TEMPLATE
- What went particularly well? Why? Possible to replicate for other things?
- Where do we see room for improvements? What are reasons? How to avoid issues we ran into in the future?
- Priorities for next month
- Product
- Community
- Marketing
- Success Metrics
June 2012 (looking back at May / foward to June)
- Monthly call
- Possibly change to bi-monthly or quarterly
- process for performance review (goals / dreams)
- discuss short-term focus:
- pipeline process revisit
- spec out work for dirk, chris
- define core platform components (for each: status, next steps, key issues / problems)
- Schools
- Notifications
- Challenges / Courses
- Cohorts & Discussion
- Profiles
- Search & Discovery
- Badges
- (Mentoring)
- list key shortcomings / problems for each (for chris: related to front-end and UX)
- Berlin Preparation
- Get invited participants to flesh out project ideas more clearly
- Take care of any dependencies we can before we get to Berlin
May 2012 (looking back at April)
- What went particularly well? Why? Possible to replicate for other things?
- Story / pairing of community members
- People seemed to like it
- I think it got people to think quite a lot, but maybe they didn't report back so well
- London
- Lab discussion, where P2PU is going as a lab (not just a single destination)
- Where do we see room for improvements? What are reasons? How to avoid issues we ran into in the future?
- Avoid hitting walls / getting stuck
- Communication
- Clarifying responsibilities / division of responsibilities
- Focus while things are shifting
- Priorities for next month
- Product
- Community
- Marketing
- Success Metrics
- Other things on my mind:
April 2012 (looking back at March)
Questions:
- What went particularly well? Why? Possible to replicate for other things?
- Functionally process works pretty well for discussing new features with community and getting them implementesd - Learn Page as an example
- Metrics are going really well, improving them all the time and starting to get the word out to more people
- Groups discussion - Pretty radical chagnes with community support and involvement in the process
- Adwords - Community Involvement - Jessy and Vanessa
- Identify small changes (with big impact) and fix them - example: sign-up process
- GSoC Application - We submitted a strong application but we don't fit their definition for good projects
- We hired another developer! And we saw a significant increase in potential intern developers / and volunteer developers.
- Where do we see room for improvements? What are reasons? How to avoid issues we ran into in the future?
- After launch - Testing, Gathering Feedback, and Communication
- Testing -> Moved to dev call
- Launch communication should include instrucitons on where to put feedback for (near) future revions
- Revision - Once we get things on the site how can we get fixes FASTER / BETTER / STRONGER
- Metrics
- Could improve our decisions around what we publish, basically come up with a clear policy that says what we do and do not share - this will help us avoid making decisions individually on a case by case basis. It's easier to have a sensible default
- Statsd access / permissions
- Historic metrics are recorded by statsd
- Add full historic metrics into statsd (user account creation, etc.)
- Project Pipeline
- We need to get things ready for dev and be ahead of dev with product
- Lets try and move more small projects up in the pipeline - things that don't need tons of community feedback. Let's front-load with some smaller projects to fill gaps between bigger ones
- Prioritization - something to keep in mind, but not a huge objective [could be improved / but doesn't seem broken]
- Priorities for next month (Three Buckets)
- Product
- Post Launch Revisions - Getting feedback implemented quickly
- Design
- Front-loading smaller projects, specifically:
- Sign-up
- Onboarding (profile creation... what is currently the dashboard) - Sign up for a new account and you'll see what I mean.
- Small profile enhancements
- URL Design
- Create Page
- What does P2PU the lab look like on the web?
- Discussion in London, Followed by staff/community calls
- Challenge Improvements
- Community
- Terms
- References for Berlin
- Marketing
- Metrics improvements
- Clickable things - two things: site & admin links
- Use human readable names
- Historic data
- Conversion tracking
- Adwords (low priority, need to keep the account active and keep tweaking)
- Testing lower bids to find the "sweet spot"
- Splitting out high traffic keywords
- optimizing for conversions instead of clicks
- Support April 18 announcements
- Adwords campaigns for each group included in the announcement (work with alison to get a list)
- Internal
- Get hard numbers for success metrics
- Split by the buckets (3 main buckets + others if there are numbers)
- Should show why the buckets matter and how I'm making a difference
- Success Metrics - pull numbers before the call next time
- Expect to see: Users love the site and encourage their friends to join
- Evidence:
- How do you know that users are LOVING the site?
- Expect to see: Increasing numbers of contributors
- Evidence:
- Development internship applications
- Expect to see: Everyone involved in the development process becomes more efficient by following a clear development pipeline
- Like to see: The community actively gives feedback to UX changes, reviews progress, and feels ownership of the platform
- Like to see: Community members help promote P2PU and recruit more participation
- Love to see: More volunteers contribute useful code
- Metrics
- Number of commits over time
- Number of contributors over time
March 2012 (looking back at February)
Product
- Feel like February went well
- Learn Page / Group Discovery
- Groups idea
Community
- Learning how to involve community in design process, first try wasn't a total failure. Lots to learn
- First successes building up volunteer developer community
Marketing
----
Development
- Commited some small pieces of code
Internal
- Hiring
- Constantly revising and improving processes
Priorities for next month
- Site design (incl. design process) -> The P2PU Style
- Learn Page
- Groups / Challenge / Course
Which project went particularly well? Why? Lessons to learn
- Learn page UX / Functionality
- Community input, revisions, and finally decision on functionality
- Lessons
- Don't send half-baked ideas to community, hit a small group first
Which didn't? Why? How can we avoid it in future?
