Improving communication, transparency, and adoption

Haskell Foundation
#22

There are pros and cons to this. I agree that getting information out sooner rather than later is good. But

  • The minutes record decisions, on which people can then act. If someone wasn’t at the meeting, he or she deserves an decent opportunity to review that decision and perhaps query it, before others start acting on it. (Decisions for which the WG doesn’t have a consensus can go to the Interim Board.)

  • As Gabi says, it’s helpful (and in my experience universal) for the participants of a meeting to be able to check that their views have been accurately represented. We don’t want to cause unnecessary complications when someone (outside the WG) thinks that something was said that is plain wrong, when in fact all that has happened is a mistaken transcription or something.

  • Writing the minutes in a public document displays the meeting in real time, before even the most superficial editing has taken place.

Whether a week is the best interval I’m not certain. But I would argue in favour of some interval for the members of the group to agree that the minutes indeed reflect the thinking and decisions of the group.

6 Likes
#23

For what it’s worth, if we aren’t going to use IRC (which is my first choice) then I have also had reasonably good experiences with Matrix. I would support this.

2 Likes
#24

If someone wasn’t at the meeting, he or she deserves an decent opportunity to review that decision and perhaps query it, before others start acting on it.

How exactly does that work? Theoretically I’m on the WG (even though I don’t attend the meetings), but I was unaware of the decisions above. Also, “here are the notes, not yet ratified” would address this.

As Gabi says, it’s helpful (and in my experience universal) for the participants of a meeting to be able to check that their views have been accurately represented. We don’t want to cause unnecessary complications when someone (outside the WG) thinks that something was said that is plain wrong, when in fact all that has happened is a mistaken transcription or something.

I suppose I’m just coming from a very different perspective here. “Here are the notes” followed by “wait a second, you completely misquoted me” both (1) fully addresses the idea of someone being taken out of context and (2) indicates some fairly deep communications issues.

Sure, I’d feel differently if this was a meeting of 4 people at a private company. Ostensibly, this WG is such a large and open group that even the meetings will be public. There seems much less assumption for privacy and review here.

Whether a week is the best interval I’m not certain. But I would argue in favour of some interval for the members of the group to agree that the minutes indeed reflect the thinking and decisions of the group.

Overall I wouldn’t argue against this. I do think the one week bit is the part that surprises me the most. This entire thread has lasted less than a week, and it seems most of it was already discussed to some extent at the WG. Maybe I’m misreading that. But if that’s correct, we’ve essentially set up a situation where the masses can go to Discourse and discuss things, but the real power lies in a meeting where the notes will come out a week later and supersede anything we’re discussing.

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#25

I didn’t realize that a redesign was in the works. Maybe this goes together with Richard’s comment about meeting minutes being delayed a week, but this is surprising. Is this being written down/shared/announced anywhere?

Yes, I announced this the meeting of the launch (Nov 7), and I’ve been giving regular status updates about it each biweekly meeting. It’s an in-kind contribution from one of our sponsors, and it’s still in the design phase, so there are no action items for it. I’ve shared designs publicly on the biweekly, every time we have something to show. Otherwise, I am the only one working with them on this track.

Regardless, an RSS feed would be a good thing to have.

Yeah, if it’s RSS, it’s universal eh? No worries.

I’d recommend that we table that discussion for now. But I do think we should have that discussion here on Discourse at some point.

Fair, and I’m happy to commit to anything in particular. I interact with people using all the available options and more, so committing to one or the other is not a problem.

That’s good to have officially. And as a note, I think we should ensure this kind of information is readily available on the website after the redesign.

Absolutely. Ideally, this would solved by putting the members of the project tracks/working groups alongside the committee in the Who We Are page. Let’s make sure that gets tracked.

Let’s take this offline at this point for scheduling
After we discuss, one of us will update this thread with a summary

+1. Offline on the discussion as of now.

#26

Oh man, I forgot Matrix/Gitter existed! That’s not a bad idea. There’s a reasonable IRC bridge for both as well.

2 Likes
#27

Apologies for that. It’s very much a work in progress! There should absolutely be a message to WG members saying “here are the draft minutes for your review, respond by date X”. We just don’t have this workflow properly set up yet, and I think we need advice about what mechanisms can support that workflow.

(Example, the message saying “please review draft” would presumably go to the WG Discourse, which would make the draft link public. But we don’t want the content to be public until the minutes are reviewed. So we need a way for just WG members to be able to access that link.)

