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