AD&T Weekly Meeting

[samvara]

At 6:58am I was feeling unnaturally but delightfully cheerful and it carried through the day. bingeling is chairing for practice as part of her internship (she got to study me doing it for a couple of months first). It’s a very different experience! I said to poke me back in my box if I was annoyingly chairy-ey by accident or something and it seemed to work out :)

•  Colocation: We’re testing on NewBeta (colocation server) right now and we’re cautiously optimistic. It is mostly a matter of making sure all the right settings are on in the background as we have it configured to do certain things, and of making sure some things are all turned on. I say ‘some things’ because I have not been tracking the individual details - our fabulous Testers are completely on it and working with Systems to resolve any issues – who have been wonderful (I am looking worshipfully at sidra here).
• AD&T News Post: is out so check it out for details on what colocation and Open Beta is all about!
• Deploy Schedule: No changes assuming all critical code gets committed this week *wibble*
  • Admin FAQ/Updates: the code has been committed! I’m *so* going to have a play with it the second we deploy it to Test.
  • Bookmarking external works: we had a fun talk about what kind of icon you need to indicate a bookmark of something external to the AO3.
  • Collections & Challenges: the abuse team are having a peek at the proposed draft in order to make sure they are comfortable with it – for the most part a collection is owned by the archivist/moderator who is running it so abuse issues should hopefully not apply.
  • Help on first login: we’re going to have to delay this until we have a coder who can work on it – was hoping to have it for Open Beta but we’re going to have to settle for the FAQ. Oh well, this is not the only code push we’ll make this year.
  • Hoovering: Heh, this is probably not going to be the long-term name for this feature – importing/duplicating and a bunch of other words were bandied about… I quite liked ‘replicating’ but I gather there are evil replicators out in fandom somewhere. I’m mostly just keen to learn what non-AO3 Archives are wanting to move in – now I know exactly how much storage space we have I want to know how long it will take to fill it up (long term planning is *important* and my thing)
  • Internet Explorer 7: we simply don’t have a CSS coder who can work on this right now – please, please, please, if you’ve got the skills and are using IE7 we need you. Comment or email me or send a pigeon with a note attached.
  • Tag Wrangling: we’re not going to be able to make any more changes to this either which is a shame, we don’t have the ability to do ‘metafandoms’ right now and we know we need it – which makes fandoms like Trek, Bandom, RPF and lots of the Anime difficult to work with. We do love them, we just can’t fix them at this point in time and they are totally on our list of things to keep working on.
  • Site Map: we’ll have one. Phew!
• Open Beta: No changes to schedule assuming nothing goes wrong! There has been some understandable discussion about account distribution. We’ve tried to build a system that is fair and creates an opportunity for any interested person to be eligible for an account. Technically, that means invite codes + sign-up list. Procedurally, here's some further information:
  • AD&T are handling the technical build and are the Archive Administrators at this point in time. We will be the people ticking the ticky that says ‘Turn invite queue on’ and clicking ‘Save’ (I am looking forward to it!). We are the people who will trigger posts saying ‘We are now open for sign-ups!’ If the past is any indication, most of the committee will be loitering supportively and gleefully in chat as we do it, followed by a certain, ah, readiness to pounce if something goes wrong.
  • We are conscious when we do this will affect people in different timezones and we will try to handle that sensitively.
  • One of our tasks is to ask DevMem, the committee that handles memberships, to advise OTW members when the queue goes live - making OTW members the first to be advised personally.
• Succession Planning: the AD&T Committee dissolves at the end of the calendar year and re-forms in the New Year around a person chosen to act as chair. This allows old members to retire, ongoing members to re-negotiate their roles, makes way for new members and provides a way to gracefully resolve potential relationship stresses. I plan to step down as AD&T chair at the end of my 2009 term. Not because of any negative reasons but because if I don’t give other people a chance to do it then we don’t get to increase our pool of people with the skills. One of the reasons we *have* OTW is to move away from the ‘solitary hero’ model and move towards a community model where people don’t burn out and die in exhausted flames. I’m not at burn-out yet, not even close but I would like to stop while I’m still healthy and happy and concentrate on supporting someone else towards developing the same skillset. We talked about it in AD&T and while *my* biggest worry was how to handle it if lots of people had a burning desire to arm-wrestle for the chair's hat; the committee’s biggest worry seems to be where I’m planning on sneaking off to - and the answer is that I’ll still be around *loves on you all* 

If you are thinking there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or by messaging or whatever medium you're comfortable with. You are invited to this party :)

Comments

[cesy]

I have IE7 and I can do a bit of CSS. What's needed?

