WordPress/five-for-the-future

Maybe record all slack channel interaction instead of meeting attendance.

Opened this issue · 2 comments

I created this ticket, as opposed to adding to #180 since this is a thought experiment and I don't want to fragment the conversations in that ticket.

We are currently looking for a way to track meeting attendance in #180. It looks like we will pull interactions and comments between 2 boundaries (probably start/end slack commands). I think as a solution for meetings, that is a fair approach.

With that being said, a fair bit of comments during the meetings are simply friendly discourse. Saying hello, talking about some personal issues, how we are feeling, some "I'm here's"...etc. I don't think we'll ever get to a place where we analyze comments to make sure they are relevant, nor should we ever.... But, those will be considered contributions to WordPress.

That leaves me with the question, why are comments of the like considered contributions because a user is around during meeting time (which is typically timezone biased), but other interactions in the channel not? If someone gets credit for saying hello during a meeting period, is that a better contribution to WordPress than someone else answering a new user question 10 minutes after the conclusion of a meeting? Should we include all user-driven slack channel interactions as contributions?

That's a really good point.

We could use the digest work in #197 to add something like this to a profile:

Sent 37 messages on Slack

...or just use a daily cron to insert something similar.

This is partly why I proposed using (emoji) reactions to the meeting announcement as the signal for attendance. It shows that someone was there without encouraging unnecessary noise. It doesn't make any judgements, just demonstrates that they showed up. And it allows for an honour system: we can trust people to only claim attendance when they're really participating.

Recording other channel activity could be a useful addition. I'm a little worried though that we're leaning towards over-recording activity. I think this should go on the Maybe pile. If there are teams that specifically need it, we can look at adding it for their use cases.