Here is a possible workflow:

  1. All meeting attendees can edit the minutes, in real time, during the meeting. This is really, really helpful for spreading the load of minute-writing and capturing the flow of the meeting. But there should be one person who volunteers to lead the writing for each meeting.

  2. After the meeting, one (or two) people should then be in charge of the minutes, the “owner”.

  3. Owner writes to WG to invite them to review by a given date X.

  4. WG members review. (By commenting? By directly editing?) Owner coordinates changes.

  5. WG Chair signs off the minutes.

  6. Minutes published publicly.

This doesn’t need to be bureaucratic, or to take long. But it’s more likely to work if everyone knows who is doing what.

I am arguing that there should be some period during which the minutes are private, so members (esp the ones not present) can feed back about them. I am not arguing that it should be a long interval. That’s a matter for the WG itself.

If we agree the workflow in general terms, the next thing we need is a mechanism to support it. We’ve been using a Google doc so far, which is excellent for (1), but not so good for later steps. Maybe Github would be better? (Rust uses GitHub extensively for this, I think.) Advice needed.

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#28

Here’s my proposal of a step forward:

Someone should be “the person in charge”
The interim board should make clear who that person is
The interim board can revoke that at any time
That person should indicate where and how contributions should be made

For the transparency sub-group I think it’s like this:

  • You and Emily constitute the transparency sub-group. Others are welcome to join.
  • Between yourselves and in discussion with others, you come up with proposals.
  • You take those proposals to the working group, which probably says “yes, great”

At that point, it’s decided.

(If the WG doesn’t reach a consensus there would be more discussion, but in the end it’d land up with the Board.)

Emily has kindly agreed to act as Chair of the WG, at the invitation of the Interim Board, effective until we appoint an ED and Board. (As a member of the WG you’ll have had email from me about this last week, shortly before we moved to Discourse.)

Quite how you organise the transparency sub-group is up to that group.

As I write this down it all sounds quite bureaucratic, but I don’t think it need be, and I’m trying to respond to your (correct) desire for clarity.

Does that make sense?

#29

Oh man, I forgot Matrix/Gitter existed! That’s not a bad idea. There’s a reasonable IRC bridge for both as well.

I wasn’t aware of the Matrix/Gitter bridge. I’m up for testing it out if someone wants to set up an instance.

#30

I am arguing that there should be some period during which the minutes are private, so members (esp the ones not present) can feed back about them. I am not arguing that it should be a long interval. That’s a matter for the WG itself.

This is actually the bit I most strongly disagree with. The strongest argument IMO for “keep the minutes private for a time” is so that no one is misquoted. As I already said, I don’t think that’s a strong motivation, people are free to publicly clarify what they actually said.

But this motivation is worse. It reads to me as each WG member has a privileged veto power immune from public scrutiny. If someone isn’t at the meeting, and doesn’t like a decision that was made: they can say so publicly.

Personally, I’d go much further than all of this, and challenge the wisdom of having regular private meetings with 40 people in attendance, instead of defaulting to text based, public communications. But given that the WG has its established practices, I’m not going to rock that boat. I do want to push towards more transparency though.

3 Likes
#31

As I write this down it all sounds quite bureaucratic, but I don’t think it need be, and I’m trying to respond to your (correct) desire for clarity.

Does that make sense?

I think it makes sense, yes. And I don’t think it sounds too bureaucratic.

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#32

One thing I’d like to call attention to broadly here as we’re having these discussions is that I think we would benefit from looking toward where we expect to be in 6 or 12 months from now, and trying to make decisions around transparency and visibility in light of what we expect the long term shape of the foundation and community to be. I know @snoyberg said he didn’t want to rock the boat around the working group meeting, but I do think it’s worth asking the question about whether we expect it to be a key part of how the HF operates going forward, or whether the meetings as they are is a stop-gap measure for us to coordinate as we’re maturing and trying to find a sustainable work style going forward.

My concern is that the size of the working group calls is already borderline too large to be effective. I think we’ve managed so far because we grew slowly and at this point a lot of us have experience working together in this format, but I’m not sure any amount of transparency about the decisions will entirely offset the challenges of scaling up if more people want to get involved.

