Interest Groups

An Interest Group deals with topics that are mostly cross-team and may overlap with other Domains, such as documentation standards, specific technologies, etc.

Interest Groups are usually made up of volunteer members and can, but don’t have to have a fixed leadership. Anyone can start an Interest Group and start finding members.

When Interest Groups need governance decisions that affect people who aren’t represented in the group, they involve everyone affected.

The list of the current Interest Groups is in the wiki, where they have their own space each. They have their own task lists and meeting schedule and notes, etc. Feel free to join one or more of them if you feel like you could contribute to the discussions.

Interest groups are less formal than work groups, involvement in an interest group is voluntary.

Structure

An Interest Group

  • consists of a bunch of VSHNeers from different teams who are interested in a topic and want to take care of it.

  • meets regularly or on demand to talk about the topics in question.

  • is long-living (that means Interest Groups aren’t suitable for short-lived topics).

  • is self-organized.

How to create an Interest Group

Strictly speaking, as soon as two or more people agree to tackle a long-term internal issue in VSHN, an Interest Group is born. The checklist below provides some guidelines on how to bring it to reality.

  1. Create a wiki space and name it appropriately, see the documentation guidelines.

  2. Create a channel in rocketchat with #<interest group name>

  3. Link the wiki space in the List of Interest Groups.

  4. Announce the existence of the new Interest Group in the #general channel and in the next company meeting.

  5. With the VSHNeers interested:

    1. Clearly define the mission and write it down on the wiki page.

How to Abandon an Interest Group

When there is no more interest in a Interest Group, or its purpose has been fulfilled, we can abandon it following these steps.

  1. Announce the situation to the people that could be affect in the chat. If there are no objections:

    1. Archive the corresponding wiki space.

    2. Remove it from List of Interest Groups.

    3. Remove (archive) the Interest Group from the Jira, for example tasks, VIPs, etc.