Pangeo Office Hours

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Thanks @rabernat. Here are some thoughts I typed up.

I am explicitly requesting input from absolutely anyone, particularly those from underrepresented groups.

  1. What do you think these calls should look like?
  2. How do we encourage a more diverse contributor base?

Concrete Goals

  1. Increase diversity of contributors to software in the Pangeo stack

    • Metric: increase in issues filed at all levels of pangeo stack (low level:
      xarray / dask; higher level: xgcm et al.)
    • Metric: increase in number of PRs to all levels of pangeo stack
    • Metric: increase in diversity of core team members for software at all
      levels of the Pangeo stack.

  2. Increase diversity of participants in Pangeo conversations

    • Metric: Increased participation on pangeo communication channels: Weekly
      Zoom call, Discourse, Gitter, Github

  3. Increase sense of community and distribute expertise throughout the community. This will help reduce load on more experienced contributors.

    • Metric: Increased instances of “community” members solving problems on the
      Discourse forums

Plan

  1. Host a 1-1.5 hour “office hours” call every two weeks.

    1. 10 minute “personal story” section: package creators and maintainers
      describe their “open source journey”.

    2. 20-30 minutes on “contributor” questions

    3. 10 minutes on “cool pangeo demo of the day”.

      • Bite-sized demo of what’s possible.
      • Increase visibility of pangeo and pangeo-adjacent projects
      • Explicitly invite contributors from underrepresented groups to present
        their packages / solutions to problems.
      • Ask participants to recommend packages / people for next call.

    4. 30 minutes on “usage” questions.
      (inspired by https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/events/office-hours.md)

      • These should be general questions
      • Encourage that question be posted on Discourse prior to the call. Asker
        is encouraged to post a follow-up answer after the call.
      • “Questions that aren’t addressed or need work can be punted to the next
        week or we can encourage other people to give them a look, at a bare
        minimum we can at least help socialize the difficult questions.”
      • Hosts should encourage listeners to participate in answer. This will
        help distribute the load of handling these calls.

    5. Last 5 minutes: Anonymous post-call survey of participants

      • We need numbers to judge how we are doing at meeting goals.
      • What worked?
      • What didn’t work?
      • What did we miss during this call?
      • How can we do better next time?

    6. Post-call

      • all calls should be recorded and posted to youtube.
      • IMO it would be good to cut the calls up into sections, especially the
        “personal story” and “cool demo” sections, and post them separately on a
        Pangeo youtube channel.

Other thoughts

Success requires that “senior members” commit to

  1. Participating in “office hours” calls when possible.
  2. Participating on discourse.
  3. Mentoring and guiding contributors and Pull Requests to completion
  4. Providing a welcoming inclusive environment that encourages participation from individuals of diverse backgrounds and all skill levels.

This above list is a major time commitment, so we need ideas on how to make this sustainable.

  1. Call hosts should explicitly encourage community input prior to answering questions.
  2. ???

Success also requires significantly increasing participation above current levels. This will require personal invites and broad publicity in many channels

  1. Regular posts on pangeo channels: twitter, discourse, gitter, github
  2. ClimateGrad slack channel
  3. Others?
    1. Shall we ask users to email their grad-school/postdoc/research-group email lists
    2. Entrain professors and their groups at an early stage
      1. Younger cohorts tend to be more diverse so professors at undergrad institutions would be a good avenue to increase diversity of participants.
    3. Reach out to “outreach” / “training” groups at institutions to participate
      1. e.g. NCAR
      2. Email mentors and past participants at summer schools & hack weeks: e.g. Brian Arbic
      3. who else?
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