To that end, I wonder if we should worry a little bit less about the details of how to maximize transparency with the current process, and instead focus on how to grow into a new process that has transparency built in from the ground up- whether that’s through discourse, or matrix, a mailing list, etc. Doing what we can to post minutes in a reasonably timely manner, etc. in the mean time is good, but personally I’d rather not see us get hung up on perfecting a short-term process in lieu of building of solid foundation for the next iteration of the process.

6 Likes
#33

I’m sympathetic to that point of view. But I think that in any setup I can currently imagine we are going to have working groups (from the board through to a highly focused limited timeframe group) that will want to meet together, record their thoughts, decisions, proposals, and share that thinking with others. The kind of workflow I describe above (or some variant thereof) is going to be necessary for any such group. So I don’t think it would be effort wasted or duplicated.

You raise a separate question, namely the future of the current Haskell Foundation Working Group. My personal view is that it, or something like it, may well be useful into the future. We want a “way in” whereby people who would like to contribute to the Foundation can actively do so.

You might say that anyone can, but my experience is that when everyone is responsible then no one is responsible. Example: I pay a lot more attention to GHC proposals because I am a named member of the group that has (as volunteers) agreed to pay careful attention to GHC proposals and ultimately decide about them. I would pay much less attention if I had not explicitly made that commitment, and was not a member.

But that’s just a personal view. The long term future of the HF WG is ultimately a matter for the Board, once appointed. Meanwhile, I don’t think we need wait for that day to get good workflows in place as above – I think we will need them regardless.

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#34

I’m sympathetic to that point of view. But I think that in any setup I can currently imagine we are going to have working groups (from the board through to a highly focused limited timeframe group) that will want to meet together, record their thoughts, decisions, proposals, and share that thinking with others. The kind of workflow I describe above (or some variant thereof) is going to be necessary for any such group. So I don’t think it would be effort wasted or duplicated.

I think the process you outlined is good, and not too bureaucratic at all. I believe that if we focus on the best way to implement transparency in these groups we’ll be in a good state. I do think it’s unlikely and impractical for most of these new working groups to have the size and scope of the 40+ member working group we had when we were launching the haskell foundation.

Even if many of the processes we want to adopt won’t be meaningfully different between the new smaller working groups and the larger current working group, I think there will be a few places where we’ll want to have different priorities at least. For example, in a 40-person working group, decisions will be relatively slow, and a lot of time and energy may need to be spent making sure everyone’s voice is captured accurately in the minutes. For a two-person working group, making sure everyone’s perspective is captured might be trivial, but it will take some effort to consciously make decisions slowly enough that the community has time to provide input.

My thought was just to say that, if there’s a conflict, we should be prioritize ensuring that these newer smaller groups can operate effective and with transparency before we focus too much time on the sorts of problems that will most hamper the larger sized working groups that we might not see as much of in the future.

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#35

I’m fine with that!

Meanwhile, does anyone have advice about mechanisms to support the workflow outlined above? Neither Google docs nor GitHub seem ideal on their own. Maybe

  • Google docs for the real-time writing. (A new link, so privacy is a minor issue.)
  • Transer to a private GitHub repo for review and refinement
  • Transer to a public GitHub repo to publish

That seems a bit complicated. Others will have better ideas, I am sure.

#36

I would support Michael’s view on full transparency where there’s no state in which the meeting minutes are private. As I understand, the desire for meeting minutes to be private is to offer the attendees the chance to properly articulate their viewpoints in case they may be misrepresented and that’s totally fair.

I would say that a potential workflow could be:

  1. Use a real-time collaboration tool (i.e. Google Docs).
  2. When the meeting is done, move the contents to a repo like so:
    i. Create a “Draft” PR in a github repo under the haskellfoundation org.
    ii. Every attendee has a chance to re-word and/or ratify the points.
    iii. Once the deadline is reached, merge.

No tool is perfect, but IMO with this workflow the benefits are:

  1. Meeting minutes are recorded for posterity under the HF’s github org.
  2. The original meeting minutes are stored in a PR.
  3. Every amendement done by the attendees is also public, as it stays in the PR where everyone made sure their viewpoints were accurately represented and signed off on it.

It would entail however making sure that the repo/org settings are appropriately tweaked to only allow attendees to be able to suggest edits to the minutes, and maybe to enable only “owners” to merge.

