documentation/roles.md

Roles

Rotating cooperative-wide roles

In the interest of distributing types of work equitably and skill-sharing, a number of tasks ideally rotate— weekly, or monthly, or somewhat randomly.

Meeting facilitator

• Standup facilitator (all regular meetings)
• Monday/Friday planning facilitator (can be different than facilitator in standup part).
• Worker-owner meeting facilitator

In practice standup facilitator has been Keegan 95% of the time, with Chris and Sanjay a bit more likely to pick up the planning facilitation.

Timecop

• Checks to ensure people get their time in each day by the end of Monday planning, mid-week daily standup, and Friday shipping. Works with people individually after the meeting to get the time in.

In practice, we have not done this for a while.

Scribe

• Write one sentence about each person's main activity in a week, summarizing our activities in an accessible way in blog posts such as "The Week That Was: Agaric's March 30th to April 3rd"
• As our main storyteller for the month, think about ways to weave the work we're doing every week into a narrative; if we can't fit our work into a narrative we're probably straying from our strategic goals.

Never put into practice and we really need to.

Trainer/Educator

• Write informative blog posts
• Create curricula for trainings
• Submit speaking and training sessions
• Speak/training at events
• Help organize trainings, camps and conferences

Primary: Mauricio, Chris
Secondary: Keegan, Ben

Infrastructure

• Create and support working development environment for each project
• Create and support staging site for each project
• Maintain deployment workflows for each project

Primary: Chris
Secondary: Louis, Ben

Leads

• Cold calls (we have never done this)
• Future event scanner - list events of interest in advance
• Respond to requests received by contact form or email
• Write proposals
• Coordinate estimates
• Manage marketing-oriented pages on website

Marketing

• Write blog posts
• Post to social media
• Coordinate sponsorship of events
• Network at events
• Take pictures and video
• Promote events we are part of

Contractor Relations

• Communicate hours and progress with contractors
• Make sure contractors send invoice each month
• Make sure contractors get paid each month
• Check in on how contractors are feeling about their work and projects
• Check in with Agaric team on how things are going with contractors they work with

Currently making no effort to rotate.

Primary: Sanjay
Secondary: Micky

Team Management

• Review planned time usage on a weekly basis (start of week, based on reports in Monday team tempo meeting)
• Make suggestions to try to ensure Agaric worker-owners combine for at least 60 billed hours a week (60x4x150=$36K/mo=clearing payroll).
  • Works with project leads to find recommended tasks.
• Pairs with contractor relations for overall use of available Agaric time.
• Implement Team Tempo process

Unfilled since Clayton left.

Project-specific roles

Lead

Client Relations

• Hold monthly sensing and sprint planning/review meetings
• Send monthly ROS and project update
• Make sure payments from client are happening on time
• Update Agaric team on how a client is doing and how their projects are going in worker-owner meetings

This role as described has not really been filled since Clayton was here.

Developer/Designer

Design

• Create wireframes/prototypes
• Create design mockups
• Create styleguide using HTML and SASS

Primary: Unfilled

Development

• Use contributed and custom modules to implement functionality
• Translate styleguide into working website
• Review others' code
• Test code
• Deploy approved changes

Primary: Ben, Mauricio, Louis
Secondary: Chris, Keegan

User Research

• Define and measure project goals and key performance indicators (KPIs
• Define key user groups
• Conduct research to learn users' needs and motivations

Project Manager

• Plan sprints
• Ensure issues have acceptance criteria and relevant info
• Facilitate project meetings
• Facilitate key milestones such as security updates, redesigns and launches

Responding to Inadequate Performance of a Role's Duties

• Person noticing an issue address directly. If issue persists, call a meeting with the whole group to discuss a resolution/change.

Suggestions for role-fluidity

• Define documentation requirements and tool usage for the role (e.g. effective use of GitLab for developers, detailed tracking in CMS tool)
• Specific email addresses for particular roles
• Document requirements of a role - hard skills, soft skills, and required resources (e.g. excellent communication, GnuCash familiarity, etc).
• "Pair-programming" approach

Related: <a href="https://gitlab.com/agaric/internal/wikis/worker-owners">Worker Owners</a>