Notes on the weekly Watchdog conference today (Tuesday 2009-02-24)
Kragen Javier Sitaker
understanding of the group consensus. Please object strenuously if I
got something wrong.
Agenda:
* the launch: what went great and what maybe went not so great?
* where do we want to go with Watchdog next?
* bug tracker: Becky has suggested we should start maintaining a list
of bugs in the open, maybe using Launchpad.
* Christopher
* Git and Becky
Other items discussed:
* Volunteers
* Meeting length
* Skype
Skype
-----
Kragen and Simon felt that continuous Skype text chat has really
helped things "pick up." Christopher found it very useful in catching
up on recent developments.
Meeting Length
--------------
This meeting took 75 minutes. This is too long; we need to keep it to
an hour.
Volunteers
----------
We need to get better at supporting volunteers. We’re going to keep
sending weekly meeting summaries to watchdog-devel in order that
volunteers can have a clearer idea of what’s going on.
Simon is going to update the wiki (oops, is this
<http://watchdog.jottit.com/>?) with proposals for where the project
can go and how to engage a community. There was more discussion on
possible way to do this but no apparent decision.
Launch
------
We launched. Hooray!
Kragen apologized for achieving no successful bug fixes during the
launch, although his QA was great.
The database build process was agreed to be a big obstacle during the
launch; we can discuss this on the mailing list.
The long gap since the last release made this release unnecessarily
hard.
So we think that as we approach continuous releases with a better
build process, this should get a lot easier.
Bug Tracker
-----------
We’re currently nominally using Sifter for to-do and bug tracking.
There are three problems with our current setup. First, the bugs in
Sifter are out of date and so we don’t go there; second, filing things
in Sifter sometimes takes more time than just fixing it, or writing a
short description; third, Sifter bugs aren’t visible to everyone, so
volunteers can’t see them.
This first problem is fairly serious. Not having an up-to-date list
of tasks has resulted in us spinning our wheels frequently.
Aaron offered to create a “volunteer” account to fix the third
problem, and seems to have done so before I sent this email. He is
also planning to talk to the Sifter developer to see if anonymous bug
submissions are possible.
It was suggested that we should create software for task management as
a side project.
Devi, Aaron, and Christopher all preferred Sifter to Launchpad in a
straw poll. So it was decided to try to clean up our Sifter bugs and
try to open it up to anonymous users. Unfortunately I can’t tell who,
if anyone, is responsible for the cleanup.
Christopher
-----------
Christopher is going to write about Watchdog.net’s status and place in
the world, and in particular how it can move from being a simple
collection of data to something a little more focused. “The big
example,” he said, “would be taking 2000 pages of FEC data and
allowing narrative and meaning to flow, [instead of what we have] ...
now[,] just endless lists of numbers and names.”
He’s also going to be working on interaction and visual design,
visualization, taking account of what we have now, blogging about
stuff, but he’s especially focusing on big-picture stuff. “Having
heatmaps of some of the most basic information we already have access
to could be life-changing, and to initiate that process, I think we
need clear stories that we’ll work on piecing together.”
This process of social narrative construction is planned to happen on
the mailing list.
Becky and Git
-------------
There were minor glitches in some merging Aaron did on some of Becky’s
work before he checked it in to Git, which resulted in a small amount
of her work getting lost. Her plan is to gradually integrate Git into
her workflow to alleviate problems like this.
Immediate Tasks
---------------
Devi is working on draft mode for petitions.
Kragen is going to:
- send this summary;
- spend some hours this afternoon testing the site to see what is in
good shape and what is not (note: I failed at that; will try again
tomorrow);
- write about problems with merging in code from October (the
load_everyone branch) on the list.