 Okay, welcome to the July edition of the Quartier meeting. Hopefully everybody's having a good summer so far. Let me advance the slide. Yeah, I don't think there were any new suggestions for the agenda topic that was on the issue. So we'll go over mostly three things. David's gonna give us an update on the advisory council discussion we've had for a while and following up from last month's meeting on sort of reframing, contribute for price labels or issues. And another discussion that we've had for a while on the Slack workspace, especially for Quartier members. So those are the main topics. And I got a couple of quick ones for GitLag commit and the next month's meeting or upcoming two meetings. But I mean, feel free to add on the slide itself if you have anything else that you wanna discuss towards the end. Eili, how are you? See you until now. Good morning, yeah, probably by yourself. Good, good, thanks. Okay, so let me advance the slides and I guess I'll turn things over to you, David and give us a quick update on community advisory council and so it's a reminder from last month's meeting. All right, kind of David. Thanks, Ray. Yeah, I've put the link to the measure best which all of you are familiar with. Essentially, yeah, what I wanted to say is that that I've been considering closing this MR essentially while there's been interest for some of them and then being used for some of you as well. The initiative has not construction. One thing that I should do though, first of all is I should probably apologize for the time it's taken for getting an update on this as the DRI or the person who proposed this I should have been more on the ball essentially essentially bringing this to a conclusion either way. I think perhaps leading to, the thoughts leading to that decision, I feel that having another process, having another governance body that has more time commitment to people who are already offering their free time as volunteers might be putting them at stress. I think all in that one thing that I was concerned about personally is the forepoint of their potentially public expression that members of this council would have. We've had some controversial discussions in the past and I'm thinking that we will have more in the future as well. And yeah, and for one, I think this might bring and one that may be exposure to people who would be part of this body. And then for them to try to represent both the views of the weather community. Also we have a critical eye with kid lab but also defending kid lab decision in some cases this could lead to stressful situations. All in all, I'm thinking that as I'm saying this slide I think rather than having a body that requires regular time commitment or I was defining a process that we can activate whenever there is this need for having more visibility and getting more proactive feedback on a particular decision that kid lab is trying to take might be more effective. I think right after this call and after hearing your thoughts my plan would be to add comment on that MR essentially similar to what I've just said here and then close the MR. But yeah, any perhaps I'll just turn it over to you. Any thoughts, any concerns, any ideas? I think you already contacted some people to join the community advisory council. Probably it's best to inform them not only we as a comment on closing the MR but send them a personal message at least those that you invited already. And you mentioned that there should be a process as an alternative to deal with situations where kid lab makes a controversial decision is the process already documented somewhere or do we have to create it or... We don't have a process yet documented anywhere. I mean the ideas would be essentially and that's just a proposal by the way it's said. There's nothing in the works yet would be to have a way to mark particular issues or particular MRs as requiring wider community feedback and then proactively engage with community leaders to provide their feedback. I mean in my head I'm thinking that's something like a label where people can subscribe freely to might work but we might still want to reach out to some people proactively. If we were to do this then we would start an MR and then get the feedback in there but if anyone has any thoughts on this or things that make sense by all means don't block on us from the IT lab team to create this. If you think this is something that might make sense then feel free to propose a process as well and I would personally be supportive as well. Yeah I think at least the small process would be good to have just something like if there's a controversial discussion it's this label and be active in the discussion because I think that was the last big thing that some people from good lab simply left one comment and then didn't participate in the discussion anymore and that increased the outrage. So I think it would be good to have at least a short general process for this kind of situation. So people have a start to handle this. I think the only risk with what was just proposed there is like you know no one's going to want to label a issue as controversial so like how do you handle how do you make sure that they don't make a mess? Yeah I would choose a perhaps a more neutral I mean this might be just a small thing with the naming but I would just use a label called requires community feedback or something like that perhaps that's yeah I think I agree with you Ben. I think explicitly naming it controversial might automatically make it controversial even if it wasn't in the