Re: Web Platform community meeting in 45 mins.

Thanks to all who made it a great call.

My apologies to the extended team -- this is a scatter-fire (shotgun blast)
brain dump following the call, and reasonable community behavior would be
to split this into multiple messages, properly given distinct subject
lines, and each conversation should call out the relevant task force or
team member who should "receive" the comment, bug report, task, offer
(hint-hint), or recommendation.  I'm going to play disabled and point out
that I never saw any such guidelines on the site, so here is the
weakly-parsed mash-up:

@JuleeAdobe -- Thanks for the upgrades to the call agenda e-mail.  Can you
add the links I put on @scottrowe_ 's new test "getting started" page?  I
had to track down my own page updates to find the shortcut to the webchat
for today's call (my bad, but I'm still pushing hard for an obstacle-free
entry to participation).

For all on the list -- I only realized recently that joining the audio call
and tracking the IRC is (for me) the best way to keep up with the
conversation.  I added that to Scott's new (lgtm, from a guy with no votes)
test page as a recommendation.  No doubt in a few weeks this will be so
obvious to me that I can hardly imagine pointing it out, which is why I'm
highlighting it now as a serious obstacle to the new participant who just
wants to make a difference (but isn't already embedded in the
open-source/w3 community).  For those global strangers in our strange
lands, I propose that we craft a reasonably comprehensive set of "welcome
to the extended team; here's how to get started" pieces.  This topic is
relevant to the community development team, and the team planning and
preparing for the next doc sprint, and the team maximizing the
effectiveness of the weekly calls (ok, maybe that hasn't been formed yet,
but put me on it regardless).

Scribing:
Is there a "scribe" tool or client?  When I started seeing @jkomoros insert
"^topic" ([caret]+"topic"), I (ignored the trivial fat-fingered shift-key
interpretation and) started fantasizing about an interface ("it should
respond_to [control-t]") more useful than baseline IRC for reporting live
audio action to the "audio impaired" on IRC-only (is "impaired" shorthand
for "insufficiently paired"? -- call it an agile accessibility joke, or an
obscure shoutout to Master-Blaster).

Preparing to grow:

   - anticipate more folks on the call every week; hint -- until we have a
   more effective channel for pure buzz, this is it
   - how about a weekly agenda item for the volunteer's voice?  We should
   have a weekly engagement with the question of how to expand the scope and
   validatability of our volunteer crew. mixing major visibility and kudos
   with both promoting what works and seriously listening to what doesn't, we
   could alternate between bragging and b*tching, and report progress on the
   top volunteer complaints weekly (hint -- grow to two slots)
   - make smoother inflow and overall community dev into milestone areas
   for the next sprint; make it visible, then listen, respond, and promote
   results (see my other notes on using the sprint to help bootstrap our
   project management and visibility infrastructure)
   - start to target rock stars and unicorns; put big items on the backlog
   and let them pull them at the sprints

Stupid noob tricks:

   - turn your complaints into coaching (what did they apparently not know,
   the knowing of which would have steered them toward the most desirable and
   effective behavior?)
   - build a backchannel for learning, and use it
   - find coaches and editors who can relate to the beginner's mind, and
   apply them to the flow relentlessly, until there are no team- or
   process-injected obstacles to new volunteer contribution
   - map out what (a vol) needs to know, and an efficient way to learn it;
   we can become (or at least model) the best practices for expanding
   engagement

DougM