from editors and, once the card has enough +1’s, any editor could move the card to the “to edit” column at any time and complete the process as normal.

Just an idea.

Also, thanks Steven, for picking up the slack on these tasks that some of us have been leaving

[jakfrost (Stephen Snow)]

Mostly I was wondering if others of us have been thinking on streamlining the scheduling, plus how using this discussion area has increased our content contributions. I like the cadence we have with the scheduling as it stands, I was more interested in the split out of the weekly chair.
I don’t mind doing what I can for the mag, which is why I brought up this topic. I think some would be more able to do the EOW duties minus chairing the irc mtg, since the other activities it encompasses can be most efficaciously handled in asynch fashion.

[bcotton (Ben Cotton)]

When I first proposed the Editor of the Week role, I combined the synchronous and asynchronous duties because I was worried about having enough people to fill two slots a week instead of one. There’s no particular reason to have the two sides combined other than that.

It would be nice to see more editorial work handled asynchronously (and I know I’m not doing as much in this regard as I’d like), but I don’t know if that necessarily follows from splitting the roles. After all, there’s nothing that prevents other editors from doing it, the Editor of the Week is just there to make sure it’s being done.