first place. Yeah I mean I agree you would come up with a different name I still think you run a similar risk of like I mean I guess it's kind you know kind of core team can look out for that kind of stuff but need various folks to not be afraid to ask for community feedback and I think some people might be just because you know they might not agree with what they're trying to do so I'm not saying there's a perfect solution I don't have an alternative just you know coming from the other side. Yeah I mean I think it might require a particularly new some education particularly new members to new team members to GitLab to essentially not be afraid of having this discussion whenever there's something that's potentially going to be controversial. So perhaps to recap the conversation I think one thing that I can do is to send us what's suggesting contact those members outside of the core team that we reached out to to be part of the initial council to let them know about the decision to gather their feedback as well and then following that and depending on that feedback and most probably close the DMR with with a comment and the comment would be would have just said here essentially and then I will extend the invitation as well to those that we contact and to see if there's that the they would have feedback on this process for gathering feedback and then yeah probably then start a new MR with a more lightweight process. Yeah sounds good. Perfect thanks a lot for your feedback I really appreciate it and then again apologies for having this familiar for such a long time. Some learning I need to do here as well. Thanks David. Okay advance the slide won't do quickly. Okay so the next topic we talked about this briefly last month on contribute for prize. I mean this labels fit around for I think a little over a year I mean the purpose was to encourage people to I mean that's just way for like the quarterly hackathons but work on issues that particularly product managers highlighted to work on like a throughout the year to get lab merchandise and I think I mentioned last month I the only person who actually had an MR merge through this program was actually a COCO and a couple of others like try to work on something but it didn't quite work out. I mean a few things that I mean I've learned I think David that you mentioned this is one of the last bullet items. I mean I think I tried to promote it through I mean mostly through my tweets but I might have had like a get lab social team at least retweet as well but it's probably worth being a little bit more proactive about this I for example do like quarterly or schedule the scheduled tweets with with the list of issues that have these labels you know I mean I have a new name that that's that sort of proposed but keeping this on on top of everybody's mind on a regular basis may not be a bad thing to highlight some of the issues that we want we want to encourage wider community members to work on and on that issue itself I think there were like a two or three names that that that were proposed but I think what I what I'm sort of bleeding towards is just renaming that label to call it like a community challenge so don't emphasize the price too much as this is more of a substantial like an issue that we want to encourage community members to work on I mean even like outside of the hackathon and that we also looked at myself and Samantha one of the community advocates we looked at like upgrading their prize as well we're looking at a couple of options and we can actually customize their prize with the message if we go with the community challenge label we can add a message something along the lines of I met this challenge on the merchandise so that's something that community members can celebrate with so it's a you know slight modification of the label or the program that we that we created a while ago but that's sort of the you know version two that I was thinking of doing but obviously want to get your feedback and get your thoughts on it yeah and then also if you click on this link I mean there are about 1920 issues with that with that label that you can take a look at to get a sense of type of issues that people added the label to but even within GitLab team members is probably definitely needs a reminder or refresher because it's like I said this hasn't been necessarily active in the past few months especially so let me just pause there and see people have any thoughts or feedback yeah I like the label change I think it's better not to focus so much on the price on the challenge itself because after all it shouldn't you shouldn't just do it because you get let's say a free t-shirt yeah yeah I mean yeah I mean you're exactly right I mean people aren't like motivated to do this I mean even if it's a like a hundred or $200 price which would be more than that we typically spend on merchandise but yeah I think people that are motivated to to work on these type of issues I doubt that the merchandise is the the main motivation it's nice way to kind of celebrate it but they're not doing it for like the monetary or material reasons we cover last week or last month I should say what the were there any specific criteria or was it very much down to the the kind of product manager to say well you know this is something we really want the community really want but we haven't got capacity to yeah I mean I think that's a I mean fair characterization I left it pretty much up to the product managers and I think like maybe it's in the handbook or even the original issue like for