 Okay, it's been recorded. So hi everyone, it's August 28th, we have a retrospective meeting for the summer of 2019. We had some presentations over the past week, thanks again to all students and mentors and our partners who have been working on this for 2019. The purpose of this meeting is to talk about what went well and what didn't go so well and discuss possible items. So basically it's a formal informal discussion about what were the issues in the project and how to improve them. It's an open forum so everybody is welcome to speak up and provide some comments. We already prepared a retrospective document which we sent before the meeting. So this is my screen. Yes, yes. So yeah, I'll probably turn off a guitar chat because it becomes a bit noisy. Okay, so here we have a retrospective document where everybody is welcome to put his or her feedback. So the approach that we just collect this feedback at this meeting, we will have another meeting next week also to talk about feedback and comments. And then ORCA means we'll process all the information, probably we will reach out to our students and mentors to gather more comments and then we will aggregate all the information and prepare at least affection items for the next year. Hopefully JSOC will happen in 2020 and so we will make sure to use all feedback from you to make the next JSOC even better. So if you're not fine about sharing your feedback in public in such way, just feel free to send your feedback to ORCA means. If you are not comfortable about sending your feedback to ORCA means just because for example if one of the mentors is an ORCA mean also feel free to just send personal feedback to one of other mentors. Sorry, ORCA means and then we will process them at the ORCA meetings and more privately. Any questions before we proceed? Any comments? Okay, so yeah, I see that some people are still typing. So my question is rather to people who didn't provide feedback so far. Would you like to just pick up and add some comments? For example, Jack, maybe you are there. I'm not sure whether we have other students on the call. Yeah, we have a RCA on the call but RCA provided his feedback just in the bottom. There is another document. So again, we will spend some time to aggregate it and push to the main door. I can do that. I thought it would be like a lot of confusion if all the responses at one place, but I can see that a lot of all the responses are in one place. So I'll add it. Yeah, I understand that there is a lot of confusion. Probably this document will be pretty long. I'm not sure. It was expected back from 2018. It was also 5 or 6 pages. Yeah, it was just really good after printing in the plane. But yeah, I think it's fine. So ORCA means we'll sort of this feedback group it. Yeah, maybe next year we should use something like TrelloFeed board or whatever to aggregate the feedback or maybe specialized sites. But yeah, it's yet to be seen. Okay, so does anyone want to add something to the list we always do have? Or should we just start discussing it? I am adding Paraches Geist from GitHub in currently. Thank you. I'd like to thank all the mentors and all our Gadmins for making GSOC so wonderful for the students. Thank you. So I think we should just start going through the feedback. Maybe through the what should we improve part. So I'm just looking at the feedback and it looks like the coding period is probably the most big part in terms of feedback. There are not so many items. So probably we should start from there. So what should we improve? So Zoom usage, it's feedback from a video because yeah, just interpret it. We had online meetups and broadcasts but basically we've got less people in Zoom than we used to get in hangouts on air. And one of the reasons that there is no YouTube broadcasts so that we do not get subscribers of the Jenkins channel is pretty speaking. But yeah, I'm not sure what we could do about that. So other some opinions. I mean I kind of like Zoom because it let more people be able to join the hangout because that was always never fun doing the hangout shuffle where you know people would join and then people had to leave. I don't know. But it doesn't seem like there's a good solution. But yeah, the limit was very nice. Thanks Martin. So Zoom does have a webinar feature that is like the live streaming on YouTube with Hangout. We just haven't used it yet. So I just mentioned I do address some doubts or I think Zoom has a better connection at least in China and actually how it is blocked in China. This is definitely an advantage especially in this year you had a lot of mentors and student applicants from China. So when we had hangouts on air meetings in the beginning of the year there was many requests not to use hangouts on air. Naturally we have no other ways now. So why not? So if we could explore for this option to set up streams maybe we could work around the issues with outreach. But I'm not sure whether it's all the feedback you had about the end. Maybe we are missing something. The only reason I preferred hangouts was especially for the meetings before the GSOC application period. You could watch the live streams on YouTube and comment on that if you had any questions. Okay. But basically you get more of the same Zoom interview because you can just join the call, mute yourself, turn off the video, and use Zoom chats or Gitter to ask questions. So I'm not sure what is different from your point of view there. Yeah. So basically it's more the same. