COMMUNITY CALL 7 JUNE - Notes
Attendees (welcome to any newbies)
- dirk
- bekka
- Alison
- john
- vanessa
- philipp
- pieter
- jessy
Standups What have you been up to? Short written notes (we'll discuss only if there are questions)
- Alison
- Sorting out Badge Maker challenge (Ali, I'll be taking a look today)
- New courses
- Help Desk use up!
- Bekka
- Berlin planning
- Monthly finance processes
- HR
- John
- Back in action
- Working on Product priorities
- Course Creation
- Reply by email for notifications
- Signup
- Making badges easy for anyone to create
- Philipp
- Hiring more developer firing power
- MoU with Maryland - research collaboration
- Communication - Chronicle article about P2PU
- Berlin planning
- Mechanical MOOC planning
- Dirk
- Vanessa (@mozzadrella)
- Onboarding! Huzzah!
- Blog post on state (and future) of badges--mentioning Ali's awesome Challenge & MIT App inventor as use case
- Interview with Luka yesterday
- Interview with Chronicle of Higher Ed
- @jessykate
- internship planning
- scheming about the structure of research collaborations (how to structure research collaborations with those doing research about open learning/p2pu)
News of the week Written notes on what's going on in our world (bring up special announcements on the call)
- Blog posts you wrote
- Articles you read
- Initiatives you heard about
Key updates Super short updates about P2PU
- Exciting new courses to check out (Alison)
- Development priorities (Dirk)
- Course creation workflow:
- Brainstorming around API - http://disfunksioneel.blogspot.com/2012/06/p2pu-api-story.html
- What can we use it for? We would like to have a little bit more of people's thoughts on what we can use an API for.
- Philipp -> Creating a use case can be helpful (what would people imagine being able to do with an API)
- Reach out to people who are "experts" for APIs - inside community (jessy, josmas) and outside (paul osman, API evangelist)
- Next step:
- Dirk/John to reach out to people we already know
- Philipp to intro to API evangelist
- State of the mustard (Philipp)
- On track with users, growth in comments, slightly down for joins and groups
- Most active courses are not web developer courses
- Superstar course -> https://p2pu.org/en/groups/skapa-en-distanscirkel/
- Hakan / https://p2pu.org/en/Hocke/
- Let's invite to the call?!? Absolutely!
- Ali: I invited Hakan a few weeks ago. Bekka to follow up.
- Follow up with the thread he started in the community list last week.
Agenda Core of the call. Focused on four types of conversations (invited guests, challenges you need help with, proposals you want feedback on, ideas you need collaborators for).
- Berlin Agenda Planning
- Visual -> https://docs.google.com/a/p2pu.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgN51_rARHlKdHV3bjBpS3F6ZFJRaXFaOTUxWFVxREE#gid=0
- Don't be fooled - this is not a rigid plan, we have some flexibility.
- Office Open Hours: 9:00 - 18:00 (we have 24hrs access)
- This is an office, not a workshop, so we will be working on stuff, not so much talking/discussion or facilitation
- The objective is to get stuff done, and build things that help us move forward, rather than have big ideas.
- Stand ups -> 10am (arrive earlier / be ready to go at 10) "What I did yesterday, what I'm doing today" +1
- We might have to adjust this, but the general idea is to have as much time together as possible.
- ~90 seconds/person really short... everyone has to stand... we don't want to stand for a long time
- Objective is also to give people a proper understanding of what is going on.
- my office does this every day with between 4 and 15 people. it never takes more than 15 minutes.
- Closing circle -> 16:30 "Break-through / Block / Non-work stuff"
- Block some times for
- (a) all hands - strategy (Mon, Wed, Frid mornings - 2 hours each - if we don't need this time, we won't use it, but we do expect everyone to be there if it is being used.)
- (b) group work - feedback
- (c) project work - make progress in small groups or individually (unconference the agenda when we are in berlin)
- Dinners
- To be programmed when we get there - hopefully cook several group meals at Niels/Alan/Dirk's apartment (put Niels to work)
- +1 jessy volunteers to help!
- Some team meals (may be GF bread and water by the end of the month) (GF bread!)
