Calendar and Meeting Guidelines

Calendar and meeting guidelines, best practices, tips and troubleshooting guidance.

Calendar Guidelines

Project meetings are a life line of the Kubernetes project. Consistent calendaring is a challenge with many different clients, corporate policies, time zones and various iterations of Daylight Savings Time. This guide should help you navigate some of the common pitfalls and provide some tips & best practices.

Please feel free to PR in your favorite tips and tricks that may help others.

Establishing a New Meeting

“I’m a chair for a SIG or WG and need to set up a meeting.”

This procedure will create a calendar that allows for you and all your SIG/WG Chairs or Tech Leads to edit and manage the meetings.

NOTE: As of March 2019, this is the current best practice. However with the addition of gsuite, this practice may change soon.

  1. Use a poll service such as doodle that will help you get a good pulse on your community and when they can meet.
  2. Create a new shared calendar titled “[SIG|WG] Foo Shared Calendar” from a gmail/google account that will not have problems sharing or posting information publicly. This may mean using a personal gmail account if your corporate policies restrict sharing. See Testing Permissions to validate you can share your calendar.
  • Creating a shared calendar is essential. If you change jobs, email addresses, or take a break from the project it allows for a smooth transfer of ownership.
  1. Configure access permissions and sharing:
  • Make all event details publicly accessible.
  • Share it with full rights (“make changes and manage sharing”) to your SIG/WG lead mailing list and contributors@kubernetes.io.
  • Let your other chairs and leads know they can accidentally delete a calendar while trying to delete it from theirs.
  • Share with view permissions only (“see all event details”) to your SIG/WG mailing list.
  1. Once you have a time cadence settled from your members, create a calendar invite with the shared calendar as the owner. Configure it with the following settings:
  • Name it “[SIG|WG] Foo [Time Cadence ex: Biweekly] Meetings”.
  • Set sharing to public. NOTE: most gmail accounts will have a “default visibility” setting enabled. Default visibility is usually “private” and will need to be set to “public”.
  • In the calendar invite body - include your meeting notes, zoom information, and any other pertinent information that you want your group to know.
  • Invite calendar@kubernetes.io so the event will appear in https://www.kubernetes.dev/resources/calendar/

Testing Permissions

Make sure your work account doesn’t have restrictions for public viewing of calendar invites you create. If you are unsure, test this with other contributors before sending it to mailing lists. This is applicable for both the calendar entry itself and the shared calendar if you are the chair creating it.

Transferring Ownership

If a chair is offboarding, ensure that shared calendar permissions are configured. Once the calendar has been migrated, send out a new invite to ensure there are no possible ghost-entries in member’s calendars.

Tips

Viewing Kubernetes Project Calendars

“I’m a contributor and want to see one of/all of the SIG calendar(s).”

Public Kubernetes Events can be seen on the Public Community Calendar.

All of the SIGs and WGs have meeting agendas with detailed information at the top. You can get this information from the SIG/WG list. Join their mailing list for the most up to date calendar invites. Chairs will always invite the entire mailing list to their events.

Adding Events to Your own Calendar

Don’t copy calendars if you can help it. Copying the calendar onto your calendar will prevent you from getting updates like a canceled meeting. Join the main contributor mailing list and any SIG/WG list that is of interest.

Accept the invite from the sender and you’ll have the updates.

Calendar Event Template

In case you are creating a calendar event and wondering what to include in it, here is a recommended template.

Title

[SIG-<name>] <meeting title>
or
[WG-<name>] <meeting title>

Description

<One line intro about the SIG/ WG. Can include github links>

Time: <Weekly/ biweekly/... or is the meeting for a fixed time and till when?>

Meeting notes & agenda: <Hyperlink to the meeting notes doc>

Zoom link: <Zoom invite link. Preferably include app client link, web client link, and dial in information page link>

Additional info: <Any extra info/ links can be provided here>

Livestream link: <optional>

YouTube playlist: <optional>

Google group: <optional>

Example

SIG-Contribex: Weekly Contributor Comms Meeting

https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/communication/contributor-comms

Time: Weekly on Friday from 8-9am PT

Meeting Notes & Agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IlHAJ131akGhI5ffF4OoVW0PrsVY4C0BB8l-UyQaQVo/edit

Zoom link:

       App: https://zoom.us/j/XXXXXXXXX

       Web Client: https://zoom.us/wc/join/XXXXXXXXX

       Dial in numbers: https://zoom.us/u/bacaZSMhA

Troubleshooting

Permissions Impacted After Changing Positions or Role

“I’m a chair and the person that created the meeting is either no longer with the project or no longer at an employer that holds the invite”

If the calendar was created as a shared calendar with edit rights granted to other chairs and leads they should be able to edit the invite and migrate ownership without issue. If you do not have permissions, check first by sending an email to contributors@kubernetes.io. Permissions may have been granted that team and they will be able to facilitate the change in ownership.

If there is no shared calendar and still one owner, ask the person to transfer it to a shared calendar or you’ll need to create a new one. In these cases it often best to just create a new one to avoid any possible issues with the previous calendar. It doesn’t hurt to recreate a meeting invite every few months to refresh invites sent to the group.