DocsWP — WordPress Help

iNaturalist Retrospective Recap

Time: Wednesday, September 28th at 20:00 UTC
Attendees: @beccawidom, @krysal, @sarayourfriend, @aetherunbound

We held a retrospective for discussing & processing the recent iNaturalist provider ingestion script contribution from @beccawidom. We spent several minutes writing sticky notes of our thoughts, then spent a few more minutes grouping them and voting on them. We then had a discussion on the various groups and the points/action items which arose from each group.

We did not get to all groups and also wanted to allow for asynchronous discussion. Below are the notes from that meeting, but I will also create discussion comments for each major group so we can aggregate responses in that manner.

Stickies

Screenshot of the stickies which were generated

Notes

Big Picture Questions

  • What are the big questions?
    • Are we going to stay in Postgres?
      • If we’re switching the infrastructure to be flat-files, should we spend time optimizing it? -> Yes
      • Though we want to remove Postgres, we should plan for it to stick around for a few years
    • Is non-API consumption/bulk-import a priority going forward? -> Yes

Communication transparency

  • Moving a lot of our internal communication to the Make WP blog would be nice, but we need better tools for facilitating that.
  • DMs vs public is a hard distinction for new contributors
    • It can be difficult to determine what is a Python question vs an Openverse question
    • Public discussions could generally be better since more people could contribute
    • Rebecca feels confident now to be able to throw some code into GitHub with potential questions and using that as a vector for communication & discussion
    • What would help improve this process or make it easier for people to get more comfortable with the various communication channels?
      • Community meeting & prioritization meetings help make maintainers more personable and approachable
      • Quarterly “contributor day”? Potentially across timezones, like the PyCascades sprints!
  • Public “project thread” seemed desirable for Rebecca, maybe project threads in general could maybe go in the Make blog so the public could see what were working on
    • GitHub issues precludes nested comments because everything is flat, discussions could be used but we only have 1 level of nesting
    • What tool could we use to do project threads publicly?
      • Could we use P2? Could Make become P2? Could we have a public P2?
    • We do have GitHub issues or milestones that reflect the project thread, but still don’t have the content/conversationality of the project thread

Documentation

  • Lots of different things were new for Rebecca at the same time, not just Openverse-specific
    • Perhaps we could have a “contributor onboarding process”?

#community-contributors, #inaturalist, #retrospective