Understand how to organize/handle "operational" versus "transformational" work

[chbrandt]

Context: In today's meeting, one of the points of our discussion was about the arrangement of team-compass repositories across the sub-projects, and how this layout would sometimes affect finding "team-compass" in different projects. The discussion was anchored on "team-compass" but it crosses other topics -- projects' docs, for instance -- and it is fundamentally about *finding information in a non-/semi-homogeneous set of resources (repositories, in this case)"; And it duels between centralized and distributed layouts.

Rationale: The ultimate mission of documentation is to satisfy all questions individuals (may) have about a product, process, or institution -- a thing. One of the challenges of any documentation corpus is to make information (easily) findable and accessible. In the case of Jupyter (Org), we have all: products, processes, and an institution, through which users, contributors, and developers have to navigate (at different levels) to get the information they want/need.

Since this working group has a scope that encompasses all the subprojects (Charter), we are bound to handle different sorts of issues: those that directly relate to our mission-and-goals, and some that (indirectly) impact our mission-and-goals. To effectively address our mission-and-goals, it is important to understand how to handle those two levels of work, i.e. "operational" and "transformational" work, resp.

"Operational": for work that we - contributors of Jupyter sub-projects - can address, discuss, or solve without (major) structural changes.
"Transformational" for work that may require major discussion and possible structural changes (that may involve Jupyter-Org).

[willingc]

@chbrandt Perhaps instead of "short term" and "long term", it would be better to frame this as "well-defined scope" and "projects needing definition".

[chbrandt]

@willingc Yes, indeed, they bring the idea of time and that's not the focus here.
Your suggestions are better. I will use them for the time being; What do you think about "operational" and "transformational"?
For instance,

• "Operational" for work that we - contributors of Jupyter sub-projects - can address, discuss, or solve without (major) structural changes.
• "Transformational" for work that may require major discussion and possible structural changes (that may involve Jupyter-Org).

[willingc]

@chbrandt Love the terms that you suggest!