2014/05/03 Omni Hackathon/Internal communications / working groups / process

5/3/14

what tools are being used for communication in our current groups?

• Daniel (Sudo Room)
• going to meetings - more helpful than scanning emails
• calendar - finding out what’s going on
• word of mouth
• example from healthy food organization -

creating charger space/data drop to entice high school kids to choose healthy meal options located within tech-savvy area as opposed to more popular crappy food in non-tech location

• Sarah (Live Space)
• email
• simple, basic forms of communication
• making communication styles available to as wide of an audience as possible

so that everyone makes use of the tool, not only the ‘tech savvy’

• showing up and participating in meetings geared toward fostering communication
• regularly scheduled focus groups
• multiple ways for people to plug-in
• live space: emails; google group
  • whatever main form of communication tools are decided upon,
• it’s very important to have training and education sessions so that everyone learns how
• How can I help with this? Something for tracking ‘to-do’s,’

point people toward a task that needs to be done across the groups

• Matt
• guiding principal: what’s the goal for this working group?
• make communication and infrastructure that is inclusive to many experiences
• multiple forms of receiving information
• patterns related to design (of hacker spaces in Germany)
  • communications patterns - you are hackers
    • need a wiki, IRC, email/message boards
    • documentation, synchronous communication, & asynchronous communication but this is suboptimal; take it one step further
• what will bring this all together in a way that will make its work more consistently and optimize, making the communications infrastructure both productive and empowering for everyone involved
• issue tracking

email lists are not an expectation that all members of the group are reading it communicating important information needs to take place across every format so that all are included

ultimately email isn’t the best way to communicate!

different functions/ operations we’d like to take place

• wikis
• forums/decision making sessions
• tracking issues/work orders
• resourcing/resource sharing
• collectively writing documents
• etherpad/google docs/synchronous

Outcomes -

• Tool List - research tools and form comparative option
  • asana
  • lumio - OWS; less contingent on old ways of thinking
    • recently crowd funded
    • consensus based
    • tracks individual status/feeling regarding a specific topic
  • slack.com
  • conceptboard
  • decentralized twitter-type system

Charge the communications working group with the responsibilities of outlining the communications infrastructure and sharing the intention and use (understanding of the flow) and build a curriculum around its use to implement education on the use of this tool

Ultimate outcome

• working group requirements:
• 1. accountability
• 2. one point person coordinating the wg providing vision and
• tangible goals toward making progress towards area of their work
• 3. responsible for maintaining a list of the actions corresponding to their progress
• 4. notes for all meetings
• 5. publicly announced meeting times