DRIs for GitLab "Content Sites" (about.gitlab.com & internal handbook)

Update 2021-11-15

This issue is now closed. See #3417 (closed) for an updated transition plan.

Summary

The GitLab Handbook was formerly a category assigned to the Static Site Editor group. As DRI for the Handbook, the group maintained /handbook/ section of the www-gitlab-com project, optimized the project’s overall architecture, and responded to on-call escalations. The Static Site Editor group was dissolved and the GitLab handbook ceased to have a DRI.

This area has traditionally been referred to as "the handbook", or "www-gitlab-com", but over time has grown in scope to include multiple sites, projects, repos, and types of content. Therefore, especially with the recent creation of separate sites and projects including the Internal Handbook project, we have switched to using the term "Content Websites" to reflect the true scope. (NOTE: the preceding link will work after merge of www-gitlab-com!92375 (merged))

In an effort to determine the DRI for the www-gitlab-com project, the Digital Experience team was identified as the appropriate DRI to drive forward a separation of the Marketing site and Blog from the Handbook. A Q2 FY22 OKR highlighted the need to define a distinct DRI for Marketing and Handbook content. The Digital Experience team fully owns and is making progress on separating the Marketing site and Blog from the www-gitlab-com project to ensure a more clear distinction between these projects.

There is still no DRI for: All about.gitlab.com content and assets other than those owned by the Marketing Site and Blog, the public GitLab Handbook itself, the Internal Handbook, and all shared infrastructure and assets related to about.gitlab.com and the Internal Handbook.

This means that critical tasks such as maintaining the projects, responding to increased pipeline duration, and fielding new requests continues to fall on @cwoolley-gitlab, a member of the Editor group, as the engineer with the most domain knowledge. This is taking up to 15% of his time away from the current engineering allocation focused on security, reliability, and scalability.

Establishing DRIs

The Marketing Site, Blog, Handbook, and Internal Handbook are essential tools for our business. They need a dedicated team to drive improvements and respond to incidents. We need to establish two DRIs:

Marketing Site & Blog - DRI is Digital Experience under `@mpreuss22`

The Digital Experience team will continue to drive the separation of the Marketing Site and Blog content and assets from the www-gitlab-com repo and be the sole DRI for those projects moving forward. This ensures that they can move fast, independently perform experiments and execute on their own roadmap.

For SEO and other reasons, however, the Marketing Site and Blog content is still hosted under the about.gitlab.com domain, and shares common infrastructure and assets.

`about.gitlab.com` and the Internal Handbook - DRI is TBD pending decision by Leadership

The rest of the projects will be managed and maintained by TBD. This content is generally referred to as "the Handbook" but includes:

All about.gitlab.com content and assets other than those owned by the Marketing Site and Blog, including the public GitLab Handbook itself
The Internal Handbook
All shared infrastructure and assets related to about.gitlab.com and the Internal Handbook
On-call support for critical issues related to the about.gitlab.com and the Internal Handbook

Risks

If we continue to operate without a DRI for about.gitlab.com and the Internal Handbook, we will increase the likelihood and severity of significant disruption to critical business operations including (but not limited to) security incidents, site downtime, failing pipelines blocking blog posts or time-sensitive content updates, and longer pipelines leading to less efficiency among contributors to the project.