Hello team, I was hesitating to send this message because people might be on vacations, but I think we have a lot of active heads around here, so we can start the discussion now, and let people comment as they come back.
After the orga sprint and other conversations during DC15 we (the Chairs) have adapted the orgateam structure to address people's requests and our own perception of needs. We have shaped those changes together with the dc16 people to make sure we agree on a platform to work together in the following year. We hope those changes reflect our conversations. Note that I've made edits directly to the wiki, but it doesn't mean that that is the final structure. Please consider this message as a request for comments. https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Teams Please read the whole wiki for more details and context, but here is a summary of changes from dc15 to dc16 structure: 1) Split of infra and video teams 2) Creation of Social activities and Treasurer teams 3) Implementation of a Facilities team 4) Different composition for coordination team: key local organizers, the DebConf Chairs, and possibly members of past years coordination 5) Bid process was removed from coord team responsibilities and attibuted to the Chairs About localteam: we were open to nominate the localteam in the teams structure, since it was a strong request from dc15 people, though dc16 team prefers to work without the local/global split. There are some tasks and responsibilities that will clearly be performed by the local organizers, but they prefer to do it within the previously defined teams. Of course this can be re-discussed for future years. Another request was to replace Facilities team by a "Bid Assistance Team", which would follow bid teams since their early stages and would work together with them in venue arrangements until the conference happens. We would rather keep the facilities team as it is defined now and expect that bid teams interact with not only facilities people, but with all the other teams when they have doubts about a certain aspect of the conference. We believe that mentoring is helpful and should be encouraged, specially when the bid team has no much of DebConf experience. It is good to remember though that bid teams do not need to have all their communication proxied by a mentor, and the earlier they establish direct communication with core teams members, the better. Having said that, we would like to make a call for people willing to mentor bids and let the teams decide (1) if they need mentoring or not and (2) who they want their mentor(s) to be. One thing that should be clear is that the agreement on the team structure for dc16 does not mean that it will be kept forever. Ideally, we'll have a checkin on this structure every year, adapting what didin't go well in the last edition and some requests of the next localteam if they would like to work differently. On the other hand, this template structure has a reason to exist and we don't expect to entirely bootstrap it every year. The teams composition is the next step to go, but let's first agree on which teams we have. In this proposal we have 3 new teams for which we'll probably do a similar canvassing process as last year. For the existing teams, we'll check with each of them if they will be able to appoint a lead/shadow or if they need our help for that. Last but not least, the openess of teams and proper communication channels. We will try to learn from success and failure stories of DC15 to address this issue within each team. As soon as we have the base structure set we can move on with that. One thing we want to to make sure is that DC16 locals and DC17 bidders (and all interested people) are warmly invited to be part of any team. We also recommend DC15 (and previous years') people to remain in the teams, mentoring the new members. Thank you all for reading and commenting. Tassia, on behalf of the Chairs. _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