each of the stages I wanted to like a limit the number of them like I didn't want to have like a 50 like issues with a label on like for for the editor group as an example I mean I don't think that's ever happened but I sort of cautioned them to like a limited number of issues with that label but I didn't you know necessarily monitor them that closely but yeah I mean as long as like the product managers put some thought behind it and then that was important enough but I didn't think there was capacity among team members to work on them that's that's something they could add labels to but I think that might be good candidate to document on the handbook as in the criteria for for choosing those and those issues right yep let me add it to the notes here any other thoughts or for comments other issues limited only to product managers and thus the deliverables and features because I can say for the github frontend we will have a good challenge of migrating our code to view three and Apollo three and I believe it would be nice to have some contributions from community I'm not sure this should fall on the community challenge for price but is this limited to product managers only are you asking if is this limited to like you know product managers who can apply labels to the issues I mean not necessarily that's how we started but I mean you know no I mean the short answer is now if if in you know consultation amongst engineers or with the product managers if someone thinks it's appropriate to add that label you know as long as they're get live team members I think that's completely appropriate yeah I mean I think that's sort of the way it started but yeah maybe I should sort of mention that in the handbook as well right I was going to ask a similar question of like you know is there a process for people to nominate things because like I don't have anything on mine right now but there could be core team members that might see things that they think should be considered you know what how should they suggest it right yeah I mean I would like definitely leave it to each of the like that's just the product teams but each of the like your groups and stages because I mean they all you know work slightly differently so I want to respect different styles of work but yeah I mean you know whatever consensus they come to they decide certain issues like we're highlighting it shouldn't have just have to be product managers perhaps a perhaps a way and another way it might be to I mean for for core team members specifically if they see something that's that's getting traction or is there something that they personally feel that it's important to to get worked on and and there's no capacity in the in the stages teams for them to bring it up on a core team meeting for instance as in a nomination I know that this is not really async I mean there could be an async process but that might be a lightweight way of doing this as in nominations on on core team meetings right yeah I mean I guess I just you know again I don't have anything specifically now but like for example if you just sort this you track her by like popularity for example like there's a number of popular issues that are not scheduled like the most popular one for example dark theme you know it's not scheduled but like should it be considered and there's a bunch of other ones too so I think that's a really good point and that's kind of what I had in my head that's one of the ways the question that's come up in Gitter a few times around well what should I attack and I think we all have slightly different approaches to how we pick issues up but one of mine has certainly been to look at the most popular but the most popular ones generally I guess would have been picked up if they were simple enough so that would be my primary concern that a lot of the popular issues not necessarily but quite likely that they're fairly complex beasts and whilst I guess some of the community members are more than capable of of tackling them some of them might be you know really require a team of seasons get lab experts okay cool yeah I appreciate the feedback and I'll add all the court team members and in the handbook update that I make and yeah once since we have the label sort of sorted out I want to get the the prize kind of lined up and then can definitely work on updating the handbook and make more announcement through our our social team okay all right so move on to the next fun topic slack workspace and yeah Ben and I actually had a chance to catch up during a coffee chat earlier in the day and Ben you you've sort of been living lived through this over the past I mean almost two years now since you've been a court team member and Lee here you're kind of going through this now so I think it was almost like almost two years ago I think we I think well like you know before I before like David and I joined get lab I think the old slack policy was I think the court team members had only access to the development channel I think that's correct like I mean Remy correct me if I'm wrong or some of the other court team members I think they only had access to maybe one or two slack channels and then we opened it up to all slack channels yes a few months after David and I joined so so so everyone got access to all the slack channels as long as you're a court team member ahead of NDA sign and right around the time like Ben joined like there was some concerns like within get lab within it and others about there are like a certain private channels I mean a lot of the court team members you've