Prepared by Valerie Addonizio, October 2023

Overview

There were major accomplishments by leadership in the 2022-2023 term, but admittedly a lot of them happened at levels above the practical, everyday work of TAC members. These accomplishments were informed by past feedback, especially leadership concerns raised in prior terms. Other goals, namely the development of significant training opportunities, had progress but ultimately warrants further improvement in terms of both strategy and execution.

Gratitude and acknowledgement to Rachel Searcy (TAC Vice Chair), Regina Carra (UAC Chair) and Suzanne Reller (UAC Vice Chair) for their professional and collegial coordination and support throughout term.

Goals

• Significantly improve council documentation

  • It was my (Valerie’s) goal to incorporate all the questions and answers posed to me or by me over the last few terms as both a member and leader of TAC, as well as pare and clarify older content on the Wiki related to council activities. Based on feedback and the amount of work completed, I consider this goal met.

  • The Council Handbook was significantly reorganized, rebranded, revised, and expanded. While most of these changes benefit leadership, the idea was that improvements and clarifications for leaders will have a whole-picture benefit, especially over the long term. There is also hope that individuals considering a leadership role will have a more accurate idea of the work and time commitment required.

  • This term featured the first time a team (Integrations) has decided to dis-band and this was an opportunity to document that process and make recommendations.

  • This goal was meant to address some of the general subteam leadership concerns discussed two terms ago; change is slow, but leadership is listening and learning.

  • This goal was also meant to help build continuity into the culture of councils.

• Encourage Cross-council collaboration (a cross-council goal)

  • Leadership on both councils wanted to honor the goal of encouraging cross-council collaboration and transparency. Relationships between the councils (official and unofficial) were documented by both councils at the beginning of term. Lines were drawn on an organizational diagram that reflected the reality of councils at the time of the first cross-council meeting of term, but lines were also drawn indicating potential avenues of collaboration.

  • These potential avenues were re-visited throughout the year, and one subteam (Testing) underwent their own mapping exercise to demonstrate how their work interacts with and is informed by other groups.

  • DevPri opened their meetings and invited attendees with regular announcements. This was very positively received, and Metadata in particular participated on the TAC side. At least two subteams met at least once across councils during the term.

  • Ultimately no new lines were drawn, but there was markedly more transparency in how these groups are meant to interact. 

• Training for Councils, but specifically for TAC members

  • This has been a goal of mine (Valerie) for years and was informed by my survey in the prior term based specifically on training needs

  • A GitHub workshop was scheduled and subsidized by the Aspace Program Team, and this was generally received as a good first step. Gratitude and acknowledgement  to the Program Team and the trainers.

  • However, critical feedback on this training was received and relayed and will be considered for the future.

  • Significant barriers remain and training goals were not met.

Leadership Activities (Chair and Vice Chair)

• Valerie piloted subteam lead meetings, which were optional and decreased in frequency as term went on. This was a space to ask questions, track concerns, and issue timely reminders about term activities.

• Advocated for bigger teams and larger councils, perhaps at the expense of full attendance at large meetings, but for the benefit of attrition and potential burnout/being overwhelmed.

• Advocated for changes to recruitment, including asking for voluntary participation for Testing and surveying members on their extant skills and willingness to teach those skills, with the hope that this will build a better pool of educators within council to help address the training goals. Significantly expanded the recruitment questionnaire.

• Began tracking council attrition over time, to predict recruitment needs over the long term.

• Significant documentation added to the Council Handbook to reflect leadership activity, with special gratitude to Rachel Searcy (TAC Vice Chair) for adding GitHub responsibilities and steps for the Vice Chair.

What Went Well (Direct Feedback from TAC Retrospective Meeting)

• Regularly scheduled meetings

• Clear goals and flexibility to adjust as needed

• Leadership communication was improved this term

• Identifying themes to ground the work

• Good start on offering GitHub training

• I feel like I am much better at running meetings – setting agendas, identifying action items, etc.

• Being on Testing introduces me to functionality I do not use at my home institution

Continuing Needs and Ideas

• Bigger teams (4-6) members are requested and preferred as a way of spreading the load

• Finding time to do the work remains a huge issue. Having team leads that help parse out work, and reduce the overhead of just getting started if one finds 15 free minutes, is very helpful. 

• Council meeting at SAA or other conference for opportunity to meet in person.

• More training in the backend of ArchivesSpace for those not familiar.

• More people involved in testing (especially regression testing)

• Communication between Testing and the two Doc groups before the docs are released, so a tester can say, yes, I can follow those instructions

• For Dev Pri, some kind of follow up with JIRA tickets that require more info, perhaps an ad hoc group to contact people who opened the ticket.