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. And for me we still have a situation like this Zoom account. Because right now we have only a few people in JNK's organization who have access to the CD Foundation Zoom. And if you use personal accounts then you have a 40-minute limitation. Plus there is background noise telling you that you have 30, then 20, then 10 minutes left and whatever distracting things. But I think that it's doable. So for example for project meetings, if within it calls to 40 minutes like status updates, Zoom should be more than enough. And then their calls still can be posted online. Mark, if I recall correctly you were recording for your project meetings every time. So how is Zoom for you? Zoom for me is perfect. It's a tool that I use not only in my open source life but in my day job as well. And I actually use the free Zoom and I'm able to do the things that I need. However, I do understand the comment in regards to the 40-minute timeline. I also like Zoom. It was like pretty convenient UI. But in our meetings we had to upload videos to the drive and we had to share the links on the drive. That was one issue we had. Like for hangouts you can directly use the YouTube link. We couldn't do it. The closing meetings were some problems especially when somebody forgets to upload a video and then goes offline for a week. Like we also experienced in special interest groups. It's a minor thing. We just need some processes to prevent that. And now for example for CDF Zoom the video is being streamed to online host. So at least there are other people who can handle the recording if somebody on the record disappears. Should be fine. Okay. Any other comments about Zoom before we move on? I just want to add a vote for Zoom. I also use it at work and find it to be pretty functional. Okay. So regarding GITR, does anyone want to discuss that? I guess it's mostly about using GITR instead of GITR for GSOC projects. So we tried doing that at work for the same reason and it didn't work well. Maybe it would work for this. The problem that we had is that we worked across a lot of repos and so we ended up having to create a special repo just for tracking the issues and it was just it was hard to get a sense for what work was outstanding. It's not nearly as functional as JIRA. But some of the things like we like to look at burn down charts and I guess we probably don't do that GSOC. So maybe not having that's okay. Yeah. I think about it. So your multiple projects is also something we experienced in 1990 because in your case the situation was even worse. There were multiple Github organizations. What we did, we actually put the projects on the organization level because Github.com for example, if you go to Libre course, you can so it's on Jenkins but whatever. So you can see that now there are organizations on the project on the organization level and here you can link particular repositories. You still can automation. So it was our solution to this program. Yeah. So you can see that there are linked repositories. Another advantage that you can basically manage permissions for this project inside. So if you have a project within the repository, you have no way to add teams to the project but if you use organization level project dashboard, you can add teams and for example people will be able to manage dashboard. Not ideal solution but it kind of works. I want to address the slowness part. I mean I have problems with Jenkins chair outside of GSOC and it's not really that I don't know if it's been the infrastructure teams already aware of that or not. A big boolean and marquee if you're meeting with the infrastructure team, ask them. Yeah, infrastructure team is pretty well aware about that. So why it's slow sometimes. Jenkins project now uses GTI which is hosted, well basically it's self-hosted so we don't use Atlasium cloud for that and hence no scalability, sometimes the performance issues sometimes. So that is just memory degradation and yeah there is a long extended action item to migrate somewhere but yeah there are higher priority projects right now. There's also support issues for that particular area. Yeah there are some but well usually it's something like GTI is unusable, somebody fixes that causes the issue and one month later it's unusable again. Well just because having front-end services is challenging. So yeah basically if somebody wants to help infrastructure team it will be much appreciated. There are some discussions about that in the infrastructure may increase and for example some work that means start to participate in the infrastructure team. So yeah whether it helps the project. Okay I'd like to add into Jira. Okay I was using Jira quite a lot. I find it quite okay. There were some times the server was inaccessible but generally it was and it is fine I didn't have this any issue with slow and like that. One issue I had was like every time there was a Jira ticket we never had a conversation on that like on GitHub issues you used to. It was generally on the pull request that the thread started. So basically it was nice that there were options to configure your Jira ticket but there were no discussions on the tickets. Yeah that's a problem. So I think what I think what we can do for that project is an action item can be is during the onboarding of a Google summer of code students during the bonding phase we can I think as org admins we can sort of design a better flow so the students are aware of what the flow is ahead of time and I think that was I think that's what you're describing please correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah not exactly I'm giving any solution because I'm not sure because I also tried a GitHub project but I think Jira is more mature than it handles stuff better than GitHub project as of now. Yeah I believe that Prerecha even have yeah that is even a blog post from Prerecha about that. So I'm not sure how actual it is but yeah basically there was some documentation for the flow. Yeah probably we should just include it in our documentation. Okay we can just like have a discussion and create a new blog regarding the project workflow which will be contributed by other members as well. It doesn't I think