Nu-Tracker
Helping you manage actions and horizontal review tasks from the command line
Presented by: Matthew Tylee Atkinson
Head of Web Standards, Samsung R&D Institute UK
Speaking as APA WG co-chair (I'm also in the TAG, and am an alternate AC rep, but this work is being presented by APA WG, as an experiment that isn't an official W3C tool, but provides a different, command-line, view on existing W3C processes).

First thing, to be clear: we love the GitHub process! And happily ACK the people who've helped with my understanding of the HR process, and with this experiment:
Philippe
Bert
Richard
Addison

But the GitHub process can present barriers...

Complexity: not so much complexity of the process (which is reasonable for what it does, and is clearly documented), but complexity of the UI around it. GitHub's pages contain a lot of information, some of it arbitrary, and can take time to process and navigate, especially for people using assistive technologies.

For TF facilitators, or group chairs, it's really hard to track work across repositories, because you have to include each one manually in the search. For groups with many repositories, this can make the web-based approach prohibitive.

Some groups engage in Horizontal Review - which is where we check every spec/document that comes out of W3C for concerns in a number of areas: accessibility; internationalization; privacy; security; and overall architectural fit. Each horizontal review area is the responsibility of a particular group (e.g. accessibility review is managed by the Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) WG).

There is a neat Horizontal Review dashboard that pares down this info for specific horizontal review tasks, and presents a streamlined UI - this is great, but we would love to have such benefits for tracking other work, and we find the command line can help us get to what we need quickly.

Thus speed is an important consideration for us; we want to find the info we need as quickly as possible. The command-line can really shine here.

Anyone who facilitates a TF, or chairs a group can benefit from an overview of all of the work going on within that team (which spans many repositories). This is something we find really helpful in a tool.

But it's important to note that you may not need Nu-Tracker: if you're an individual contributor, you can track everything assigned to you via GitHub's web site (though W3C specific things like due dates on actions won't be taken into consideration, you can find all of the work assigned to you).

However, you may find Nu-Tracker useful if you engage in:
Horizontal review; or
Action tracking;
In and out of group meetings.

Nu-Tracker builds on the existing GitHub process for Horizontal Review, and action tracking (i.e. it finds issues created by GHURLBot). It's named after the venerable Tracker IRC and web-based tools that we used to fondly use to keep tabs on our (and our group's) actions. It also helps with horizontal review tasks.

It's important to note that Nu-Tracker is experimental
...and your feedback is most welcome :-).

[ Notes on the demo... ]

A demo of various functions of Nu-Tracker was presented, ranging from using it to track issues (which just calls back to the `gh` tool from GitHub - but knows which repositories to query for a given TF or group), to showing how it helps track W3C process stuff, where we have conventions, i.e.: actions (with due dates); spec reviews (with due dates); comment review requests from other groups (with specific triage and other statuses, which you can use the tool to filter).

Use of Nu-Tracker to pare down issues to the most relevant ones for now was shown. Also, using the tool to produce the list of issues in a form that could be pasted into IRC during meetings was shown. This outputs `subtopic:` commands (plus other vital info about the issues) that can be pasted into IRC, and give structure to the minutes.

Also it was mentioned that you can also open the results of queries in the browser. [ Though, in the demo, I forgot that whilst this used to be done via the `--web` switch, it's now done via `--report-format`/`-r` switch, with the `web` option; d'oh! There are several reporting formats, for different occasions (e.g. getting an overview, running meetings, and an upcoming one about preparing agenda). ]

It relies on having the GitHub command line tool `gh` installed and set up.

At the moment you need a Rust compiler too (though I'm working on that). You can access the repo at <https://github.com/matatk/nu-tracker>

Questions from the group included:

* How are the due dates inferred? - This depends on the part of the process being used, e.g. for spec review requests the due date is encoded in the issue title by the W3C bot (Nu-Tracker gets the date, and uses it to sort results, and also streamlines it out of the issue title when the title is displayed); for actions, GHURLBot puts these, in a particular format (<https://w3c.github.io/GHURLBot/manual.html#create-action>) in the first comment of the issue thread.

* Heads up on a tool that Jeffrey's working on to track progress on specs, which also has the need to track work across repos (check the IRC notes for the URL).

* How can we reliably get repository info for groups? W3C's existing `w3c.json` infrastructure may be able to help with this (HT François; Jeffrey and Matthew to investigate).

Please file issues on Nu-Tracker if you have any input; it's most welcome.

Thanks for your time!