# Tauri Community Refinements: Phase 1 - VIPs

Tauri has grown over the past several years into a very popular community. Along with that have come some growth pains where I don't feel the current model works as best as it could and would like to propose some suggestions to improving this.

This is a multi-phase plan to shape the Tauri community into as strong and healthy place as possible, powered by and for the open source community.

✅ Phase 1: VIPs (this document)
[Phase 2: Support Resources](#Phase-2-Support-Resources)

## Phase 1: VIPs

_Note: This is the some content from the VIP proposal that is already in place, feel free to [skip to the next phase](#Phase-2-Support-Resources)._

### Observations

First, let's start with the observations:

- Working Group is sitting at 47 people on Discord (including our happy little Discord Bot), 29 on GitHub
- 16 people reacted to the Working Group call time vote
- 15 people registered votes for the Tauri Board election
- In the first 3 working group calls where attendance was recorded an average of 6.67 people attended (granted this was a synchronous call)

If you dig into the details you'll see a clear pattern of who's been active. This isn't to call out non-active members at all, this is just to highlight that there's a pattern and that more people doesn't necessarily mean more engagement.

I'll say that I have bias on this because I'm not involved with core GitHub repo contributors, so there could be WG members active there that aren't in the above scenarios, but I'll come back to this point in a bit.

### Issues

So cool, not many people are necessarily involved. But is that a bad thing? It's known that large team sizes cause issues that slow the pace of the group at large. The common number I've seen for an "ideal" team size is around 7 people. Some more reading material [here](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaimepotter/2020/04/27/the-ideal-team-size-at-work-may-be-smaller-than-you-think/) if you're interested.

But what are the impacts for Tauri of having such a large Working Group?

- Slow time to make decisions due to "waiting" for potentially in-active members to give their input
- Looking to others for improvements, hoping that "someone else" will pick up problems and solve them. We don't interact with a lot of people in WG so it's easy for us "imagine" that they could step up and do things, but the facts are that this isn't happening.

### Group Makeup

Now let's look at the themes of people in working group. I boil it down roughly into these groups:

- **Core Leaders**: People who are leading the decision-making for code contributed to Tauri. They're the gate-keepers and usually the most active in projects.
- **Code Contributors**: These are people who have contributed to Tauri, but maybe this was a one-off contribution or they're not overly active.
- **Advisory Members**: Those who have wisdom and expertise that are valuable to our collective knowledge, but may not be active working on tactical projects
- **Ecosystem (VIP) Members**: People who are strategically important to Tauri (and Tauri is important to them), however they aren't involved in setting the direction for Tauri. These could also be lighthouse projects that are using Tauri downstream.

Of course not everyone fits cleanly into one bucket and they may cross-over into many areas (hint: a single person can have multiple Discord roles ;)), but this captures what I've observed.

### Where do they belong?

Now let's talk about where I see the best fit for these different groups and _why_:

- **Core Leaders**: They're in the right place. They're the ones who are steering decisions and executing on them tactically. They're also responsible for guiding contributors the the right places and resources
- **Code Contributors**: These people are amazing, but they belong in a more public place. The reason for this is twofold:
- They've only contributed a few times (and we love that), but they haven't quite shown consistency yet. Consistency is needed to build expertise in order to effectively "guide" the project.
- We should never have contribution conversations behind closed doors. Public channels are scary, but if we don't talk about what we're working on then we never get the chance for someone to chime in. We want to give as many opportunities for people to join the conversations. This is part of OSS and community building (even though public places are indeed scary at times)
- **Advisory Members**: I feel right now WG is the right place for these people. I think the board within WG is maybe the most optimal place and I feel the Tauri Board is meant to be a place for advisory, not necessarily execution.
- **Ecosystem (VIP) Members**: They don't have the vested interest in Tauri that we look for in WG. They're amazing, they (or their customers) may depend on Tauri, but they're ultimately not _responsible_ for steering Tauri. This is where a VIP/Ecosystem group comes in (more on that below).

