Communicating changes to our communities

Communicating changes to our communities#

We’re working to be more proactive in planning and communicating infrastructure changes that don’t directly impact communities, in addition to sharing new features. This process focuses on changes that match the following description:

We (2i2c) believe these should have no real user facing changes, but we want you to know this is happening. If you perceive any changes at this date, please let us know and we will respond to it promptly.

This means explicit new feature deployments, working with specific communities, etc are out of scope for this process at this stage.

When this process applies#

Here is an explicit list of the types of changes that will be communicated out through this channel:

  1. Version upgrades of:

    1. z2jh

    2. kubernetes

    3. jupyterhub-fancy-profiles

    4. `jupyterhub-home-nfs

    5. dask-gateway

    6. binderhub

    7. Our home page default implementation

  2. Structural changes in how we provide our service. Examples of this would be:

    1. Moving from using cloud provider home dirs to jupyterhub-home-nfs

    2. Switching our profileList options to match memory requests to guarantees

    3. Changing from auth0 to CILogon for authenticating by default

    4. Switching base instance type from one node type to another

Responsibility#

It’s the responsibility of the engineering manager and the tech lead, to make sure that if some work matches this criteria, the requirement to send out a notice is noticed (either by themselves, or whoever is assigned to do the work), and make sure it goes out. It is the responsibility of the person making this change to write the message and ensure it is sent out. This may change in the future as we add more things to the list above.

How to send this out?#

Writing, and sending these messages out should take less than 15 minutes once the process has been familiarized. We do not want this to be community specific, but be sent out to all communities. Note that you must be logged in as a FreshDesk admin to complete this process.

Create a CSV#

To create an email to communities via Freshdesk, we need a list of emails, companies (organizations) and names in a .csv file to import into FreshDesk.

  • For authorized technical contacts, export a list from HubSpot or Airtable (this will eventually move to FreshDesk)

  • For all community members who’ve submitted tickets, export contacts from FreshDesk

Create an email using our template#

We use FreshDesk’s Proactive Outreach feature to send email alerts for changes.

  • Open Proactive Outreach.

  • Upload your CSV. This make take a few minutes.

  • When prompted to compose an email, start by adding a canned response, and choose Technical Announcement.

  • Replace PROMPTs in the Technical Announcement template with text matching the specific change.

  • Hit Send.

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