seen this like the ones that start with like a pound a underscore like account specific channels that people were concerned about and we were trying to find like a different ways to kind of resolve it I think harness like you propose like is there a way to sort of isolate those private channels and slack and it turns out there still isn't a way to do this I mean we thought maybe if we upgraded our plan to something higher we upgraded from like a standard to think it's called plus so that's the isolation of like a private channels is still not a possibility so we're sort of in this like a limbo like I mean several of the court team members have access to all the channels Ben you have access to I don't know what the number is like maybe 15 or 20 or so and Lee you haven't seen it yet because it's a confidential issue I mean David just approved it a while ago but we request access for you to to like a 10 or 12 like a different channels on in Gillette workspace so I mean so it's a start but that's not I mean Ben I'll let you I'll let you like voice your concerns but it's obviously not ideal solutions because I mean Ben you shared an example like you started discussion in one of the channels that you have access to and then people mentioned another channel that you don't have access to and it obviously it's not a good experience so we're sort of it is like a state that's not like necessarily ideal people even amongst the court team members you don't have equal access to all the slack channels and one of the things that I wanted to have discussion on was about you know just like some of the other companies are the open source projects why don't we also start a like a completely open workspace that's separate from the current private instance of get lab and that's sort of one of the things that I you know even amongst the community relations team that we started talking about or thinking about so that's sort of where things are let me just stop there and then I mean do you want to share like other concerns that that we discussed early in the day well I mean you pretty much highlight that but it's like you know I have access to some channels and then I know there's other channels that would be good to get access to or nice to have access to but then it's like well is it worth the effort to ask Ray to request me access and get the approval and then like you know various different times people will be like oh look at this link it's like well I can only see the preview text of that link if I click the link it says you know doesn't exist because I don't have access like because for example like you know I do a lot of stuff with the docs I mean you eventually got access to the docs channels but originally it was like well I can't kind of go looking at the channels that are the topics I'm most interested in so I think you pretty much highlighted it you know I guess some other thoughts just like yeah I've seen other companies do public slacks or open-source projects rather I think that's a potential option to consider you know some potential conflicts there is like in a way it competes with Gitter but I'd say it's a lot different otherwise why does Github use Slack and not Gitter you know since you guys own it and then you know the thing I mentioned to Ray earlier today was just like a third thing to kind of consider could be to like run your own MatterMos server because I mean Github does ship MatterMos but no one at Github actually uses MatterMos so maybe that's an area that Github's kind of blind on but you do ship it as part of Omnibus so just various different thoughts I think that was what I was going to say is it are you far far far too deep to consider other solutions that I know I've bounced ideas around with maybe yourself Ray and some other maybe product team etc we since lockdown begun I've started using Discord my organization we're using the free plan I know there is a load of additional features if you pay but I mean the requirement seems fairly basic and it's quite surprising that Slack don't actually facilitate what you're looking for go ahead then sorry well I was going to say just I think something to consider too is like just because we set up another Slack Discord MatterMos whatever it is I mean doesn't necessarily mean that like Github the company has to change how they do things today like it'd be beneficial to have a bunch of engineers in all those places or whatever's chosen but I'm just referring to your comment of like are you already too deep in Slack because it doesn't necessarily mean the company has to change it's just like like for example I'm not active on Gitter because I find the experience quite not good yes that's very no I mean I think that's one of the issue like not a lot of GitLab team members are on Gitter because of the experience I mean they enable I mean we have like you can at least like create threads now but even threads it's pretty rudimentary it's not as elegant unfortunately I mean my thinking is that the threads are worse than not having threads you can't follow conversation anymore you know if somebody posts a reply to a message that was is not still on the screen you kind of don't really see it so yeah I'm fortunate I think as well whilst I can understand you know if we do bring on board yet another product or tool or whatever you want to call it but I think that's entirely the issue that we've got at the moment people don't like Gitter yeah the tool's not great and because there's no one I'm exaggerating things greatly here but yeah the the GitLab team aren't