Just an idea. Happy to see these conversations happening :smiley:

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#37

I am puzzled by the focus on minutes. In every firm I have worked/non-profit organisation I have collaborated to the minutes are made public only after each participant has had the chance to review them and sign them off. This usually happens at the next meeting, where the first point on the agenda is «approve last meeting minutes».
In this regard seven days of time to review is speedier than bodies with way more resources than the HF. It also makes the job of the minute taker less of a burden.

2 Likes
#38

I’m puzzled by the pushback here. And I’m puzzled by the claims. I’ve never seen an organization behave the way you and others are describing. Regardless, let’s ignore “what other organizations do” and focus instead on why the status quo is broken and needs to be fixed here.

The claim is that the HF working group is transparent. The claim is that Discourse is a good place to discuss activities. At least, I think that’s the claim. This very thread demonstrates that the status quo breaks this. Without assigning fault, let’s point out that we had an entire conversation for a week straight here. I was specifically asked by WG and interim board members to take initiative on these points. And only later did we all find out that at the 40-person WG meeting, decisions were reached that superseded anything we discussed here. That’s a broken system.

I don’t understand how a 40-person group can be effective in video calls. I’ve never been to those meetings, so I can’t speak to it. I can say that it creates a layer of opacity that I think is unhealthy. Further obscuring behind a week long delay to write down for the public what was discussed essentially means everyone on the outside needs to wait a week after each of these meetings to have any real conversations, because we don’t know what happened at the WG meeting.

@simonpj I’ll tell you directly what I think should be the MO here:

  • There is a general HF working group, I don’t have an objection to that
  • However, the primary communication platform is Discourse, nothing else
  • Other conversations will happen, including video calls, text chats, etc
  • Like I did above with Emily, the correct thing to do is to state “we’re taking this discussion offline, and we’ll post a follow up when we’re done.” Essentially: we’re publicly grabbing a mutex
  • I think a 40 person general-purpose WG is a bad idea. I think specific, focused working groups are a great idea. Let’s say we decide that we need to rebrand Haskell with a new color scheme (silly example). The process I’d see is:
    1. Someone raises the point here on Discourse
    2. People generally agree it should happen
    3. Someone takes initiative to own the process
    4. That person says “we’ll go work on this for 2 weeks, if you’re interested, ping me”
    5. When that person is done, they present their findings here on Discourse
    6. If there’s disagreement at any point in this, then the board would step in

Right now, the claim that Discourse is the primary communication mechanism is false. The real communication is still happening at a private meeting. It’s great that we now at least have the promise of meeting minutes, but it’s still relegating the community to second-tier at best.

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#39

Thank you all very much for working on this!

And, here are three cents from a random Haskeller:

Planet Haskell: I read Planet Haskell, via feed reader (bazqux.com) and highly value it. It’s our community’s aggregator of blogs and blog-like feeds. It’s a very efficient way to keep up with a community’s blogosphere; it has been a kind of standard in FOSS communities for years (Debian, Ubuntu, Gnome, etc.) This is more reliable than relying on, say, reddit mentions. At least if people continue to add their blogs to Planet Haskell. At present, I think quite a few do not do this (and many folks aren’t aware of it).

Real-time chat/audio/video: Matrix is the solution. Slick clients on all devices (eg Element), works very well for matrix, IRC and gitter rooms, has jitsi built in, has strong governance and a bright future, etc.

Minutes: delayed minutes (by a week!) may be the norm in “real life”, but it’s not what works well in the FOSS world. I think this new initiative will live or die on its Transparency, so I think hidden minutes are the wrong choice here. I fully agree with Michael’s pushback and I want him to rock the boat here; he is doing his job.

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#40

This is a good conversation.

Perhaps it’s got to the point where the Transparency Working Group (= Emily, Michael, and anyone who would like to join them) can talk about it, come to a consensus, and emerge with some concrete proposals to bring to the WG and board?

Simon

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#41

A very easy solution has occurred to me that I thought I would share:

It has been floated that regular meetings would be streamed for wide attendance. If that’s the case, and if the recording is preserved, then we can have our cake and eat it, too: we have the transparency granted by having the raw video available, and the chance for the minutes (which are much quicker to consume) to be reviewed before posting. With the original recording freely available, there does not seem to be a need also for the minutes to be instantly available in order to guarantee transparency.

Personally, I see both sides of the argument on whether minutes should be embargoed or released at once. With the addition of streaming, however, it seems both sides of this debate can get what they want, which is surely a good thing.

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