Succession plan

From translatewiki.net

This plan is inspired by a presentation at FOSDEM.

This page was last reviewed January 2023

Roles

These are the main roles for translatewiki.net. The current role holders form the translatewiki.net core team. One person can hold more than one role, and multiple persons can hold one role simultaneously, but they need to coordinate. It's not necessary to officially hold a role to do any of these things or to be restricted to only the duties of your own role – this is a collaborative volunteer project.

However, if you are holding role, there is an expectation that you will take care of the duties or bring it up to the project leader if you are unable to. Past role holders are good candidates to back you up for temporary unavailability. Fixed-term periods (e.g. 6 months, 1 year) and mentoring are a great way to try a role without committing to it for long times.

We are looking for new people to fill in these roles (with mentoring) to make it easier for all of us by having backups and sharing the workload over multiple people. Some of the roles require access to our servers, and that requires a lot of trust. If you are a completely new person, you should start gaining trust by trying other roles first. If you are interested, contact the current role holders on their talk page, by email, or on IRC.

Project leader

Takes a long view to ensure translatewiki.net will continue to exist and prosper.

Duties:

  • Ensure project continuity (e.g. hosting, succession planning)
  • Set a strategic direction and scope
  • Maintain this succession plan

Current role holders:

Currently being mentored:

  • Nobody

Past role holders:

Translator liaison

Helps translators and relays messages or connects people.

Duties:

  • Watch Support and project talk pages for issues reported by translators, helps them, or brings the issues to attention of an appropriate person.
  • Rename user accounts

Current role holders:

Currently being mentored:

  • Nobody

Past role holders:

Documentation:

System admin

Keeps our servers running. This role requires a great amount of trust and responsibility because of the access to private data.

Duties:

  • Maintain puppet configuration for our servers
  • Keep software up to date
  • Perform big software updates
  • Monitor resource usage and alert project leaders when resources use is growing beyond capacity
  • Keep the servers secure
  • Keep the servers optimized

Current role holders:

Currently being mentored:

  • Nobody

Past role holders:

Documentation:

System admin for MediaWiki

Ensures our MediaWiki installation is fast, secure and maintainable.

Duties:

  • Deploy updates to our MediaWiki installation
  • Do configuration changes
  • Monitor MediaWiki/PHP error logs
  • Monitor upcoming changes to MediaWiki

Current role holders:

Currently being mentored:

Past role holders:

Documentation:

Developer

Responsible for maintaining and developing the features of translatewiki.net.

Duties:

  • Maintain and develop Translate for the needs of translatewiki.net
  • Maintain and develop RepoNG project and related scripts
  • Support other developers with code review

Current role holders:

Currently being mentored:

Past role holders:

  • Siebrand
  • Wikimedia Language team developers

Documentation:

Translation admin

Imports and exports translation updates for projects supported in translatewiki.net.

Duties:

  • Monitor changes to project strings
  • Update group configuration in the translatewiki repo
  • Follow changes in upstream tagged for translation admins
  • Advice people how to do message renames, changes etc.
  • Import translation changes
  • Export translation changes
  • Report issues affecting imports and exports

Current role holders:

Currently being mentored:

  • Nobody

Past role holders:

Documentation:

Project liaison

Reach out to new and current projects to ensure smooth collaboration.

Duties:

  • Reach out to potential new software projects to discuss using translatewiki.net
  • Gather necessary information to setup new projects
  • Follow Support, #translatewiki at Libera.Chat in IRC and #translatewiki.net in Phabricator for new project requests and helps them
  • Understand the requirements for projects using translatewiki.net
  • Keep in touch with existing supported projects to surface possible issues early
  • Work with project's to fix observed issues (e.g. translations not getting into use)
  • Keep the project pages up to date

Current role holders:

Currently being mentored:

  • Nobody

Past role holders:

Documentation:

New user approver

Approves new users.

Duties:

Current role holders:

Currently being mentored:

  • Nobody

Past role holders:

Documentation

Accounts

Backblaze

For backups.

Access: Vault

BitBucket

For handling translation syncing.

https://bitbucket.org/translatewiki/

Access: Vault

GitHub

For handling translation syncing.

https://github.com/translatewiki

Access: Vault

GitLab

For handling translation syncing.

https://gitlab.com/translatewiki

Access: Vault

Framagit

For handling translation syncing. Self-hosted GitLab instance.

https://framagit.org/translatewiki

Access: Vault

Google Cloud

Machine translation services.

Access: Vault

Libera Chat

We have project for translatewiki with channels:

Access holders:

Netcup

Hosting.

Access holders:

SourceForge

For handling translation syncing.

Access: Vault

Telegram

Access holders:

UptimeRobot

Email notifications if our services go down.

Account holders:

Wikimedia

Contacts

Each project page should list contact persons for that project.