Merge pull request #644 from nikomatsakis/2020-07-08-lang-team-design-meeting

describe 2020-07-08 design meeting on the "path to lang-team membership"

Author: nikomatsakis

posts/inside-rust/2020-07-09-lang-team-path-to-membership.md

@@ -0,0 +1,117 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Lang team design meeting: path to membership"
+author: Niko Matsakis
+description: "Lang team design meeting: path to membership"
+team: the lang team <https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/lang>
+---
+
+This week the [lang team] design meeting was on the topic of the "path to
+membership". This blog post gives a brief summary; you can also read
+the [minutes] or view the [recording].
+
+[minutes]: https://github.com/rust-lang/lang-team/blob/master/design-meeting-minutes/2020-07-08-lang-team-path-to-membership.md
+[lang team]: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/lang
+[recording]: https://youtu.be/SeH-hZgDG1Y
+
+The premise of the meeting was that the lang team has never had a
+particularly clear *path to membership* -- i.e., it's been hard to say
+exactly what are the kinds of steps that one should be taking if you
+would like to become a member of the lang team. However, with the
+shift to [major change proposals] and in particular [project groups],
+we're starting to see what such a path looks like. 
+
+[major change proposals]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2936/
+[project groups]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2856
+
+### Expectations for a team member
+
+As part of our discussion, we came up with a relatively complete list of
+what we see as the "expectations for a lang-team member". To be clear,
+this is the full set of possible expectations: many members only have the
+time to do some subset of these things at any given time.
+
+- Lead project groups, where appropriate
+- Liaison for projects, where appropriate
+- Participate in triage meetings
+- Participate in design meetings
+- Respond to rfcbot fcp requests in a timely fashion
+- Participate constructively in, and help facilitate, RFC discussion, issues, PRs, and other GitHub-based discussions
+    - Provide important technical points
+    - Help to drive discussions towards common understanding
+    - Understanding and documenting the positions and points being raised
+- Monitor and respond to communication in Zulip
+
+### A sketch for a path to membership
+
+The core idea for a path to membership is that we want some set of
+steps that let us see people doing the things and demonstrating the
+qualities we expect from lang-team members, so that we can tell how it
+is working (and so that people can experience what it's like).
+
+This suggests that a "path to membership" might look something like this:
+
+* Lead or be heavily involved in one or more project groups
+* Serve as a liaison for one or more project groups
+* Participate in meetings, where possible
+* Participate in discussions and in particular help to create summaries or otherwise resolve technical disputes in a productive way
+
+We realize that we can identify people who are doing some of those
+things already and approach to see if they are interested in lang-team
+membership.  If so, we can look for opportunities to complete some of
+the other bullets.
+
+## A bit of background: project groups
+
+We've not been blogging a lot about the idea of project groups and the
+like so let me give just a bit of background. In short, the idea is
+that we are trying to "intercept" the RFC process earlier by
+introducing a "pre-step" called a Major Change Proposal
+(MCP). (Terminology still subject to change as we experiment here.)
+
+The idea is that if you have an idea you'd like to pursue, you can
+file an MCP issue and describe the high-level details. If the idea
+catches the eye of somebody within the team, we will create a
+**project group** to pursue the idea, with that member serving as the
+**lang team liaison** and you (or others) serving as the **group
+lead**.
+
+A **project group** doesn't have to be a huge group of people. It
+might even just be one or two people and a dedicated Zulip stream.
+The idea is that the group will work out the design space and author
+RFCs; once the RFCs are accepted, the group can also pursue the
+implementation (though the set of people involved may shift at that
+point), and hopefully see the idea all the way through to
+stabilization.
+
+### Growing the set of folks who can serve as liaison
+
+One of the things we talked about was the proper role for a project
+group liaison. As described in the previous paragraph, a liaison was
+basically a member of the team who would follow along with the design
+and help to keep the rest of the team up to date. 
+
+But we realized that if we limit liaisons to team members, then this
+is incompatible with this idea of a "path to membership" where people
+can "trial run" lang-team activities.  It's also somewhat incompatible
+with a core goal, which is that the experience of someone who is *not*
+on a team and someone who *is* on a team ought to be awfully close,
+and that we should be careful when creating distinctions.
+
+Therefore, we discussed the idea of saying that liaisons don't have to
+be team members, they just have to be people who are heavily involved
+in the project and who can be trusted to create regular updates for
+the lang-team and keep the rest of the team in the loop. 
+
+In particular, this can also be a useful stepping stone towards full
+lang-team membership -- although it doesn't have to be. It's useful to
+have people serve as liaisons even if they don't really have time or
+interest in being on the lang team.
+
+### Conclusion
+
+We concluded that we'll start experimenting with "non-team-member
+liaisons", and that people who are maybe interested in that role can
+reach out privately to Josh Triplett or myself
+(nikomatsakis). Further, we'll work to write up the "path to
+membership" as well as the expectations for team membership.