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If you chose to take part in or lead a brigade, we have some best practices and recommendations for you.

Recommendations

Now that we've been running brigades in the ONOS community for a while, we have some best practices and recommendations to share.

• In-person work weeks are crucial for establishing connections among brigade members and getting a project kicked off.  We encourage all brigades to make use of their budget to bring people together either at the Menlo Park office or somewhere else to meet in person.
• Clarity around a brigade’s goals and vision are very important so that people who are interested in joining that brigade know what they would be getting involved with.  Even if you don't know yet everything that your brigade may want to focus on, share out the ideas and plans you do have on your brigade's wiki page.
• Communicate regularly about what your brigade is doing – we're happy to help you share out your activities on the ONOS blog and other community channels.  Sharing out your progress will also help you find more people who are interested in what you're doing and want to help you out.
• Producing code is important, but it is even more important for brigades to be creating more module owners who have expertise and interest in that code.  As your brigade continues, be on the lookout for opportunities to delegate responsibility to brigade members and nominate brigade members to become new module owners.
  

Brigade Leads

A brigade leader is someone who has enough bandwidth to devote to the project -- this doesn't necessarily need to be someone who has the most technical experience and non-technical people can lead.  This role is more about coordinating the enthusiasm of brigade members and to keep progress moving forward by coordinating work weeks, and regular project calls and also to make sure that brigade members aren't blocked and have what they need to be successfulDavid to summarize notes from the post-mortem discussion...

Mentors

Mentorship is vital in an open source community because so much information and knowledge is often not written down or documented.  For brigades where there are leads or members who do not have easy access to the ON.Lab offices in Menlo Park, mentorship is also crucial since you do not have the ability to easily interact with and ask questions of core team members based there.  Because of that, we encourage all brigades that are not lead by an ON.Lab staff member to have a mentor who can support them, answer questions and get them unstuck when they are blocked.  Mentors can be ON.Lab staff members, TST members, module owners or anyone else who has deep knowledge to share about the work the brigade is doing.

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