[OSCTC-planning] Infrastructure changes

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

Hi all,

I'm hoping to make a bunch of infrastructure changes over the next week or
two. Asheesh and I started brainstorming on an etherpad here:
https://etherpad.mozilla.org/openhatch-infrastructure

Please feel free to raise additional organizational problems you see,
and/or to suggest solutions.

For me, the biggest problems are:

A: Information is located in too many places, so it's difficult to know
where to find a given answer to a question.

B: Communication is siloed in our mailman lists.  Organizers may have
similar questions but can't access previous answers stored on other lists.
Joining lists is also all-or-nothing -- there's no way to talk to volunteer
mentors some of the time and only organizers other times, consequently
mentors get onboarded late to avoid spam.

C: It's not clear how to contribute to the project beyond hosting events.
Planning mostly takes place on this mailing list, which is not well
integrated into the issue tracker.  The issue tracker captures bugs well
but doesn't do a great job of welcoming newcomers, or talking about how to
add features, new curriculum activities, etc to the project.

Right now I'm hoping to tackle B by setting up an instance of Discourse and
moving most of our planning, event-based and otherwise, there.

With regard to A: perhaps the place to start is with a canonical place that
everything points to (and that points to everything else) that newcomers
can be pointed to.  Have folks seen this done before/do you have intuitions
about the best place to put this?  In the Github readme, perhaps?

With regard to C: this seems to be a documentation and roadmapping issue.
Again, have folks seen places where this is done well?  How do you suggest
we proceed?  My first impulse is to have regular open roadmapping meetings,
but I've never participated in such things before so I'm not even sure how
you'd organize them...

Hoping for your insights!
- Shauna
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