Discussion: Planning an agenda for Express TC meetings

[vinybk]

Starting this thread to coordinate the agenda for Express TC meetings.

Context:

In today's meeting, we discussed the benefits of having someone prepare an agenda ahead of time. This should take about one hour and help contributors bring topics to the TC when they are blocked or need guidance.

Being new to Express contributing, I volunteered to help with this. It seems like a good opportunity to start with a non-technical matter.

Discussion points:

• Existing automatic meeting issue creation (GitHub Workflow)
• Source of topics: where do the topics on the agenda come from?
• Submitting topics: How can contributors submit topics for the meeting?
• Agenda storage: Where should the agenda be stored? (GitHub, Google Docs)
• Meeting minutes: We could use the agenda document to record relevant decisions.
• Update Contributing.md: Should we mention the topic submitting procedure in the contributing guide?

References

Here are two structured meeting notes from other open-source projects that could serve as inspiration:

• Kubeflow Pipelines Meeting Notes
• Kubeflow Community Meeting Notes

Open to ideas on how we should go about this!

[blakeembrey]

Related, but there's the Wednesday working session and the TC agenda meeting. It may be beneficial to test using the working session as a type of stand-up since I've heard from @wesleytodd and others that they don't know what's happening in parts of the ecosystem, as well as allow others to submit recent blockers that may not exist on the agenda.

[vinybk]

Thanks for the input! I think it's a good idea to use the working sessions for this.

Building on that, @bjohansebas recently updated the bot to track issues labeled as 'agenda' in the working session meeting issues. With this change, I think we're close (if not there already) to having a practical workflow where contributors can add this label to issues they want to discuss in the working session. While contributors are always welcome to stand up, adding this label guarantees that their issue is on the agenda.

This encourages participation in the meeting and ensures that issues get addressed even if the contributor can't make it. In the worst-case scenario, their issue would be addressed within 14 days after adding the label, assuming there's enough bandwidth in the meetings.

Thinking about developer experience, it might be helpful to notify contributors when their issue is added to the agenda. Maybe the bot could ping them when their issue is scheduled so they can plan ahead?

@blakeembrey, do you think this is a good direction?

[bjohansebas]

Although I broke the workflow with that label and the issues no longer appear on the agenda, it could be the way forward, given that the labels won’t be shown until we fix it or revert the change. @vinybk can review the statusboard where, at a global level across the three organizations, the issues and PRs with a specific label are listed.

Until an @expressjs/express-tc member can create the agenda label with that script, we won't be able to use it.

[kjugi]

Regarding this:

Source of topics: where do the topics on the agenda come from?

Members can add a label to the issues that are highly commented on or have more attention than others.

About this:

Submitting topics: How can contributors submit topics for the meeting?

Everybody can comment on the meeting issue. For example here: #328 and let know that you want to discuss a particular topic. Not sure if this flow is common or propagated tho.

[vinybk]

Hmm, I see. So the idea of contributors adding the agenda label to their issues wouldn't work for contributors directly because only members can do that.

Everybody can comment on the meeting issue. For example here: #328 and let know that you want to discuss a particular topic. Not sure if this flow is common or propagated tho.

I agree. This seems to be the way currently - also not sure if people know/do it.

`- / -

How about using the workflow to track a specific string in the comments, like #discuss-in-meeting?

This way, non-members can add issues to the agenda as well.

When added to the agenda, the bot would comment something like This issue was added to the [YYYY-MM-DD] working session. to avoid adding the same issue multiple times. If the contributor wants to add it again, they can by commenting the trigger string one more time. The bot would look for it after the last bot comment.

I discussed this with ChatGPT, and it appears to be doable. If you guys think this is a good idea, I can create a test repo to see how it goes. What do you think?

[bjohansebas]

Express has too many repositories to have a bot observing every comment, and the idea of having a bot has already been discarded due to security concerns (#309)

Hmm, I see. So the idea of contributors adding the agenda label to their issues wouldn't work for contributors directly because only members can do that.

If someone needs that label added, they can ask a triage member. also, there are many members who have notifications for all repositories, so if we see that a topic should be added to the agenda, we will most likely do it.