that it's rather up to teams to define their workflow because for example some projects all we have is the best workflow if you're a JSOC student working on the JCAS project or something like that then there is already a workflow in GitHub for that and yeah as long as teams are happy I think that's fine so I would rather avoid standardizing that unless there are clear benefits for Jenkins as an organization. Oleg some of the teams might not be aware of what to do and it is they might rely on us so it's okay to guide them and if they are aware of what they want to do then they can choose their path. Correct I think it's up to the mentors to set that tone with the during the bonding phase and I think so what I think the action item is on the org admins to create sort of a checklist during the bonding phase for mentors to follow and one of the items in that checklist should be we need to discuss what the flow is going to look like for our given project not for overall but just a given students project. Yeah we didn't have this action item explicitly I mean yeah we had a checklist but there was no this action item I noted to the list oh okay. Actually can I throw in another thing about the kind of points for JIRA? Sure so I think using is a kind of like another positive thing about using like JIRA and like having conversations there is part of the like post google summer of code when we're trying to encourage the community to maybe like look at this or adopt it and have more usage it shows like all the thought that went into the ticket or kind of like ideas if something wasn't able to be accomplished or kind of like discussions so then it can be picked up by other people later you know just like adds to the self documentation so I think that's useful. So something like that and sure completed. That was a great suggestion Kristen. Yeah so it would be clear problems statement, the definition of done. This was the Department of Defense. Yeah I think that's pretty that's good definitely an extra step. Okay I'm sure it gets completed. Thanks Oleg. So anything else before we move on? Okay mentor's commitment. So yeah this is probably a painful topic because it input at least a few projects and actually it's not the first year we had this issue and it's not only about the coding phase. So how the process worked this year is that during the project selection we asked all mentors to commit to at least five hours per week because we lost a few mentors in previous years and the idea was that if mentors explicitly commit then it will be better but yeah of course life happens. So in the case of some mentors they don't expect that events which prevented them from participating in JSOC and we were able to apply some backup plans but still it wasn't ideal so some mentors unfortunately disappeared and yeah what is our next item yeah we will we already have a kind of blacklist for mentors we will be expanding that without mentioning names right now but still it impacted the projects significantly and apologies for that. So as of that means we got involved in a few projects during phase one but maybe it was pretty late for some projects so there is definitely something to improve but yeah it would be really nice to get students feedback because yeah it basically hits not only active projects it impacts other students who apply it and who are not selected because other mentors committed and they didn't work well yeah then in some cases we had great mentors teams but we were unable to accept projects after them so yeah then it would be really great to ensure that all mentors teams are really aligned and then can execute on projects even if there are some initial cancellations so it would be really great to get feedback here from students and mentors about what's your opinion about that and how we could improve that. Well like if I might may I think I may be one of those mentors you're talking about I know great early on we're quite involved in terms to you know trying to you know find students for our project and so on but once the project was not selected I didn't realize it was an option to sort of continue on with with other projects you know also perhaps I couldn't contribute too much because it was outside the area of expertise but nonetheless if we kind of you know make that more clear and perhaps you know request if there are mentors that their projects were not selected but would like to contribute forward yeah so yeah maybe to address some of this feedback for selection projects so what I'm actually working on for selection is plan B for not accepted projects plan B for not accepted projects so if you follow one request and outreach special interest group what we introduced recently we have community bridge and on the community bridge we started setting up a Jenkins framework there just to have an opportunity to run self-funded projects so we start that one project here by slide and he was presented presented on Monday it's for jpegs developer tools but the plan is to keep expanding and I had an action item to reach out to you honest actually so yeah it's one of the mitigations we plan for not accepted projects but indeed having clear way for mentors to join other projects would also help so basically it's community bridge yeah that's that's that's a great idea and I think there was a some early discussion on that we didn't have a lot of traction but nonetheless I like the community bridge idea thanks yep so I hope a lot on that yeah I just didn't get to that because yeah you're to many fires in other areas okay you're honest maybe you have other feedback about the application part especially for mentorship I think you know the early formation of of mentor teams is is important as you you know you're finding out there is a lot of charm in a lot of people you know life cuts us up with them during the summer especially