How Do We Communicate What We're Working On?

[cacology]

Problem

How do we communicate the problems we're trying to solve in a way that the group can understand, comment, test, and explore?

Possible Solutions

1. This form- state a problem and some possible solutions. Discussions can be threaded and the issue closed, etc. in an Agile style workflow.
2. Erin could maintain a project management workflow.
3. We could email each other all the time.
4. We could have Google Drives and Docs
5. Another?

Discussion

I like this form because it uses fairly sophisticated best practices from the development community, BUT there is a learning curve. It's unclear if this method of collaboration works for our community as well as it works in development.

Prototype

This! And a few more issues.

[erin-elizabeth]

I'm writing up a report of our work so far for the Executive Committee, and wanted to document my appreciation of GitHub as a forum for our work. Having documentation of our conversations/work thus far is extremely helpful. Things I like especially:
We can participate when it's convenient.
We're automatically tracking our conversations through issues, so minutes aren't really required.
I can upload documents like the report I'm working on and share it with others.

Things that concern me:
Getting broad participation by more than a few committed users.

Possible solution to that concern:
I'm the person responsible for keeping the ball rolling across the organization, so at certain points I'll check in with people via email.

I think we also need to bring some more people on board who might dig into the discussion, and the data. I'll post a call for participants in the September newsletter.

[cacology]

Regarding your concern, I think broad participation is utterly a concern. I like this platform for tech-y users, but it's not really good for a broader group. (though, IMHO, there's no reason why!)

Incidentally, I got an email about this message, but just hadn't gotten around to replying. If you "follow" something or have participated in it, you get notifications.