[samvara]

omg *glomps*

Issues 757, 758, 759, 760 and 761 are our problem babies - have a look and if any of them look doable we would be deeply grateful for your help :)

I can provide a vast amount of support, including people to talk technical talk with, commit anything you can give us, access to AD&T documentation and so on.

[cesy]

Those look like things where I can at least help get it closer to a solution, though I may not be able to fix it all.

Apparently I need an account on the wiki to see the details.

Also, I'm not familiar with a lot of the terms in the descriptions - which bit is the work blurb?

[cesy]

Is there someone with a dev environment or Dreamhack-equivalent I can work with, so I can just give them some different CSS to replace what's currently live, and they can put it on a test environment I can then look at it on?

[cesy]

Also, do you know if there's a way I can sign up for email notifications of comments on those particular bugs, or all IE bugs?

[samvara]

*g* my email is black0samvara at gmail dot com - let me know what email and username you would like and I will arrange a wiki login.

[samvara]

dreamhack no, we're looking at it but don't have naything yet.

Someone who can put it on a test environment - totally, we can either dump it on Test which is web based and anyone can get to (2 step process) or you can work with someone who will put it on their local dev environment and let you know what they see (1 step process).

[samvara]

Gimme and email addy, prefer gmail, doesn't have to be and I'll add you to the project.

[ex_rustler489]

Hi! A fellow ADT member jumping in here - would you be willing to come on board the project (even temporarily!) to help us out? We'll get you set up with access to everything you need (wiki, code, etc.) -- that would definitely be the easiest way for you to work on this.

[cesy]

Yes, I'd be happy to. How do I do that?

[ex_rustler489]

Yay! samvara is getting you all set up. \o/ Thank you!

[samvara]

Added, you can star them or add yourself as an owner/CC to any bugs you fancy now :)

*sighs* late night typing does not bring out my finest work :p

[samvara]

The works blurb is the chunk of information that tells you about a work.

For example: http://archiveofourown.org/works

[cesy]

Well, at least you didn't misread "email and username" as "email and password" like I did!

[yvi]

I am ridiculously excited about this, even though right now I can't help - I am doing so much development on Dreamwidth, so adding a new project + a new programming language would be very draining, but yeah, excited!

(And I almost click on the 'volunteer' link every week. Maybe one of these weeks I will be weak and do it. Aaaargh.)

[yvi]

You can so totally do more than that!

*fangirls cesy*

[minkhollow]

--HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA THAT'S ME IN THE BOX
...Er. Don't mind me, I'm easily amused at present. XD

[bingeling]

It’s a very different experience!
It totally is!

And dude! No one's boxing you! I need someone to remind me to raise ACTION points, so I have less work doing the Minutes! It's in my own interest. +g+

Also, I don't know what to say to the Milestones. "Here is a massive Gantt Chart of everything we are working on, I don't know how we are still alive." +g+

[samvara]

Immortalised! Forever!

[samvara]

Hee! I do that too!

[samvara]

Mmm action points, I have learned to love them - someone should write RPF about our uneasy but passionate relationship :)

Milestones - that sounds like a very accurate things to say, go for it!

[samvara]

*g* I know! I watched DW go into testing and just... kept chairing AD&T and occasionally poking people I thought might have the time.

*hugs* maintain self, love current project, don't die!

[onceamy]

*signs up to remind Bing and action points*

(I'm in love with them. I need an ACTION/TO-DO/ish icon to show this!)