The first deadline of the WMF Annual Plan (T124019) is
Wednesday, February 3 - Initial budgets and narratives are due for Core Work
Core work budgets for 2016-17 to include: staffing, travel, consultants, equipment, off sites, etc. needed to support current work and projects and to continue those projects for the coming fiscal year, as appropriate, are completed and sent to Finance.
February 3 for all WMF means we need to have a solid draft by Jan 28, and this means that we need to start the work right now.
While a lot of this work is counting beans looking at this fiscal year's budget, the distinction between core and strategic poses an interesting question: **how much time are CL and DevRel putting in core work?** For a definition of core, see [[ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Tracking_core_and_strategic_work | Tracking core and strategic work ]].
Some assumptions to be challenged:
* By default, Community Liaisons work is strategic by definition: new products and features are being developed (strategic), and our communities need to be involved. This means that we need to look actively for what is core.
* Since liaisons work mostly embedded with Product teams, whether their work is core or strategic depends on whether the respective Product teams are defining their work as core or strategic. This means that we need to ask each of these teams and be consistent in our plans.
* A case can be made that #Community-Tech is more core than strategic, because the Community Wishlist tends naturally to highlight proposals related to technical debt, maintenance, solutions to old bugs or long overdue missing features... Therefore, our support to this team could be considered core as well.
* Are our Wikimedia Hackathon and Developer Summit core or strategic? One could think that they are core because there is an expectation to continue organizing them, but on the other hand organizing them in the same way or doing something different is a very serious strategic decision. One solution is to request the resources as core (if we agree that such level of investment should be kept) but then leave the door open to use those resources in a different way if the strategic discussions advices us to do so.
* Core workflows are in theory core (surprise!) but this needs to be double-checked, and we will need to estimate how much work that is in terms of [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time_equivalent | FTE ]]. Andre's current 0.5 FTE on Phabricator patrolling is probably our biggest item.
* About travel, offsites, management overhead... should we count considering the size of the full team (counting core and strategic) or do we really really need counting taking only core into consideration? In other words, if only 3 out of 11 FTEs are dedicated to core, should we count travel, etc only for these 3?
Actions:
[ ] Everybody: comment and propose if you wish.
[ ] @qgil to ask Product management about their share of core vs strategic.
[ ] @DannyH to provide feedback specific to Community Tech.
[ ] @qgil to resolve with Luis & CE directors the questions about big events, travel, overhead...
[ ] @rdicerb, could you estimate the FTE for CL core workflows, including the list of workflows computed, please?