P2PU Community Roles / Responsibilities
Lets write these down and post them somewhere
- GOAL: Who should I connect with to make something happen at p2pu?
- GOAL: Recognition for contributions by community
- Helpful for new people joining staff
- Helpful Community / Public to find the right person to get in touch with / work with on a project
- Clarify who does what, and help us track if we are hitting our goals
February 2012
- Idea: discuss recommended readings
- Proposal: Change the format ->
- What went well last month?
- What do you think we should change?
- What was your favorite role/task/project in the last month?
- What's your biggest regret/weakness - why, how can we avoid it in future?
- What new knowledge or skill do you want to develop in next 3 monts?
1 - Questions / issues / discussion
February:
- Goal: Over the past P2PU has been pretty broad. Would like to focus on a few corse things.
- Here is what we offer.
- Other things may not get the same level of attention
- Describe The main features of P2PU
- What is P2PU?
- Old notes:
- Staying focused - lots of things going on and making sure important things get done
- Pretty well overall. BUT multiple things and people pulling into lots of different directions
- Webcraft content
- Webcraft community
- Product stuff
- Misc - Not easy to keep up with things I am not responsible for, it takes time
- Hard to stay focused on one task at a time
- Currently blocking off time to work in specific things
- Back in NY, lots of discussions with people in NY
- Lots of money flowing into this space right now, and wondering if non-profit is the most effective way to get where we want to go (would hate to miss an opportunity that is temporal, and won't be there in a few months)
- Feel the need to drive up activity (users, courses, etc.) on the site
- Let's not miss our weekly and monthly calls going forward - they are important
2 - Priorities for next month
- February:
- (Still) Hiring a Developer
- Webcraft report, add qualitative data
- photos, screenshots, bios
- Wrap up Webmaking 101 ;-)
- Challenges / Course / Group - Make Recommendation and move on it
- Mentoring as a first class feature - p2pu.org/mentor
- not a mentor finder, but allow offering mentorship and discovery
- Google Summer of Code Application
- Summer Intership Program (Berlin)
- Old notes:
- January
- (Still) Hiring a Developer
- Webmaking 101
- Challenges / courses discussion
- Mentoring feature / model
- Clean up this etherpad ;-) (especially long-term success metrics)
- Ideas for funding of more developer resources
- December
- Clarify workflow / collaboration practices within the team (assessment/badges specifically)
- Challenges UX
- A perfect, awesome set of challenges as our example - Webmaking 101
- UX fixes (not major improvements, just fixing)
- Easy to create new challenges
- Product stuff - (see pipeline trello board)
3 - Long-term metrics and how are we doing against them?
- 1 Expect to see: Users love the site and encourage their friends to join
- Metrics
- growth in number of courses created
- repeat sign-ups
- number of invites / referrals / sharing
- happiness indicator? - may need survey or email evaluation (three smiley faces)
- 2 Expect to see: Increasing numbers of contributors
- Note: need to define conversion metrics (from what to what?)
- Metrics
- Ratio of users who volunteer as mentors or adopters after completion of a course/challenge
- Ratio of sign-ups who join a course
- Ratio of sign-ups who create a course
- Days from sign up to joining a course / creating a course
- 3 Expect to see: Everyone involved in the development process becomes more efficient by following a clear development pipeline
- Metrics
- Rate at which we ship code / deliver projects
- An existing development pipeline process
- Monitor progress and refine, iterate, improve
- 4 Like to see: The community actively gives feedback to UX changes, reviews progress, and feels ownership of the platform
- Metrics
- Number of emails
- Level of discussion on community calls
- 5 Like to see: Community members help promote P2PU and recruit more participation
- presentations - community members speak about P2PU and promote the project
- Metrics
- Blog posts about p2pu by others
- What I learned
- Inviting friends to join
- 6 Love to see: More volunteers contribute useful code
- Metrics
- Number of commits over time
- Number of contributors over time
4 - Help Philipp get better at his job
January 2012
- Hiring / Dev Structure / Funding / Limitations
- Mentoring
- Working with Alex Kehayias on some ideas
- Once we have a 1-pager / bullet points share with Mimi Ito
- Inspiration: Rails Hotline (but asynchronously)
- Last version: 4 January - Big Picture
- (previous version: 13 December)
- 1 - Questions / issues / discussion
- Need more development resources - how are we going to get them longer-term?
- Lots of good people might become available later this year. How can we hire them?