### That's a lot of words, what are the actions?

Blah blah, words words, let's get to the proposed game plan:

1. Shift more conversations to public channels
- I've begun work to strategically refine Discord channels and keep them as limited as possible in an effort to provide clear places to hold those conversations publicly.
- We _MUST_ be diligent with having conversations in an open environment outside of WG and closed channels in order for the following steps to be successful
2. Create a "VIP" group
- I've set up this channel and role, this is the conversation we're having now. More on the specifics of what a VIP and how we interact with them below.
3. Invite people to shift from WG to the VIP group
- You're amazing! We love you! But could we offer you maybe a more suited (and more relevant for you) place to hang out? Cool! Welcome to the #VIP channel! <3
4. Create an "exit strategy" for WG Alumni
- Yu-Wei has brought this up before and Jacob is working on proposing it formally. Let's thank and acknowledge these people for their service and contributions and give them the Alumni status they've earned while not feeling responsible to continue in WG.
6. Clean up inactive Working Group members
- After we've gotten the VIPs into the right place there will still be some stragglers. We need to trim these down not only from a strategic organizational perspective, but also from a security perspective (inactive people with special privileges? Never a good thing.)
- This is the last thing, we could just do a ping on Discord for people to give a thumbs up reaction if they're active and still interested in WG. If no response after x time, we could reach out to double check intent, and then shift them over to WG Alumni.
7. Have a discussion around what we need WG to be and our expectations
- So far it's been a group of amazing people, but what does Tauri **need** it to be?

### What's this VIP thing?

The new concept here is a VIP. I don't personally feel this is anything that requires regulation whatsoever and would advise against it. This is something to begin trying out, so what does and doesn't work, and adjust from there. If we feel the need to put this in official regulation later on down the road then we can cross that bridge when we get there.

**Who is a VIP?**

- Framework (Svelte team, Rust & cargo teams, etc.)
- Media (streamers, bloggers, speakers, etc.)
- Sponsors (DigitalOcean, Netlify, etc.)
- Lighthouse Projects (larger-name projects that we want to ensure are as successful as possible using Tauri. Their success is our success)

There are probably other categories but this should give an idea of what this is

**What VIP _is_**

- Allow VIPs to call attention to important issues or opportunities to WG at large that could be easily lost in other channels
- Reach out if they're talking about, using, or showcasing Tauri to make sure we can prepare them to be as successful as possible with "going live". A streamer is building a Tauri app live? Cool! Give us a shout and let's tweet about it!
- Megaphone Tauri. 2.0 is coming out in a few weeks? Let's get these people on board to start writing and talking about it to create some buzz.

**What VIP _is not_**

- A VIP is not a "premium" support channel or a way for someone to pay-to-play or skip the queue (although we welcome relevant issues and opportunities being highlighted to us)

**How to become a VIP?**

The barrier to entry to becoming a VIP should be fairly low. Right now there's no formal process for becoming a WG member at all, so I don't feel it's a relevant time to have any conversation around VIPs (if we want to then I'd strongly advise we first tackle "what is WG" and "how to get into WG")

I'd suggest the following that current Working Group members can follow:

1. Does the person meet the criteria for a VIP defined above?
2. Yes? Cool, add them to the `@ecosystem` role on Discord!

(love me a good KISS method)

### Closing Thoughts on Process & Regulation

I'm very strongly opposed to any sort of formal regulation around the VIP roles. We're drowning in regulation in WG as it is. A VIP isn't a person with any sort of "power" or "permission" like a WG member is, I don't feel it's necessary to go through these in-depth conversations just for the sake of improving the Tauri community and our interactions with it.

I'm also a strong believer in trying something, see if it works, and adjust as you go along. It's impossible to solve something without even giving it a try. Why would we try to make regulation around a process that we've never tried before?

That's not to say that process and regulation aren't important. They are very important. However let's look at reality and realise we need to become more agile as an organization. This is one of the efforts that I whole-heartidly believe will help us get there.

### Copy for Procedure

**Welcome to the Tauri VIP channel 🎉**

We're happy to have you with us!

Streaming about Tauri, writing a blog post, integrate with or use Tauri, or do anything else involving Tauri? Feel free to let us know here and we'd love to share it!

If there are issues or opportunities that you feel we should be paying attention to then you can highlight them here.

Know someone who you think would fit in here? Let `@working-group` know and we can set that up.

**Working Group Guide: Adding Someone**

1. Get a thumbs-up from one other WG member to add that person
2. Send the person a DM asking if they'd like to be added
3. If so, add them to the `@ecosystem` role
4. Send them a welcome message in `#vip` with who they are/what they do as a welcoming introduction to start the conversation