Develop Roles for Opt Out Tools

[malteserteresa]

Objective
Decide on roles needed within Opt Out

Description
Opt Out has reached over 10 people as it's core team spanning many different fields, thus we require some structure in order to work most efficiently.

Skills

Tools

Time Estimation

Tasks

• Ensure future tasks are clearly defined
• Consider roles and research other organisational structures in this space
• Write a constitution

[malteserteresa]

Current Non Tech Roles:

Volunteer Manager

• helps new volunteers get started (onboarding)
• maintains engagement with volunteers through regular meetings and social activities

Community building

• helps recruit new volunteers
• organises meetups, workshops & hackathons for the external community

Fundraising + partnership

• finds & researches funding opportunities; apply & write grants for these opportunities
• finds & establishes relevant opportunities

Marketing + external

• writes and distributes newsletter (project updates, past and upcoming events, vacancies, relevant articles)
• branding & social media presence

User Advocates

[malteserteresa]

Not for us yet but interesting nontheless https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/4/silicon-valley-self-organizing-systems

[malteserteresa]

First three definitions:

Maintainer
Someone who feels responsibility over the direction of the project and is dedicated to improving it.

Contributor
Anyone who gets involved with the project in anyway such as helps out with branding, writes up research, organizes an event, writes technical comments on an issue or pull request, or people who add value to the project in some other way (whether it’s triaging issues, writing code). They don't have to commit code necessarily.

Committer
Someone who has contributed code to the project.

We make the distinction between Commiter and Contributor as onboarding is very different for these two groups

Roles within Opt Out:

Contributor Manager
• Helps new contributors get involved
• Maintains engagement with contributors through regular meetings and social activities

Commiter Manager
• Helps new commiters get started (technical onboarding)
• Maintains documentation, and general DevOps work

Community Activist
• Helps recruit new contributors and represent Opt Out at events
• Organises meetups, workshops & hackathons for the external community

Fundraising and Partnership Management
• Finds & researches funding opportunities; apply & write grants for these opportunities
• Finds & establishes relevant opportunities

Marketing and External Engagement
• Content writing eg. newsletter (project updates, past and upcoming events, vacancies, relevant articles), updates to website
• Branding & social media presence

User Advocates
• Facilitate interaction between users and maintainers/contribtuors
• Advocating for the user, and attempt to see the product through the eyes of, and the experience of, the user.

Event Design
• Designs and helps facilitate the hackathons, workshops or internal training

Someone to write minutes of meeting
Looking forward:
Mentor Manager: we would like to have mentors for all female-identifying people contributing to the project one day. This would need to be managed
Data Auditor: checking and consulting with us on best practices wrt data provacy
Ethics board

[adrinjalali]

It's a pretty good start I'd say. I feel like there are kinda way too many roles here. Quite a few of them can be merged. Of course later on when the project gets larger and busier, you can decide them.

On the coding side, AFAIK, the convention is that anyvody who contributes code, i.e. has a PR, is a contributor, people who are authorized to merge those PRs are maintainers, and people who can handle tags and labels and make sure questions are clear etc, are the triage team. I'd say for now you don't even need a triage team. That'll be needed with a busier repo.

You also have a few roles basically to mentor people to get in the project. That to me is every maintainer.

And about the general direction of the project, you can have a technical committee for instance, who's different than the maintainer team, but you could also rely on maintainers for now for that purpose.

Sort of same applies to non-coding roles IMO.

[adrinjalali]

You have assigned a whole bunch of us here, but I'm not sure what we're supposed to do :D

[malteserteresa]

Think, add/suggest roles. But this is labelled backlog and is thus a "slow-burner" of a task