- Collaboration among team got better
- Old notes:
- Staying focused - lots of things going on and making sure important things get done
- Pretty well overall. BUT multiple things and people pulling into lots of different directions
- Webcraft content
- Webcraft community
- Product stuff
- Misc - Not easy to keep up with things I am not responsible for, it takes time
- Hard to stay focused on one task at a time
- Currently blocking off time to work in specific things
- Back in NY, lots of discussions with people in NY
- Lots of money flowing into this space right now, and wondering if non-profit is the most effective way to get where we want to go (would hate to miss an opportunity that is temporal, and won't be there in a few months)
- Feel the need to drive up activity (users, courses, etc.) on the site
- Let's not miss our weekly and monthly calls going forward - they are important
- 2 - Priorities for next month
- This month:
- Hiring a Developer
- Webmaking 101
- Challenges / courses discussion
- Mentoring feature / model
- Clean up this etherpad ;-) (especially long-term success metrics)
- Ideas for funding of more developer resources
- Old notes:
- Clarify workflow / collaboration practices within the team (assessment/badges specifically)
- Challenges UX
- A perfect, awesome set of challenges as our example - Webmaking 101
- UX fixes (not major improvements, just fixing)
- Easy to create new challenges
- Product stuff - (see pipeline trello board)
- 3 - Long-term metrics and how are we doing against them?
- Expect to see: Users love the site and encourage their friends to join
- Metrics
- growth in number of courses created
- repeat sign-ups
- number of invites / referrals / sharing
- happiness indicator? - may need survey or email evaluation (three smiley faces)
- Expect to see: Increasing numbers of contributors
- Note: need to define conversion metrics (from what to what?)
- Metrics
- Ratio of users who volunteer as mentors or adopters after completion of a course/challenge
- Ratio of sign-ups who join a course
- Ratio of sign-ups who create a course
- Days from sign up to joining a course / creating a course
- Expect to see: Everyone involved in the development process becomes more efficient by following a clear development pipeline
- Metrics
- Rate at which we ship code / deliver projects
- An existing development pipeline process
- Monitor progress and refine, iterate, improve
- Like to see: The community actively gives feedback to UX changes, reviews progress, and feels ownership of the platform
- Metrics
- Number of emails
- Level of discussion on community calls
- Like to see: Community members help promote P2PU and recruit more participation
- presentations - community members speak about P2PU and promote the project
- Metrics
- Blog posts about p2pu by others
- What I learned
- Inviting friends to join
- Love to see: More volunteers contribute useful code
- Metrics
- Number of commits over time
- Number of contributors over time
4 - Help Philipp get better at his job
- Figure out a system to evaluate partnership opportunities (to keep the focus on income generation / sustainability)
- Ok to direct some of these projects (if they have promise) to John at an earlier point.
5 - Other Discussion Points
- Old notes:
- How can that help us with platform development challenges (too slow to keep up?)
- VC Funded for profit opportunities
- Other solutions
- Competition
- Product Vision - Leaning towards
- Challenges
- Mentorship
- Mostly online
- Assessments / Badges
- (Social)
- P2PU Vision - Leaning towards
October 2012
1 - How are things?
- Pretty well ;-)
- Webcraft making fast progress
- I'm happy
- Could get better together - at tracking progress
2 - Priorities for next month
Must Have:
- Launch Webmaking 101 (and plan next phase)
- Push out more general UX improvements (header, footer, typography, contribute page)
- Workshop planning
- Mozilla Festival planning
Nice to Have:
- Helpdesk
- Metrics http://stats.p2pu.org
- Making the site more social and bringing out the community
- Cohort feature (daily lit style?)
December
- Make signing up contributors at Edu Hack Day easier
- Give them something cool to hack with (open source / API)
3 - Questions / issues / discussion
- Don't get much feedback about my work (in general) from other people
- Itching to move past webcraft
- Probably need to launch Webmaking 101 first, but then find the right person quickly
- January 7/8 - Education hack day NYC
- Very distributed team
- Modularization of work is hard (requires ongoing sync on vision / goals)
- Figure out how to make community input / review better
- People who disagree might be more prominent
4 - Long-term metrics and how are we doing against them?
- users love the site
- and encourage their friends to join
- they sign-up for more courses / challenges over time
- learners become contributors
- Note: need to define conversion metrics (from what to what?)
- the community actively gives feedback to UX changes, reviews progress, and feels ownership of the platform
- blog posts about p2pu by others
- What I learned
- Inviting friends to join
- presentations - community members speak about P2PU and promote the project
- blog posts - users share their experiences at P2PU and tell their story publicly which drives more sign-ups
- more volunteers contribute useful code
- number of commits over time
- number of contributors over time
5 - Help Philipp get better at his job
- Overall pretty good job
- Strengthen the overall focus (reduce number of projects potentially)
- We spend a lot of time feeling around outside orgs / partnerships - but experience not locked down enough yet / risk that we end up driven by partners needs
- Take more ownership of decisions you want to take (people trust your judgement, don't need sign-up from everybody)
- Ramp up overall communication (do more of the videos, blog posts)