2023-03-29 Leads Meet
- Jinghao Lei
- Daniel Puratich
- Aidan Bowers (Deactivated)
Date
Mar 29, 2023
Participants
@Daniel Puratich Trial run directing this leads meeting!
@Dhruv Upadhyay
@Sahil Kale
@Ethan Abraham
@Hamza Ali
@Amy Hu
@Aydan Jiwani (Deactivated)
@Conall Kingshott
@Jinghao Lei
@Megan Spee
@Nathan Green
@Aaditya Chaudhary
@Aidan Bowers (Deactivated)
@R D
Discussion topics
Vote on new leads (beginning officially at the end of this term, though onboarding will start now)
@Nathan Green for Mechanical
Committed to team & has a complementary skillset to Conall
Concern would be the stream stuff
Conall is planning on stepping down after Spring 2023 term and so ideally we resolve the stream offset
Vote has passed.
@Mihir Gupta for Autonomy
Committed to the team and has bigger picture autonomy architecture ideas
PM, consistently been at meetings, and working across projects
Next term there will be three Autonomy leads
Aydan is planning on stepping down after Spring 2023 term and Amy & Mihir are on opposite streams
His first term as lead will be an off-stream term for him
Vote has passed.
Discord UW Verification
@Dhruv Upadhyay to discuss rollout
Bot has been added already and leads are piloting it
Leads should do this by tomorrow
Announcement to entire server will be by Friday
Members will have until Monday to do this
If people do not do this before Monday they can do it at anytime to regain full access to Discord
We need a way for advisors to get around this
We will probably kick prune (kick people who don’t verify from the Discord server) at the end of the term
Justification for this is our server link is public, but we want this to only be associated uWaterloo people
Social Media Pipeline - @Hamza Ali
Ops & Hamza is/are struggling to post regularly on social media
There’s just a handful of people on the ops team and it’s a challenge for them alone to post regularly
Hamza has created a channel to handle delegating this out to anyone who grabs a role
People with this role will be pinged regarding social media posts
Policy for selling equipment
Specific in this case to @Aaditya Chaudhary purchasing older controller (Taranis Qx7)
@Anthony Luo Says it’s worth ~$80
Would be ~$120 on eBay, but it has some broken switches, lacks a battery, and lacks a charger
It’s absolutely shot so it won’t be useful to us for anything
In this case Anni will run this specific sale to Aadi
We may want to auction it thought in the past we’ve just given shit away
Would be awkward to auction it off (and too much effort)
In this case we will put it in #onsite or #discussions and let people discuss, we don’t want to spend time running an auction
We aren’t using the Qx7 and don’t plan on using the future so it’s okay to let it go
We have a lot of other stuff we may potentially be selling or auctioning
We do not have a policy on it up until now
It has been handled case by case by directors and this is how we want to run it in the future
For future cases the leadership team needs to decide if it’s no longer of value then we try to sell it and members make reasonable offers
Cash only or exchanges and all sales will be final
Put it in #onsite or #discussions and let people discuss, we don’t want to spend time running an auction
General Meeting Discussion
Next General Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fdrWB8M7JFPT9CSs38n_eawtLIFz8Cmq0mwkWA3e9-Y/edit#slide=id.g206862a1ce9_0_20
Recap General Meeting Feedback Survey
Feedback Discussion:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1D38jVQKJPHL0wjc6KARUskGClEpaRLy7leVDeZnGo7Q/edit#responses
Present results: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_ajMBYtdlxPpXG_7tRTC7PrK5_kLWqdBwC1jnLVmeak/edit?usp=share_link
Aidan’s Takeaways:
Keep it short
Make it fun (social event after, food, work session?)
Leave planning and technical details for project syncs
Meet less frequently
Provide high level updates during the meeting to align everyone
General Meeting Improvement Ideas:
General Meeting idea: have snacks
If everyone pitches in we could afford these with no warg cost
this disincentives people from showing up at all
If we wanted to directly fund snacks it could come out of warg cash
Something small like 15-20 dollars per meeting
Otherwise leads could push in
How much does snacks actually encourage people to show up ?
