Identity/Crews

One Team, Many Crews

We want to explore new ideas. To be productive, explorations should be focused and time-limited. If they don't work out, they should be killed. We'll fail often. Such is the cost of innovating.

So we're creating project-centric "crews." Each will be at most 5 people, with 1 lead. Identity team members may belong to more than 1 crew, but can only lead 1 at a time.

Each crew will be assigned for 2 months by default, after which initial results should be evaluated by the team as a whole. Outcome will be either

(a) success, merge into production

(b) looking good, but needs more time (2 more months max)

(c) kill it.

This means that no problem we undertake should take more than 4 months to hit production. If a project is particularly large, we may stretch that to 2 3-month cycles, but a minimum viable product is absolutely required within 6 months, and the first review should show great promise to merit a second cycle.

Crews are documented on the main Identity wiki page.

Creating a crew

Currently, we've only gotten as far as having core Identity devs lead crews. Interested community members are welcome to push on this point.

1. Propose a crew on the dev-identity list & refine its goals, timeline, and description
2. Find collaborators
3. Add crew info to list of active crews on the main Identity wiki page:
   • crew name (linked to crew wiki page), one-liner description, core crew members, target date
4. Create a wiki sub-page for your crew with long-lived info:
   • goals, timeline, description, other getting-started info
5. Create documents to manage tasks and hold short-lived info. Identity tends to use the identity etherpad for this purpose, but any tool is fine, so long as it's linked from the crew's main wiki page.
6. Create a mailing list for your crew. The naming convention is dev-identity-foo for the foo crew; file a bugzilla ticket to have a mailing list created.

Joining a crew

Contributors welcome!

1. Subscribe & say hello on the dev-identity list or, better, the crew's specific mailing list
2. Check out the wiki docs and the lower-level information
3. Jump in :-)

Managing a crew

It's on crew leads to ensure that the crew is killin' it:

• ensure goals still reflect reality; ping dev-identity to discuss any big changes
• every thursday by EOD, send weekly status updates to toxborrow, who will collate and publish on the wiki
• ping the main dev-identity list as milestones come and go, or as cool stuff happens
• schedule bug triage or sync-up meetings as needed

Deactivating a crew

1. Ping the dev-identity list once more with the over-and-out message
2. Archive the crew's mailing list
3. Update the main identity wiki page, moving the crew's entry to the deactivated list
4. Update the crew's wiki page, indicating that it's been deactivated
5. Consider pulling low-level content into lower-level wiki pages (rather than etherpads, which aren't indexed & hide info)

Feedback

Feedback/questions welcome on the dev-identity list.

References

• Discussion of the crew concept on the dev-identity mailing list
• Discussion around crews & documentation on the dev-identity list