Athens: Proposal: weekly triagers

[arschles]

We discussed the idea of a weekly triager today at the weekly development meeting.

The rough idea is that one maintainer will be the primary person to help make sure that issues and PRs keep "moving" during the week that they are triaging. They're don't have to be responsible for things in the issue and PR queue for the week (unless they want to be); instead they're responsible for prompting the right people to do the right thing (if they can) on issues and PRs.

Details

they're responsible for prompting the right people to do the right thing (if they can) on issues and PRs.

Regarding this part, we'll know if it's going well if:

• discussions keep going on issues (i.e. people are prompted to respond if they can)
• decisions are made if possible (i.e. a vote concludes)
• work is started if appropriate (i.e. someone who wants to take an issue knows that's cool)
• and that reviews happen on PRs (i.e. if someone pushes new commits to the PR, people review it again if they can).

In other words, the triager keeps the project's "heartbeat"

A Few Of My Feelings

Because when do I not have them? 😄

• I personally feel like a work week (5 days from mon-fri) is a good amount of time for a single person to triage without getting burned out, but long enough for continuity
• I also feel like a maintainer shouldn't have to do it two weeks in a row
• Things happen, and if a triager has to drop off during the week, it should be easy to do that
  
  
  
  • maybe just sending a message on slack?
  
  
• I feel like if we do the triaging right, everyone in the community shouldn't _have_ to know who the triager is in a given week
• ... but I also feel like we should publish the triaging rotation (or maybe the schedule?) so that community members can see it if they want to
• I definitely want to keep this flexible, and to not be a drag! Everyone has different schedules, jobs, responsibilities, etc...
• I don't know how/if to do this but I want triaging to be lightweight. Ideally I think it should take like about 20 minutes max every day, and that should be pretty much the only expectation
• We have maintainers from lots of different time zones (I've said it before - I'm really happy about this 🎉), so if we do this I feel like we should do a rotate different time zones

And finally, one last feeling! I feel like everyone should weigh in on this idea, not just maintainers. But definitely including maintainers, since we are going to be responsible for a lot of this

[arschles]

Here is some prior art for issue triaging, from which I stole almost all of these ideas: https://gist.github.com/technosophos/c269362e154540b4bfc3bb2ac210df41#issue-triaging

Thanks for this @technosophos!

[arschles]

I think every contributor in our community is doing a pretty good job keeping up with PRs and issues for now, so I'm gonna close this issue. We can go try and fix something if it becomes a problem 😄