um I'm wondering if we could sort of have a pool of sort of backup mentors that you know they would be available if you know some projects lose mentors and then you know those people are available to sort of come in and help ad hoc um that may be a good sort of option for recovering from the loss of mentors which could be detrimental to project yeah yeah it would be definitely nice so our main problem was that many projects are just quite specific and yeah although we did some effort to find backup mentors it didn't always work so in 2018 we had cases where we needed toilet mentors in 2019 yeah there were some cases as well so yeah if there are people who are ready to be backup mentors it's perfectly fine but yeah our approach this year was to start from many mentors you may have noticed that some projects started from something like five or six mentors and basically it boiled down to less mentors so maybe we just approached this quantity from where the beginning I'm also wondering if it's possible to identify mentors during the year in anticipation of the GSOC perhaps you know from some of the people that are involved with the Jenkins open source community um you know you might you know and Mark for example people that you are more involved with the community have an idea of people uh and kind of you know see their activities and perhaps try to invite them early on another thing that we're doing on that front is a lot of us especially that we're at Jenkins world I can say we were we were actively trying to like pump people up and recruit people for that Mark how do you think that worked I think it worked good I've had two people that you know out of a lot of people two that are remaining in contact with me yeah about wanting to do that so I think it's a good thing but to your point even more in regards to trying to identify people I think it's also good to take uh studies that pass to google summer code and really try to sort of elevate them to the mentor status because they did they did well so I think there's a lot of things that are in play but I do think we can we can can still continue to improve on that front yeah so yeah basically we were doing both in 2019 and all our previous GSOC students have been actually potential mentors in 2019 for example Wutron, Alexomai, the mentors this year so yeah I think it worked well another thing we do in order to improve the situation we basically start earlier so for example this year we start preparing for this table and started a more onboarding projects in November right after the mentor summit for 2020 well basically we can start doing it right now so we we have natural source of project ideas from the previous year because for some projects we had really great applications mentor teams but the various reasons we were unable to accept them so we can make sure to just drag and drop these projects to the next year and have a basic list and we can keep expanding it um do you think maybe it would help to have like I don't know if somebody can't uh commit in the full capacity of a mentor to try to like split out like okay maybe one person one person who's like the lead mentor or something will attend all the project meetings and then if somebody else can't commit to that then they could just be doing like code review or something like that because that like my project was one of those that started out with like a bunch of mentors and a lot of people dropped out and on the one hand it was kind of confusing because it's like are they still a mentor are they not like um but in some ways I'd rather have some help than no help at all and so um for for my project um Tim was not actually a mentor but did a lot of like code review which is really helpful so even though he wasn't able to attend like any of our meetings uh just the fact that um he was able to like you know give me feedback on the code that I had written and how to do like some best practices and stuff like that that was really helpful for me so like I don't know I know you guys are saying like well it helps obviously have mentors who are you know more familiar with the project which I think he was one of those but I think also having people who maybe are like really good engineers or something who would just be able to give you like feedback on your code I think would also be helpful because part of my goal as a student is to continue to develop my skills over the summer as well yeah right so basically it's also what we did for this year so it was called technical advisors so for example I and Baptiste we were technical advisors in Natasha's project so yeah this one um so yeah we listed here as mentors just because uh well we didn't fix metadata but yeah in the spreadsheets we have high technical advisors so one of the issues here was that for example in my case I just committed too too much things this year so there was less available than I wanted to and yeah Baptiste was busy with other things and yeah I assure you that these things yeah are really important so yeah me tried to do it this year as technical advisors okay yeah but this didn't really work so I think it could work um but I think one of the best ways to be able to do that is to try to like help pull more members from the community who have taken this who maybe still aren't aware despite our best efforts to advertise this because I think that's kind of like like Natasha's project like we she went to so many of the like SIG meetings and the popular meetings and then um people from those different you know SIGs got interested and then they you know became very involved so it's like after they were able to see that the project would benefit them I think it kind of has a lot more power to pull people in so unfortunately that doesn't seem like it can even start to happen until after projects are selected or until like the community bonding