Team Practices Group/Onboarding
The Team Practices Group (TPG) was dissolved in 2017.
This page is obsolete. It is being retained for archival purposes. It may document extensions or features that are obsolete and/or no longer supported. Do not rely on any information on this page. |
These are the various onboarding tasks for everyone involved in onboarding new hires to the Team Practices Group.
Scrum Master/Agile Coach/Agile Specialist Onboarding edit
Manager tasks edit
- Mail out welcome to the team email
- Mail out welcome email announcement
- Establish expectations about logistics (work hours, location, etc)
- Add new hire to staff page
- Add new hire to internal TPG mailing list
- Review remote meeting set up
- Review org structure and how the TPG relates to other teams
- Ensure new hire is on relevant team meeting invites
- Review health check survey process
- Discuss nuances of working in our transparent, community-oriented environment
- Establish expectations around engagement with teams new hire will be supporting
- Review new hire tasks with new hire
- Discuss what's appropriate for public vs private communication in our environment (err on the side of public)
- Review the notion of 'assume good faith'
- Add new hire to the team's shared Google Drive folder
Onboarding buddy tasks edit
- Review TPG team docs, mission, values, and regular meetings
- Review different tools in use for what, set up with relevant accounts (wikis, Phabricator, hangouts, IRC & relevant channels)
- Ensure new hire is on main staff channels in IRC
- Run new hire through IRC basics
- Add information on how to use IRC for n00bs, critical channels and the "hoops" you have to jump through (see https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_QuickStart and https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Office_IT/IRCCloud)
- Add to relevant Phabricator projects
- Register up for a Phabricator account using the "Login or Register / Mediawiki" link, not the LDAP link
- Ask (via email, etc) for that account to be added to the relevant projects
- Team-Practices (Arthur)
- Team-Practices-This-Week (Arthur)
- Triagers (grants ability to do bulk edits)
- Project-Creators (grants ability to create Sprint projects)
- Projects specific to teams you are working with (ask developers on the team)
- OK to defer if the TPG'er doesn't yet have a team.
- Be sure to read the Phabricator tips page in the links section below
- Review pertinent mailing lists, help new hire subscribe
- (See the list of lists in the links section on Team Practices Group/Onboarding#Useful links)
- WMF All (if not already done by Arthur/HR/IT)
- WMF SF or other local lists
- https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo
- TPG public
- other...?
- Ensure a basic level of wiki knowledge
- See: https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Systems_guide_for_new_hires#Our_wikis
- Visual editor vs. source edit
- Discussion pages (including indentation and signing)
- Subscribing to pages; enabling email notifications
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style
- Sub-pages
- Templates
- Examples: User page, meeting minutes
- Practice joining hangout in a conference room
- Show new hire how to set up user pages using cool templates
- Discus SUL (a recent change in the wikimedia ecosystem) (see https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_account_policy and review with new hire)
- Set up one user page, on wikimediafoundation.org
- Copy the template from another TPG user page
- On all other wikis you have staff accounts on, edit those user pages to add links to the foundation user page
- Discuss nuances of working in our transparent, community-oriented environment
- Review staff/contractors page
- Review the notion of 'assume good faith'
- Review policy around editing projects with personal vs staff accounts
- Ensure official portrait is used on user page and for icon/avatar in everything
- Phabricator
- Gmail/Calendar
- Staff page, TPG team page
New hire tasks edit
- Welcome email announcement draft
- Add contact info to officewiki contact list
- Review HR's onboarding docs
- If you got a laptop but not a headset, request a headset
- Set up user pages
- Set annual goals
- Add new hire to team page
- Schedule regular 1:1s with manager (1 hour, recurring weekly)
Useful links edit
- Office contact list
- Team Practices Group documentation
- Phabricator
- Mailing Lists
- https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Overview
- teampractices list
- wikitech-l - Mediawiki engineering
- Wikimedia IRC channels
Links to engineering resources edit
While you may or may not be interested in actually hacking on Mediawiki/Wikimedia stuff, it will be useful to be familiar with these resources as you are supporting engineers at the WMF:
- New hire information (on officewiki)
- How to become a MediaWiki hacker
- Mediawiki book
- Security for developers
- Developer hub
- wikitech:Performance/Guides/Backend performance practices
- Architecture guidelines
- Wikimedia Release Engineering Team - the folks who manage our release pipeline
- wikitech:Deployments
- Scrum of scrums
TPG Welcome email edit
Welcome to the Team Practices Group!
We're really excited to have you join us and want to make your first days/weeks/months both productive and fun.
Below are some quick links to get you started.
Our team: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors#Team_Practices
Team portal: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group
Chat: IRC #wikimedia-teampractices (freenode)
Email:
teampractices@lists.wikimedia.org (Public default discussion list)
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org (Public Wikimedia engineering mailing list)
tpg@wikimedia.org (Private internal team mailing list; public list preferred)
Task tracking:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/56/ (General backlog and inter-team communication)
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/1105/ (Weekly workboard)
If you get lost or are confused about what you should be doing, then grab one of your new team mates and chat over coffee, tea, milk, beer, etc.
We are happy to have you with us!