Realistically we’re going to have super cheap snacks and it’s not going to have much benefit
Snacks is a good way to get people in the door, but like long term it’s not going to have people show up
We decided against this in the end
General Meeting Idea: Make meetings funny
Keeps it more engaging
Promote the social aspect
General Meeting Idea: Make it short and nice
Would require a smaller group of people running it to avoid dead air
General Meeting Ideas: Make it (general meetings) less frequent
This would require moving discussion to weekly syncs
Less frequency could mean snacks
Makes it more special since it’s less frequent
This seems to be something we are all in favor of
It’s more important that we schedule them when there’s something to talk about than that it is at a consistent time.
Bc we currently approaching comp biweekly, but after comp we could reduce frequency
General Meeting Idea: Demo the things we’ve completed since the past general meeting
Could be less technical and more of a show off
We could demo individual things as we build them up month by month
General Meeting Idea: Recognize members directly
Give people kudos or shout-outs
General Meeting Idea: remove implementation details (from general meetings)
Send these to text channel in discord or project syncs
Make general meetings more general
This aligns with the feedback we’ve seen
This helps keep general meeting exclusively for high level alignment
Why do we run general meetings ? Related notes, why do we run sync meetings ?
Generally (at companies of our size) this is to align people on the company vision and convey events.
From a real company: Kudos section
From a real company: New hires, anniversaries, finances, HR stuff, no technical
We have loosely defined requirements for general meeting which makes it tough to hit.
We need decide on the balance between what is covered on a “sync” vs what is covered in “general”
We are focusing on attendance in this conversation, but we need to define our goal.
Because making it more social would increase attendance, but push off other things we may care about. Specifically this will bring a lot of the technical discussion back to the project syncs.
A lot of the “sync” meetings we end up having are architecture meetings
After the first few sync meetings the syncs lose necessity as it is fully communicated what needs to be completed.
Specific cross team technical stuff should be decided in architecture meetings and not necessarily sync meetings.
The “sync” meetings end up handling all of the non-scheduled architecture changes.
These are too technical and specific to end up being handled in general meeting
Considering discussing final results in general meeting
Project syncs have been effective because it’s a localized scope
Compacting syncs into general saves us on overall meeting time ?
If general is less frequently then syncs will turn into general
Sync stuff feels too often because it’s becoming architecture meetings
Syncs are just slightly more detailed than general currently which is fine
Syncs are more technical than general
Having a technical sync for each of the projects
Has only required stakeholders for each program
Directors, Relevant Leads, & PMs
not all leads would be required
Leads meeting could cover some of this
Leads is currently mostly admin stuff, but we could tack on to the end of leads some technical stuff
If we do this PMs would attend this block of leads meeting
These are some big changes we may want to delay for now until post competition ?
Action items
Verification Rollout as described above
Anni to conduct sale of old controller to Aadi
Changing up meeting content and length to follow
General Meeting
Bi-weekly until comp and lower frequency subsequently
High level covering exclusively:
What we have done (specifically the cool things cuz cool things are swag)
Upcoming events
Encourage all members to be present
20-30 minutes in duration
Organic flow into social (food, drinks, or work session) following this meeting
Whoever is running it needs to stay on the rails and not diverge into the technical
Implementing the “Kudos” system
Leads Meeting
Directors and leads required.
First Section: Technical Stuff
Most technical decisions should still be in project syncs
Additionally require all project managers to be present, anyone else is allowed to join
First Section: Admin stuff
~45 minutes at least
Disallow certain/all non-leads depending on context of discussion
Project Sync Meetings
Will continue with what we have currently, just add more formality to this
Required any project stakeholder & technical director
Should be ~ 1hour