This document is intended for INN staff, board members, volunteers and contractors who may interact with the technology team at various times in the course of their work but may not be as familiar with all of our internal processes or interact with us everyday.
Much of this information is covered in our team docs which are great if you want a deeper dive into how we work and how to work with us most effectively.
Everyone gets stuck from time to time and we're here to help. Given the volume of requests we receive, we have processes in place for managing support requests that vary slightly depending on the need.
General questions or requests for documentation - open a new issue on the INN docs github repo. Slack is also great for general questions, choose the most appropriate room and ask away!
Help with INN web properties (inn.org, learn.inn.org, etc.) - email support@inn.org.
Help with Largo - use the Largo help desk (additional help can be found in the knowledgebase and documentation) or email support@largoproject.org.
Email for general inquiries: nerds@inn.org. This goes to the entire team and someone will get back to you as soon as we are able. Please try to avoid emailing team members individually regarding support requests as these are assigned and handled from a shared queue.
Slack is an "always on" group chat application that we use for conversation throughout the day as well as to keep conversations visible to all members of a team or project.
Instead of having one-on-one conversations or losing important details in endless email threads, posting in the relevant Slack channel makes these conversations visible, searchable and archivable so that everyone involved can easily see what is going on and/or quickly catch up if they're out of the office.
This also has the effect of avoiding the, at times, unfortunate feeling that someone has been left out in a particular conversation.
Slack also allows you to add links to important documents, resources or webpages and to upload files which are then also archived and searchable. This is a great way to share links to things like documentation, screenshots, mockups, etc. that you may want to be able to easily refer back to later. It's great for quick questions.
When we kickoff a new project we will typically create a private channel specifically for that project and add the people who are involved. If you feel like you're missing a conversation you can always ping one of your coworkers to make sure you haven't been left out inadvertently.
There are also several standing rooms:
- The main INN room (#00-inn-staff) - open to all INN staff, general conversation not specific to any particular project, updates the entire staff needs to be aware of, etc.
- The open INN tech room (#00-open-tech) - open to all INN staff, member organizations, partners, etc.
- The closed INN tech room (#00-tech-team) - just the tech team, some general team business, but mostly project discussions, commit/deployment messages, etc. that are relevant only to our smaller team
Slack also allows for one-to-one private messages and audio/video chats. Typically this is best for conversations that are either not of interest to a larger group and/or are sensitive in nature (personnel matters, etc.)
You can also mention someone in any room to send them a notification using the @ sign followed by the person's username (@username) or send a notification to all members of a room using @channel or all members who are currently active using @here.
Getting Started
- Request an account by emailing nerds@inn.org.
- Download Slack apps for Mac/PC or various mobile platforms. You can also access Slack through your browser but the apps tend to be easier to use.
- Sign in and ping one of your coworkers to make sure you've been added to the relevant group/project rooms.
Asana is a project management tool we use for organizing work on our internal and client projects.
It's also the home of the list of known issues and roadmap for INN's own web properties.
Mostly you'll need to be able to login, create issues on projects and then track the progress of those issues. If you want a tutorial on how to use some of the more advanced features and/or want to create new projects, just send us an email and we'll be happy to give you a walkthrough.
Getting Started
- The login URL for Asana is: app.asana.com. If you don't have an account, email nerds@inn.org and we'll create one for you.
- Once you log in you will see a menu at the left of the screen that allows you to select from the teams and projects that you have been added to. Once you select a project you'll be able to see issues related to that project and can click "create" in the top menu to add a new issue.
- For issues you create, you will also (by default) receive email notifications anytime the issue is updated. You can also reply to these emails to add new comments to the thread associated with that issue.
- For more on Asana, check out their user guide.
GitHub is typically used for managing code but it can be used for keeping tabs on different versions of many types of documents. You can think of it sort of like track changes in something like Microsoft Word, but applied to any file type.
We use it for many of our open source projects, such as Largo where we not only make the source code available and manage contributions to the codebase but also as a place to organize the roadmap for upcoming features and to allow users to report bugs or issues with the software we write.
You will more than likely encounter GitHub either through reporting issues with Largo or in reading, suggesting additions or contributing to our team docs.
Getting Started
- Visit github.com and create an account.
- Email your username to nerds@inn.org so we can add you to the INN team account and give you access to the relevant repositories.
- Click on the issues tab of any repository (for example, the INN docs repository: github.com/INN/docs/issues) and then click on the green new issue button to create a new issue. You will automatically be subscribed to notifications when someone comments or updates the issue.
Want to learn more about git? Here are some resources and tutorials to help you get started:
- How To Use GitHub and the Terminal: A Guide (18F)
- How the Heck Do I Use GitHub (lifehacker)
- Got 15 minutes and want to learn Git? (Code School)
- How to Git (Ari Lacenski)
- Getting Git Right (Atlassian)
- GitHub for Journalists (Knight Lab)
- Open Office Hours are held every Friday from 2-3 pm ET. These are primarily intended as an opportunity for members to sign up for a slot and come ask us questions, get feedback on work in progress or present a project that they've recently completed. These are held via zoom video call and are completely open to anyone, including any INN staff that would like to attend.
- Book Club is held the second Wednesday of each month at 1pm ET. This is a monthly book discussion, open to anyone, held via a zoom video call.
- All of our regular team meetings are not strictly limited to our team and anyone from INN is welcome to attend. This includes our morning scrum (daily at 10am ET) and our weekly recap and planning meeting (Friday at 10am ET). These meetings are all conducted via zoom video call. If you'd like to be added to the recurring event invitation for either (or both) of these meetings just send us an email and we'll add you.