Additional Roles for the project

Community
1

The following are some roles in our project that can benefit from more participation - either dedicated or part-time. Some people have already been playing these roles informally in an ad-hoc fashion. This is an attempt to bring more attention to these roles and look for participation.

Product Analyst

Responsibilities

  • Write detailed stories in unambiguous language.
  • Break down epics into smaller stories.
  • Take care of dependencies between stories.
  • Label stories appropriately.
  • Analyze and create user personae.
  • Come up with acceptance criteria for stories.
  • Organize stories into releases and maintain Kanban boards.
  • Track merge requests corresponding to stories in the release.
  • Work with the community to decide the order of priority of stories.

Skills required

  • Basic GNU/Linux skills
  • Willingness to learn and understand some of the technical stories
  • Requirements gathering from users
  • Understand skill levels of various user personae to guide development and UX

Quality Analyst

Responsibilities

  • Ensure quality of the system by regularly coming up with tests for various features.
  • Think of various ways in which the system can fail. Do exploratory testing.
  • Automate tests by adding more functional and API tests.
  • Maintain a library of smoke tests and execute them on each release.

Skills required

  • FreedomBox power user
  • Test environment setup - virtualbox, vagrant
  • Automation tools - Selenium in Python
  • GitLab
  • Test library - Wikis or Spreadsheets
  • Some application security knowledge is nice to have

Documentation Writer

Responsibilities

  • Keep end-user documentation updated.
  • Stay up-to-date with the latest features in the app. Follow development closely.
  • Identify and improve areas of the application lacking documentation.

Skills required

  • Writing for a non-technical audience. Ability to explain things in a simple, non-ambiguous language.
  • Use screenshots, diagrams etc. where appropriate
  • FreedomBox power user.
  • Wikis

Documentation Translator

Responsibilities

  • Translates documentation from English to other languages.
  • (optional) Contribute new documentation which can get translated to English and other languages.

Skills required

  • Wikis and translation tools
  • Multi-lingual with proficiency in at least two languages (not necessarily English, e.g. can translate from Spanish to Portuguese where the Spanish translation is sourced from the original English one)

Community Manager

Responsibilities

  • Empower community members to productively participate in the project
  • Promote adherence to the community’s Code of Conduct
  • When appropriate, mediate conflicts and moderate discussions
  • Notify community about upcoming events, like biweekly progress calls and conference appearances

Skills required

  • Listening to community members
  • FreedomBox power user
1 Like
2

The above post is a wiki. We can discuss on this thread and also collaboratively edit the post once we reach conclusions.

3

@njoseph Since, as you point out, some of these responsibilites are being carried out by people already, do you imagine that existing community members would fill these roles? Or do you imagine recruiting new contributors to fill these roles?

4

Though some existing members of the project are contributing to some of the responsibilities of the above roles, these roles are currently underrepresented. People who are currently trying to play these roles don’t have the bandwidth to execute these additional responsibilities in addition to their primary responsibility.

Most of the community is currently engaged in design, development and translation. We need similar efforts in other areas like documentation, bug triaging, support and community engagement.

I think it is not important whether the new people who fill these roles are doing so in a part-time voluntary capacity or full-time as long as there is more participation.

5

@njoseph I added some proposals for the community manager role. Others should feel free to make revisions to that role.

6

Perhaps Business Analyst could be renamed to “Product Analyst” or “Feature Analyst”?

7

I like Product Analyst.

Feature analyst or Requirements Analyst might be too narrow for the role.

Another option is Functional Analyst (sounds too technical).

I’m changing it to Product Analyst for now, since Business Analyst doesn’t make sense in our context.