JupyterHub dugnad (or boondog)

[minrk]

@sgibson91 brought up dugnad during discussion of #384 .

Some background: In Norway, it's typical to twice a year get everyone in the neighborhood together to do some community work. In my neighborhoods this has generally been twice a year - once in the Fall where we mostly rake leaves and once in the spring where we rake up all the gravel we put out for the ice during the winter. There are also other tasks like weeding, painting, cleaning, etc.. Many organizations also have their own dugnad - schools, community gardens, etc.. It's a time to bring the community together to do the maintenance work that needs doing for that community, whatever it may be. I believe it is also required to serve cake and pølser afterward.

Questions brought up:

• what does dugnad or something similar look like for us?
• how often and for how long makes sense?
• how do we serve cake to a remote team?

To me, the most analogous task for us is dealing with backlogs of issues/pull requests/releases. Catching up on all the things we might have missed, but need doing. I think dedicating a week, 2-4 times a year, to say "our focus for the week is issue triage and backlog maintenance, not development" could be really helpful for us as a community and keeping repos healthy.

[sgibson91]

I was wondering if there's any budget/process for expense claims? One thing that has been lovely in remote team events I've participated in is that everyone received a £30 budget specifically to treat ourselves with (so not headphones or equipment to attend the event). Many people ordered takeout, groceries to prepare their favourite meal, or sweet treats and then there was a time on the agenda when we'd all eat together, whether it was breakfast, lunch or dinner! I don't know how difficult this would be to replicate for the JupyterHub team?

[choldgraf]

I am 100% in favor of this, I think it sounds great 👍. I get the feeling that we often have PRs that just need like 15-20 minutes of somebody's time to get merged, and this would help to get those in.

Can we plan a first Dugnad for Q2 of 2021? (I say Q2 since that might map us roughly onto 4 a year). We can use this to understand the process a bit and use part of the time to plan our how we could repeat this ritual with minimal human intervention needed.

Could we possibly coordinate this with #384 ? E.g., plan a release at the end of every Dugnad?

For expenses, the biggest challenge to me is the administrative side of this. I think it might generate a lot of labor if everybody submitted receipts that had to be processed by an admin. One possibility is that we could try reimbursing one person $30 * n_participants and then use venmo etc to dole out cash individually to folks? I will try and figure out how others have solved this.

Also I don't think this will be an issue, but we should make sure to be sensitive and respectful of this awesome Norwegian tradition if we're gonna call it a Dugnad! (and I apologize for getting the name painfully wrong before!)

[betatim]

I like the idea. Some questions I had while pondering this:

1. would the theme always be "bug and issue and PR triage" or would it change from dugnad to dugnad?
2. what would the schedule of the week look like? Are we trying to get people to have time at the same time? Or more about everyone focussing on similar tasks/goals?
3. I think getting some "synchronous work time" (as opposed to async work which is our default mode) is nice. It helps get things moved on quickly. Do we have a smart idea how to deal with the fact that we have free time vs work time contributors as well as several timezones? For example I'd be happy to take 1-2 days of leave from work for each dugnad and not plan any private events (sports, going out, household chores, etc) on those days. A bit like if I travelled to a sprint/conference. But it would feel like a waste to do that if several other people can't also do that so that we have focussed time together
4. I wouldn't (by default) combine it with releases. If we want to choose it as a topic (see (1)) then lets but having it as a default topic/task seems like it would wear people down. I think we'd be better of working on reducing the effort required to make releases (as suggested in An organization wide release pulse every X month? #384).
5. I think if "all that is needed" was 15-20minutes for a PR to move it along then it would get moved along normally. There are a lot of (nominal) members of the JupyterHub team so someone should have those spare 15minutes. This makes me think it is something else/something in addition that is missing. I don't know what it is though :(

[sgibson91]

I've had a couple of ideas for dugnads, or at least coordinated community efforts. Generally, I think some sort of theme for these types of events would be good such that everyone could be in a similar headspace but working on different tasks.

1. A hack around binder's UI. We often say that users find the alternative UI's like JupyterLab and RStudio difficult to find on mybinder.org, or you have to know to edit the URL and how. I opened a draft PR changing the interface to use radio buttons a while back, it could be a nice opportunity to link the front- and back-ends together. @betatim suggested we could deploy this at mybinder.org/beta or something to 1) not have to redeploy everything, and 2) solicit user feedback. Or we could resurface some alternative UI ideas, like the awesome bar?

2. I think the mybinder.org SRE docs could use some love and updating. They still mention kube-lego whereas we use cert-manager now. And generally, I think there could be some knowledge we've gained that is either in folks' heads or tucked away in issues/PRs that would be nice to get somewhere more sustainable.