Project Affiliation

Blueprint: Project/Team Affiliations

Launchpad has projects (née products) that are the central organizing object for an open source application, bringing together bugs, code, translations, answers, etc. Projects are the seeds around which communities in Launchpad grow.

Launchpad also has teams, which are ways to organize the people who want to be involved in a project. Teams are used in some cases to control access to project artifacts (e.g. private bugs, code branches) and as a forum for audiences that want to participate in the project (e.g. mailing lists).

The problem is that there is no association between teams and the projects they revolve around. It can therefore often be difficult for an interested user to find the team they want to join in order to participate in a project.

This spec addresses this problem by introducing project affiliations, a way for teams to be (optionally) associated with a specific project.

Rationale

How often have you gone to a project page and wondered what teams exist that relate to this project? When you're looking for a way to participate, you naturally want to find the related teams and mailing lists, but this is currently fairly difficult. If the teams share a name with the project, you might get a lucky guess. Or your search might turn up something useful. Or you might be able to follow the obscure trail from various project artifacts and permissions to the teams controlling them. Ultimately though, because these relationships are not explicit, this is all left to luck, chance, and The Googles.

Wouldn't it be nice if a project owner could link specific teams with the project? Then on the project page you would see a list of related teams. Similarly, from the team page, you would see a link to the related project. This makes these relationships (which already exist implicitly) explicit and easily discovered. As a new user looking to participate in the project, there's much less guesswork in finding the channels for this participation.

Data model

We will provide for optional links between teams and projects.

It is proposed that we create a new table called TeamPillarAffiliations which link a team (really a Person) to a pillar. For the first cut, we'll support only projects but in the future we should at least also support project groups and possibly distributions as well.

Notes:

• We considered allowing for many-to-many relationships, but for now we're going to limit this so that a single team can only be affiliated with one project. A project can have many teams affiliated with it. Think foo-users, foo-dev, foo-announce, foo-bugs, foo-commits, etc. Should we need to support a team being affiliated with multiple projects, probably the most common use case would be to allow for affiliation with project groups.
• It must be possible to create the link between team and project after the fact. Should it be possible to do from both a project page and a team page? I think the u/i for the latter is easier, but both present interesting challenges. Further, the approval model works better if it is always the project owner initiating affiliation.

Stories

Here then are some stories for breaking down the work and estimating their level of effort.

Project affiliation for teams

As a project owner
I would like to be able to affiliate a team with a project
So that it is easier for people to discover this relationship, and the ways they can participate in the project.

• Add a TeamPillarAffiliation table containing at least these columns:

  • pillar

  • team

  • status (enum: Proposed, Rejected, Accepted)

• Add to ITeam interface and `Person content object, a project_affiliation attribute.

• Add method to IProduct to query for and return the set of affiliated teams.

Note:

• For now, teams cannot be affiliated with project groups or distributions. In the future, we may add this.

Story points: 2

View project affiliation

As a Launchpad user
I would like to be able to view the project affiliations for a team
So that I can more easily decide how I want to participate in the project.

• On the team index page, add a link to the affiliated project.
• On the project index page, add a section listing all the teams that are affiliated with the project, including teams that are implicitly affiliated, e.g.
  • answer contact
  • bug contact
  • driver
  • maintainer
• Implicit affiliations, as well as those that have been accepted by the team

  owner are listed as official with a special icon.

• Teams are displayed with their name and description, with links to the team's index page.

Notes:

• Sub-teams do not show up as affiliated even when their super team is affiliated.

Story points: 2

Add affiliation

As a project owner
I would like to be able to propose a team affiliation
So that I can more clearly communicate to users what these relationships are.

• When a project owner visits any team page, they see an action called

  Affiliate with project. Clicking on this action takes them to a page with a pull down menu containing a list of all the projects they own. They can then propose an affiliation of the team to one of their projects.

• If the project owner is also the team owner, the affiliation is immediately accepted.
• If the project owner is not the team owner, an email message is sent to the team owner informing them of the proposed affiliation. While this proposal is pending, the team still shows up on the project page's affiliations list,

  but without the official badge.

• The team owner can click on the link in their email to accept or reject the

  affiliation proposal. If accepted, the team is made official. If rejected, then the affiliation is removed and it's as if it was never made.

Notes:

• Should it be possible to create this link from the project page? If so, you clearly can't see every team on LP. I guess you could give them an edit box with the pop up to select a team name. Or you could just prompt them with all the teams they own. I think the u/i is problematic in this case.

Story points: 5

Remove affiliation

As a project or team owner
I would like to be able to break a team affiliation
So that it is clear there is no longer a relationship between the team and the project.

• A project owner can go to a team page to break that team's affiliation with the project. In this case, the affiliation is immediately removed and an email notification is sent to the team owner (if the project owner is not also the team owner).
• A team owner can go to the team page to break the team's affiliation with the project. In this case, if the team owner is also the project owner then of course the affiliation is removed immediately. If not, then the

  affiliation is made unofficial and an email notification is sent to the project owner.

Notes:

• You must break an existing affiliation before you can reassign it.

Open questions

• TBD