phase so unfortunately that doesn't really help us pull in mentors but it does help us pull in people who are super so interested in seeing the project succeed so just getting more of those people maybe is even important too from and so regarding that when we were selecting the project ideas actually our focus was to have project ideas from special interest groups and and we were reaching out to all these entities we were going to meetings in order to propose project ideas so I guess for pretty much every project in the list we tried to do some outreach work even before the JSOC officially started we were going to platform SIGs presented project ideas facilitating feedback I wouldn't say we got too much out of that but we joined pretty much every special interest group and we reached out pretty much every project and the idea was that the most of the projects are somehow binded to special interest groups for example we can just take something like that multiple branch for github yeah you cannot see it on the page but if you go to the the metadata so here there is no SIG mapping but for many projects there is a SIG mapping in the metadata because we really wanted these projects to be a part of special interest groups not all projects were naturally a part of that so for example ABUDA was working on role strategy performance improvements and right now we don't have security special interest group there are some activities to have it on the CDF level but we were able to mitigate it to go on to platform SIG for example for performance testing by participating in the NJCASC sub-project so yeah it was somehow mitigated but the whole idea this year was to have all projects under the umbrella of Jenkins entities because yeah it would be much more comfortable for students so basically what you propose probably just didn't work for that well yeah oh like one of the challenges that we had as mentors early on we had a really great team but we were quite geographically dispersed essentially we were spanning you know probably you know the entire time zone of of universe so it was kind of hard to organize meetings and so on is there any kind of ideas or suggestions on how to improve on this any kind of you know regional perhaps focus on teams that may be more local to the to the student I think that can be quite disruptive too well so when we were selecting projects time zone overlap was also a topic well historically in google summer of course the most of the students allocated in the Asian and Pacific region and the most of the mentors allocated in America so in Europe so there is kind of time zone difference by designing JSOC just due to the distribution at the same time yeah we could improve that and what is the suggestion that if there is a mentor team they are encouraged to do outreach on their own to find applicants and for example you can focus on having applicants in your region so that as a mentor team you can mitigate it so I'm not sure whether it's good enough but it's how you could actually approach it so for example if you are a mentor potential mentor if you wanted to have a good student one of the ways is for example you can just go to a local university to present JSOC I mean Jenkins JSOC or just JSOC in general who really advertises that the sensual kind of whatever local promotion and it could also help with time zone differences but time zone difference is kind of implied when you work on JSOC and of course all kinds of synchronous communications maybe please et cetera also mitigation so we are doing this some other continuous comments that we should probably be using maybe please more often yeah it is though a challenge even you know and I suspect it will be even more after students get involved I know we're mostly in the planning states I mean Mark he was in California Bruno was in New Zealand and I was you know in Boston so we were basically spanning the entire you know but anyway I think that can get even trickier once the students get involved and and you need more regular meetings that's for sure so yeah but well we have to work that somehow distributed work is challenging even for senior engineers because yeah it's just completely different lifestyle and when you go to JSOC it's even worse because mentors are still partially available there is no mentors who can dedicate full-time to mentorship and yeah it's even more challenging but we have to somehow deal with it okay so yeah I would like to course back to the mentor commitment because yeah we went to other topics and edit some feedback there but yeah are there any additional feedback you would like to have for this topic one of the things that I would like to add for the mentor commitment is regular communication from the org admins to regular asynchronous communication from the org admins to the mentors more so in the in the form of a stand-up and that doesn't have to be something that has to be in person but maybe it's something twice a week emails or you know Monday and a Friday something that is showing that there's progress a lot of times I find we're all very busy for most of us we all have day jobs so a lot of times we can attend meetings but I may read emails you know at night or early in the morning it makes it easier for us to catch up and catch from an org admin perspective to catch something early if I see something or don't see something sorry for being long-winded there yeah it would be really nice so before that we go the weekly mentor meetings this GSOC we wanted to have something like that but basically it fell through the cracks and the other assumption was that since almost all mentors all say either technical advisors or mentors and projects it would be fine and apparently it wasn't fine so whether there's something to improve so like what was the follow-up with the with the getter teams that you started setting up