The Birth of a coala

This is my first entry on the coala blog. Welcome everyone. My name is Maximilian and I am the community team leader for coala since December. In this post I want to talk about the teams in coala and especially about the community team, its members and our work so far.

Teams in coala

I had the idea for the teams around EuroPython 2016 as a way to take part of the organisatory burden from Lasse. At that time he was making almost all the meaningful decisions in coala, not because he wanted to, but because everyone asked him. This meant that Lasse had almost no time to do anything besides organization and management stuff. Considering that he is one of our more experienced developers that sounds like a waste of potential. Not to say that he wasn’t doing an awesome job managing everything, but maybe someone else could take on the management role and free some of Lasse’s time up for developing again. Thus the teams idea was born. Having team leaders that take over parts of the management burden associated with their team’s scope would leave Lasse more free time, add more voices and brains to decisions and diversify our “leadership rank”. In the end Monolythic management can only get you so far. If you want to read more about the structure of teams in coala you can take a look at the teams cEP

Meet the community Team

I started recruiting members right after the election was over and found a number of like-minded coalians that were interested in community work in the broader sense. We have Lasse, who has his fingers everywhere but especially wanted to help with the GSoC again. Mariatta, yeay an imdb star!, who is interested in the wellbeing of the community and the newcomer experience, Hemang, our frontend guru, Kaisar the backend equivalent and Udayan who will work on administering RGSoC (besides being the Research team leader, awesome!).

Together we have many ideas on how to improve and grow a healthy community. Creating a welcoming environment where everyone feels welcome, a place where we can teach and learn from each other, a place where we can exchange mutual interests, a place to grow as professionals and humans.

What we achieved so far

This section is part of a activity report we wanted to implement for all teams. Partly to create a mechanism of control for the rest of the coala community but mainly to give the teams a place and platform to talk about the awesome stuff they create and work on.

The first thing that I would claim for the community team would be the creation of the teams cEP, election for team leaders and all together the creation of the coala teams. While the cEP was written by me I had great reviewers. I wanted to list them here but looking at the PRs, that would be too many names. We had 7 leader applications for 6 teams and recently we added the review team with another Max as leader.

After that Mariatta added the Code of Conduct which was lacking until then. This enabled Udayan to apply coala for the RGSoC, which just got accepted. YEAY!

After that we finally got our call for participation out so all the coalians who want to become team members knew it was possible. We got a lot of applications and so far it looks promising.

And finally Hemang and Kaisar wove their web-dev magic (dark arts if you ask me) and created not only a new landing page but also this awesome projects page. Although evil tongues claim the landing page was not only a community team effort I claim that all your page are belong to us.

You should definitely check out all the cool stuff created and give some love to the members of this awesome team.

What’s coming up next

We are in the process of finalizing our GSoC application but there will be a blog post about that in the future I guess. Let’s just say that the new projects page will hopefully help us a lot (and everyone else who decides to use it. Open source baby!) and we have some exciting projects and collaborations in the pipeline.

Besides the huge GSoC effort, I am in the process of rewriting the members cEP, which includes some major changes to our newcomer guide and we are working on improving the communication for maintainers. Hopefully this will be the done until our next post.

If you have ideas, questions, comments or other input, visit us in our gitter channel or drop us an email under community at coala.io.

Until next time,

Your Community Team