Google Season of Docs: CHAOSS Project under The Linux Foundation — Week 2

5 min readSep 1, 2020

Introduction

👋Holla everyone!

I am Jaskirat Singh, an open-source research strategist, and tech diversity community management specialist, developing new and improving existing, computer-based technologies, systems, and solutions in advanced open source ecosystems. I have been working quite a while with various communities in the open-source, helping them maintain good relationships with external communities and projects, organizing meetups and events generating FOSS ecosystem, supporting the community in the outreach, creation of tools, and process with good relationships.

I hold a great experience in mentorship spends most of the mine time mentoring and administrating young-minded people across the globe such as an administrator in Google Summer of Code and in Google Code-In for Terasology Foundation(Codeuino), Google Season of Docs Administrator for Open Collective, Mentor at Rails Girls Summer of Code and MLH League Summer program and recently administrating for Codeuino Mentorship project under The Linux Foundation CommunityBridge mentorship platform

I help organizations understand, use, release, and contribute to free and open-source software in a way that’s good for both their end-users and for the community.

Exciting news! I am working within the Google Season of Docs program on a CHAOSS Project under The Linux Foundation.

Things I learned this week

This week I worked on the “Working Groups” section under the CHAOSS community, “Path to Leadership”, and build my Google Season of Docs tracker of my project.

Well, I had a very good time making research around the Working Groups. The Working Groups are the core of the metrics and the software under the CHAOSS community so it was vital for me to understand its meaning and evolution in depth. I tried to grasp the knowledge of “Focus Areas” alongside the “Vision” and “Motives” used to define any working group.

The challenging and interesting part for me was to understand the criteria and workflows followed by the groups for placing the metrics with a defined focused area under the appropriate working group and the question I asked myself was “If I want to propose any new focus area around the metric what will be the procedure for it?” and this question made me discuss around along with the other following questions:

How to define any new focus area of metrics inside any working group?
What is the workflow and culture inside the working groups?
What criteria do the Working groups follow for refining or accepting any metric under the relevant group?

After discussing these with community members I was able to draft them into the community-handbook.

Moreover, after getting inspired by one of the GSoCers under CHAOSS, I planned to maintain a repository for my Google Season of Docs project and I think this is a good way to keep a track of my progress and keep the community updated.😊

Things I could have done better — with the Lesson I learned

The CHAOSS community already holds various working group meetings and I think my questions could have been answered better by experiencing and observing while I could have participated in any “specific” working group call. Lesson — utilize all resources available and tried to experience them in order to understand things better.
I started maintaining the repository for my progress and report in the 2nd Week of my engagement with this program which I should have done earlier itself. Lesson — plan early and start early in order to avoid any conflicts in the future.😊

Work Done this Week

Day 1 [Research]

Worked on the inconsistencies and the inputs received from Georg and Matt on the mailing list regarding the Values and documented same within the GitBook
The research did on the “Working Groups”. Tried to understand their vision and motives. Came across some questions —
* How to define any new focus area of metrics inside any working group?
* What is the workflow and culture inside the working groups?
* What criteria do the Working groups follow for refining or accepting any metric under the relevant group?
Started a thread on the chaoss community mailing list with a subject: “ Understanding Working Groups better — context for Community Handbook “

Day 2 [Research]

Understanding the Working Groups
Research on the content that needs to be added for the community handbook

Day 3 [Research & Documentation]

Research on the Working Groups
Understood the Common Metrics with Focus area
Opened the small issue which I came across while understanding and reading the repository.
Proposed a new idea to the community and wrote within the community mailing list with the subject line — “Came across the new idea for proposing a metric and filtering it ”
Wrote in the handbook — What is the Working Group?, Types of CHAOSS Working Groups, Who all can participate?, How to define any new focus area of metrics inside any working group?, What is the workflow and culture inside the working groups?
Attended the first official GSoD Meeting: GSoD office hours with mentors and meeting notes can be found here

Day 4 [Documentation]

Finalized the “Working Groups” page
Made the Google Season of Docs tracker on the GitHub
Sent the email to the CHAOSS mailing list with the subject — “Working Groups information within Community Handbook”

Day 5 [Research & Documentation]

Finalizing and setting up the pending work within the Google Season of Docs tracker on Github
Tried to reframe the Leadership roles within the CHAOSS

Day 6–7 [Research]

Researched on the “Path to Leadership” section for the community handbook
Read some articles defining the leadership in open source communities
Trie to figure out important key points that need to be mentioned within the community handbook for this section
Wrote an email to the CHAOSS mailing list, asking for some reference context in this regard with the subject line — “Path to Leadership — context for Community Handbook”
Figured out the context: What leadership means to the CHAOSS community? Why it is important for us? Processes for availing the following leaderships Technical Leadership — Processes for “Repo Maintainers”, “Documentation Maintainers “, and “Website Maintainers” Governance Maintainers — Pathway for “Board members” and “Decision Makers” Operational Maintainers — Pathway for the Community manager Best practices for being the leader

There is more exciting ahead in the coming weeks! 😊

Once again, I am very much grateful to my mentors and the community members for being so supportive.

Feel free to connect with me on Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

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