there so people come on and ask questions and don't get answers so yeah I think that's kind of the idea of trying to find something that you know I'm sure we've all experienced working in organisations where there's too many tools and too many systems and too many platforms and yeah it sounds a bit of a dangerous a slippery slope to me yeah I mean I think I think then if we were to use something like Mattermore then it should be the tool to use rather than that's like to be honest but I know that this is an ideal situation or rather not an aspiration and there's more complexity to that and to me the most important thing would be to remove walls because right now I mean people have access to to GitLab you can talk to GitLab over gitlab.com but this real time more instant messaging type of conversation is something that also creates or helps the community to get that connection with the GitLab team members much more than and conversations over MRs and I think if we were to have a separate open Slack instance we should definitely move some of the channels that are inside GitLab to have only one version rather than having private and public channels because otherwise the wall would still be there and even with the recommendation for the Latin MRs to work only in the public channels then does there is that conversation that's still happening on the private ones? Yeah I mean my sentiment is also that if I mean let's say you know all of a sudden we have this like a public instance if GitLab team members aren't there especially from the engineering side of GitLab then we're sort of back to where we are I mean you have a nicer interface and nicer tool with Slack but you know you still have that separation but and yeah but you know asking like a lot of the like a GitLab team members to you know keep track of both workspaces like I don't know there'll be a lot of objections or how that's going to go yeah and then I think I noted in the issue as well I talked to Dawei on the Militano team I mean they've had a public instance of Militano Slack for I mean at least like several months and it's a free version that I mean Dawei himself is managing it's not supported by GitLab IT so just you have a lot less bells and whistles on the free version so you know if we have a like a completely public instance with less bells and whistles I don't know that's going to cause a lot of issues either but yeah I mean Natalia I don't know if you do have any like a thoughts or yeah I think for good or bad I think people are just really entrenched into like Slack this is sort of become a habit for for a long time and it's hard to break away from yeah what scares me as GitLab team member if we have two instances like private and public and we have duplicative channels there right it would be definitely hard to track both even with one private instance sometimes it's very hard to keep up with messages or say front and for development if we move it all to public it could be fine but we would need to have some kind of moderators to prevent spamming and unrelated questions from the community and this will happen the person who moderates view discord I know this for sure and we have public and private instances as well so if we move public we need to ensure that messages are all related to the topic and not preventing core members and team members from something really important on these channels because if they are spammed nobody will just read them this is one of my concerns and with a public instance also we would need to make sure that GitLab team members are well aware that posting in the public space because sometimes in our channels some private slack sometimes things happen it's sometimes we post something that probably shouldn't be posted on public spaces like from simple things like I don't know non-inclusive lexic it still happens since on our slack and this might be a limiting factor for the team members as well because we need to think well before we post and you probably remember that we had a few incidents already with all our open issues and discussions and this transparency is one of our values but it also leads to some issues with publicity with hacker and discussions and ready discussions so this should be considered for sure right with Natalia because if the channels are open it will be too noisy there and there is no guarantee people will not pick the first channel from the list and use it as the the general support channel for example if we have the development channel we there's no guarantee that people won't use it as the just help me how to install the platform or something like that right it will be the problem I mean I hear what you're saying but how's that not a problem with Gitter and the form and so on today like you're changing medium but I don't think you're changing the problem I mean maybe you're making the problem easier to create because the tool is easier to use and easier to find but yeah I guess you still see questions about I mean once in a while I need to remind people like you know go to this Gitter channel for you know using get live questions if you're not contributing but uh yeah I wonder if the volume will be larger on Slack those incidents is happening but but I do agree with you like when I talk to Dao-Ai like he's managing that by himself like I don't know how many people are subscribing to that Slack channel but even if it's a free version I don't think it's probably something that like Gileb IT team will dedicate have to dedicate resources not just to like moderate it but also manage