[teampractices] Offsite meetings

Tue Apr 7 00:58:47 UTC 2015

On a personal level, I think it's important for teams to get together
in-person as often as they feel is necessary - and I do not think this
number is a constant.

I think the first question to answer is "what's the purpose of the
offsite(s)?" The answer(s) + budgetary constraints should inform the
decision. A team may want to spend a couple days in the same location to
have some super high-bandwidth face-to-face time to hack on a particularly
tough project, or maybe they want to spend a few days defining their
identity and work processes - or spend a week doing both.

Like Bryan mentioned, the WMF budgeting for the upcoming fiscal year is
being guided by the notion that teams will do 2 5-day offsites; one
adjacent with one of two large events (all-staff and either the European
hackathon or Wikimania) to save on airfare, the other at the team's
discretion. This doesn't mean that teams need to 2 5-day offsites, one
alongside a major event and the other elsewhere - that scenario is just
defining how the budget numbers are being drawn up (at least for now,
subject to change, your mileage may vary, etc etc). Once the money is
budgeted, it's up to the teams/their manager to decide how they want to
spend it - maybe it's one mega-offsite in Fiji, or four offsites in
Sacramento, or whatever.

On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 1:34 PM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I have been asked to make some recommendations about frequency and
> duration of offsite gatherings for the teams I am coaching. That topic
> seems highly intertwined with the WMF culture, which I'm still just
> starting to learn.
>
> What would be the best way for me to get to the point of putting
> together a recommendation?
>
>
> Kevin Smith
> Agile Coach
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
>
> Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
> the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.
>
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-- 
Arthur Richards
Team Practices Manager
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
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