- Activities -> add more on the berlin pad http://pad.p2pu.org/berlin
- Workouts
- Breakfast German
- Tech Talks from Berlin geeks (John)
- Talk from Information Party
- Fiction workshop
- Kulturpark
- Questions & Discussion
- Q: Receipts
- When can we reimburse?
- Bekka: Mainly first week
- Philipp: If it's a problem, people should just give us a shout (P & B) and we'll make a plan.
- Vanessa -> (1) woud be good to have a dedicated time for people to talk to us/learning activities and
- Suggest evenings / end of day for inviting people (5P - after closing circle)+1+1
- Could also do brown bag lunches if people prefer not to come visit us after dark
- do we have one place for us all to eat together? the ground floor restaurant has enough space, but separate tables (same outside) for evenings, we can all eat at niels' space
- Vanessa -> (2) it would be good to have a way of showing the world how we're working and what we're doing. +1+1
- do we have a Twitter hashtag for the month? #p2puberlin? (+1)
- let's agree on a hashtag for everything popup p2pu?
- notes from standups w/b good
- Jessy -> Scrum shoud be really short, 10 minutes max +1
- my office does this every day with between 4 and 15 people. it never takes more than 15 minutes.
- Jessy -> can we make the green slots (on the spreadsheet) fewer and longer?
- Preference for longer uninterrupted blocks (to get their head into developer space)
- Yes - let's try to make sure we have enough uninterrupted blocks/ take into acount different work styles / approaches
- Show the world how we work / take notes during standups / blog /
- let's agree on a hashtag for everything popup p2pu?
- Jessy -> recommended reading wrt schedules in general: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- great article
- main point - minimize small interruptions, batch meetings
- John -> Do we know what we're using the Mon/Wed/Fri sessions for?
- Philipp -> One of the goals of the month is overall strategy / good to do with everyone
- evenings could be good times for some of these discussions too - not all the time but when we are up for it.
- eg long strategy sessions at the bar :)
- Yes in small groups, but I don't want to force people to give up their evenings - maybe evenings (at the bar) for development rather? oh fine. +1
- code at the bar... works
- no, but failing is less disappointing :)
- Jessy -> could also do learning "brown bags" over lunch?
- P2PU Berlin Map -> add your digs if you haven't already
- dev - notifications
- maybe this should be dicussed n dev call? (another call! ack. time is an issue for several of those who are interested)
- but in terms of dev priorities has been around forever and would make a massive difference in usability
- would like to discuss others' feelings about importance/priority level
- idea has been thrown around about having this be a community-implemented project, possibly through a series of dev sprints? (various pros/cons)
- currently revisiting how we set priorities in general
- JB: want to get to it soon / already discussed
- Improving notifications next (not yet reply by email)
- plan is to add ability for notifications to be batched, and let users set preferences for notification frequency
- after that is notification by email
- Jessy -> one concern is that whe people peopel sign up, there are no reminder emails that lure you back to the site, so it's easy to forget. Suspect that people sign up and then sit back and wait to be told what to do next
- Other issues: Some redundancy in how we present information
- John -> one thing to think about is the idea that notifications are not emails, and it happens in the site (if they use the site within a 24 hour period)
- notifications queue up and people can read them on the web, or receive them via email if they haven't been to the site (sort of like stackoverflow/stackexchange sites)
- there are different types of notifications as well - comments vs. course joins etc. each hsave different time appropriateness
- Dirk -> there are a lot of small improvements that can be made with notifications which will make a big difference. Makes more sense to make a series of small fixes, rather than prioritising the whole "notification" subject.
- Vanessa -> would be good to revisit the text in the notifications, let me know when it would be appropriate to get involved at this level.
- Jessy-->this would be a great group project: design, code, copy
- If we could see a screenshot of what they look like now, and what they might look like
- super important. strongly agree. +1
- Development Priorities
- Philipp -> we've been talking about how we set these prioroties in general, it's not perfect yet, but the basic process is in place (see dev call notes from this week)
- John runs the overall prioroty plan, takes what is being fed through via the various community groups/areas and shuffles priorities, and translates people's requests into action
- Jessy -> one thing that would be helpful would be a high-level regular email with 4 lines of "this is what our priorities are" - prioritoes are lost in the dev notes +1
- John: New format for dev call notes have priorites at the top. (PS: If that doesn't work, we could split out priorities and send separately)
General discussion and questions
- Anything else that just needs to be said out loud