the the workspace but I mean yeah right like has again I'm not really that familiar with Gitter but I mean have much work went into trying to figure out the various efficiencies with it that people don't like I mean like for example I'm poking at it right now and like is there really only one channel for all of Gileb because no there no there are there are three there's one for contributors there's heroes and there's one for just I mean I think we called it like now is it called Gileb HQ I can't remember what it's called now but that's yeah so there are three right now but really just one for users isn't there yeah yeah yeah I mean I guess just okay I see now just the usability is that has some room for improvement 10 minutes of me looking around I can't figure it out I've definitely raised this a number of times not not the usability as such but I'm still looking for an answer why Gitter is used and all I've figured out for myself so far is because it's owned by Gileb yeah I mean so how we started using Gitter is that what you're asking Lee or I think we can answer this one actually yeah oh sorry I can give you my view at least I mean when I started there was that only channel Gileb and I'm not sure if by that yeah by that time it had been acquired by Gileb had been acquired by Gileb but that channel might have predated the acquisition I'm not sure right yes the I mean the reason why we started using it on the community team and the reason why we started creating the other channels was to have a way for community member to have that real-time conversation with community members particularly on the contributors channel then they can I mean people can talk to Ray can talk to the worship as coaches can talk to each other and that's yeah that's a that's an easy way with with the tool that's already there that's already hosted for us of that conversation and then recently for the same reasons John Cogman and our team created the the heroes channel for heroes to be able to have that and that real-time conversation that's essentially it I mean if we were to use I mean it's it's a free of cost tool right now it's it's on by Gileb and then the reason we started using was because yeah it was readily available we could have considered mother most for instance but gotcha okay and slack was maybe ruled out because it was assumed that there was a cost associated and you'd have the same permissiony related issues that we're discussing now yeah indeed okay yeah I mean I cannot ask I cannot answer the question on why the first channel ever was created but but yeah I mean that's that's how we started using the rest or we started greeting the rest on the community team cool I think the channel was originally created when Github was still hosted on Github and Github was just the tool where the community could get a free shed essentially for pretty much any Github project so somebody created the channel there and that's it okay I guess you're still very popular within there within Github right yeah those of you who probably contribute to more open source projects maybe more aware of if that that tool has a kind of reputation it's some of the discussion that I think I pointed out to Ray a while back that I saw in the Github channel a couple of guys yeah basically just saying you know why you know everyone uses Slack and I personally had never heard of Github before but then potentially you know I'm quite new to open source so maybe it is a fairly industry standard it too I need to find out I think about the year ago I saw someone posting a blog post on percentage of people there was a survey actually and there was still high percentage of Github projects using Github because of the of how easy it was to to set up essentially I'm not sure if things have changed since then but I'll try to find out and go with the data cool yeah so got about a minute left but thanks for your feedback I for I mean I should have mentioned this earlier we plan to as this says one of the topics during the group conversation called that community relations team will have next Thursday I believe so appreciate the feedback if you have any any more thoughts or feedback I mean feel free to leave comments on the issue we'll keep you up to date on this just just one thing to clarify right yeah for conversation Thursdays this week but the one next week the 23rd of July yep cool thanks all right so a couple of quick things I'll cover the second bullet first because that's quicker get like committed in case you haven't noticed it's free so it's obviously virtual like I mentioned last last month but please register it's it's going to go for two hours I I think each session are repeating at least one so if you miss it in your time zone for whatever reason you can catch sort of the next next wave so I want to encourage you to register and for next meeting I wanted to propose canceling the meeting in August I mean a lot of people will be on holidays and are typically on holidays in in August and also the the next hackathon it's going to be in the first week of September so so that's like early in the month typically we have court the meeting so I just wanted to cancel go ahead and cancel the meeting next month and resume the call on September 2nd if people are okay with that if you have any like concerns with that please let me know all right so we're actually gone a minute over thanks for staying later than usual thanks for your feedback and discussions and I'll talk to you or see you online pretty soon thanks Ryan have a good day thank you take care bye