did that work out well we used them for requesting reviews and for yeah mostly for requesting reviews it worked but you basically cannot use github teams for anything else so it's rather feedback from students so did they work well or could it be improved can you repeat the question again did github teams help you yes so basically any feedback about them yeah I guess they worked okay I mean I pretty much just used it for tagging people to review things and I felt like people were pretty responsive to that so I think it worked okay I wasn't using the team so much because like some of the additional members were there who were not doing code reviews so I was just directly asking for reviews from my mentors individually so yeah one of the reasons why we introduced github teams is because we need a way to include students to the Jenkins organization because otherwise if you learn at a part of the organization and if you didn't have a your project for example in the case of promoted bills in the case of role strategy there was no new repository for students created in the beginning and hence they wouldn't be able to even request reviews unless they edit to the github organization so github teams was a way to do that but yeah for example in a role strategy project we were using team mentions for requesting reviews I'm not sure how it was for beauty but yeah I think that it was still not positive to have them and though yeah if you don't use them you basically have no problems so you just don't use them it wasn't being able to set them up yes definitely the teams were useful because I contributed to several repositories so it was easy to just tag the team anywhere in Jenkins I would like to give a time marker we are seven minutes from the hour okay so yeah let's just spend this seven minutes at feedback if somebody is missing but it's just the first part so next week we will also have retrospective so if you would like to add something just put your feedback to the chat and we will make sure to process that and to discuss that and if you just want to speak up to add something it's a good time to do that if not we can just go on through comments here I would also like to add to those that are on the call if you do not feel comfortable adding something into the document with your name being attached to it you are more than welcome to reach out to one of the org admins and your information will be added anonymously if you don't feel comfortable doing that there is the org admin I don't know of a different way to send it anonymously but what I can say from an org admins perspective is if you do wish to remain anonymous you can reach out to one of the org admins individually and they will keep your information anonymous from not only the community but or other org admins as well I just want everybody to be able to feel comfortable with with providing feedback you know that can be anonymous as well right and if you want to talk to someone in Jenkins project which is not a part of the org admin team whatever escalations if you don't like anything so firstly there is Jenkins board mailing list it's a common escalation way for code of conduct or if you want to just have one-to-one with somebody who's not a part of the org admin team let us know we'll set up this one-to-one I mean this somebody I'll say the team completely I mean one thing I want to ask I don't think it's in this retrospective is typically we have the hourly office hours every week at this time has that worked out for all the students basically during third phase we didn't have office hours because nobody had any questions I'm using yeah I noticed students didn't have questions so sometimes we just have office hours of getting questions that's what make sure that it wasn't because students have questions but couldn't ask because the timing didn't work out but rather it is we just didn't have questions I think officers are nice like initially we had some queries and those are answered during office hours later on when we were working on the project specific work then the team meetings was sufficient to answer all our queries so that's my point of view any other comments if you're asking about the time of the meetings they work well for me yeah but basically it's back to comments from you're honest about us in communications we can find one slot which is fine for everyone so yeah maybe doing more as in communications could also address that so potentially basically you didn't need it right initially it was helpful but later on I didn't find it much of any use to me I mean I didn't have any queries at that time okay so actually we could just optimize it a bit for example what we could do use something like so something like that just to be explicit that we want to be doing office hours regularly during later phases does it make sense yes so yeah let's just put this and if somebody wants to vote for against just feel free to comment okay so we are running out of time so again please spend the next week to just put some feedback if you are a mentor and if you haven't submitted your feedback yet please also do so I mean evaluations all students have already submitted evaluations and thanks a lot for that and yeah I will just keep working on the feedback structuring that so any kinds of being done just put them there and we will process it awesome thank you everybody thank you nothing from me I wrote everything in the document everything I wanted to say so and thanks everyone for your input I also wanted to thanks everybody from the organizers from early on I know it was a huge amount of work and it's really appreciated thank you guys Martin Oleg Markey great job thank you thank you yeah let's keep working on the next year so juice of no hands good looks like you're ready yeah say right everybody yeah bye bye see you next week bye bye thank you take care bye