P2PU Staff Calls
Etherpad for agendas and notes: http://pad.p2pu.org/staff
THURSDAYS
- 09:00 San Francisco [anchor time, other times may shift with daylight savings]
- 12:00 New York
- 12:00 Toronto
- 17:00 London
- 19:00 Athens / Cape Town
- (Shared google calendar should always have the correct time)
Conference Call:
- US Toll Free: +1 877 395 2347 **Only use toll-free number if you really need to**
- US Local / International +1 415 763 5901
- [Telco provided by http://twilio.com via John Britton - Thank you!!!]
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June 3 (what happened to April and May? Who knows. Last we heard, they were having a good time...)
Attendees
- Philipp
- Ali
- Dirk
- John
- Bekka
- Vanessa
Agenda
- Welcome Vanessa! Now it's time to learn the secret handshakes, and get your decoder ring...
- Philipp -> one of the areas where we've been struggling most is "what do you learn and how do you learn at P2PU" and Vanessa brings a great perspective and maker-centric approach to this, so we're super glad to have her here.
- Community Manager & Admin Manager roles
- Ali is going to grad school to become an eco-architect (and boat-builder), and we're going to miss her, and will no longer be able to fill the Community Co-ordinator position any more.
- Bekka has slipped more into an admin role over the last year which she doesn't love with all her heart.
- Decided rather to outsource the admin side of things, and move Bekka back into the community a little bit more and take over the Community role
- Job descriptions: http://pad.p2pu.org/p/admin-mgr / http://pad.p2pu.org/p/community-mgr
- Developers
- Very happy to be bringing on 2 developers on short, part-time contracts:
- Paul Osman (who wrote Lernanta) who has deep python knowledge, and who can act as a sounding-board and mentor on some of the site design (8 hours a week)
- Chris Ewald to help with sys admin and front-end stuff (3 months full time)
- Media Lab update
- Philipp -> P is due to start spending more time at the Media Lab from September, doing exactly what he does now (lots of email, forgetting stuff and bring in money) but also thinking about possible collaborations between the Media Lab and P2PU. This is a very good place for us to build credibility with the kind of people who might not have thought much of us before-hand.
- Off-topic opportunities that could make us money, be good for the lab (from my time in the states)
- Badges in Colleges
- John has been having ideas in the US, and spoke with a former colleague who is thinking about translating badge idea into the colleges, might be a possibility for us to build things with/for them. John will keep us posted.
- Teacher / Student SMS
- Classparrot
- Possibilities for informal assessment here are awesome--learnosity is offering a similar feature for instructors
- Similar project locally: http://oneville.org/ (we can ask them about their plan)
- We should get Karen Fasimpaur involved in this conversation - she's got K-12/ district/ business experience.
- Both cool - would love to hear more!
May 3
Attendees:
- Philipp
- Ali
- Zuzel
- Dirk
- John
- Bekka
Agenda
- Twitter
- Ali: working pretty well at the moment
- Current users -> alison, bekka, philipp, john, jane, dirk (will start using it)
- Next step: john to contact dany (colombia)
- And it can be complemented by adding the #p2pu tag to any messages we send with our personal accounts relevant to p2pu
- Q: How can we use twitter with chartbeat?
- Charbeat stats can include tweets (needs to be linked)
- Next step: John to associate with admin@p2pu.org account
- What can we get better at:
- Engaging with people who tweet at us (or relevant topics)
- a more steady stream of content (use buffer)
- de-duplication - don't repeat the same tweet (check first) unless it's been at least a few hours
- re-tweeting from personal accounts with #p2pu hashtag
- de-linking twitter from other accounts (but keep FB)
- we are not using FB at all right now - would be good to keep at least some content feeding into FB
- Next step: bekka to check how the two are linked
- tweet for timezones? I know SA is most active on twitter between 9am and 11am
- Summer campaign
- Someone has to own this -
- reach out to Michelle
- Think about what kind of event is best for us
- leg-work/admin
- Next step:
- Make a decision on who owns / drives by May 20
- Weather update:
March 1
Agenda
Google Adwords
- Account creation up 40% from January
- # of comments - no rise
- Alison - haven't noticed any surge in good courses, but noticed small surge in test courses
- If we were spending the money it wouldn't be worth it - but as a freebie, it's awesome!
Helpdesk - Who "owns" it and makes sure users get answers
- Loads of people are answering
- I also like the queves so we can sort suggestions into people who should answer them +1 this is awesome
- Philipp -> suggestion: Alison "owns" the helpdesk, but everyone continues to answer
- Ali generally keeps an eye on things and makes sure that nothing falls off the table
- Can forward to others in case they need to answer (using "tags"(?) feature)
- When new people start answering, then we should just read their stuff and make sure that it's appropriate and fits in.
- Ali -> conversations are often closed / questions answered by the time Ali gets to them, but she follows all of them, and it's useful to have ali (in her time zone) following up.
User support is often an afterthought, that's why it's first here. Support doesn't just answer questions and point users to documentation. Great support is personal and shows a genuine interest in helping users learn while being efficient, concise, and honest. Being a friend and a mentor to our users is important. Be sure to make them feel valued and absolutely do not make them feel dumb. Everyone has to start somewhere.
The primary source of support at P2PU is the helpdesk (http://help.p2pu.org), but it's not the only place. We provide support pro-actively, wherever our users need it. Maybe it's in the comments of a blog post about P2PU, on Twitter, in a forum, or even in person at a conference. The important thing to know is that users don't necessarily ask for help when they get stuck. Be on the lookout and offer to help you think someone needs it. For every person that asks for help you can bet that there are more people with the same problem who can't be bothered to contact us.
- Knowledge Base - Strategy for expanding content
- http://help.p2pu.org/kb
- When questions are asked over and over again, we should look at creating Knowledge Base responses for them +1 will start checking for it
- Ali -> happy to highlight areas that need to be fleshed out
- Not much on development (maybe just link to github - i think there is good documentation there, we want the developers on github anyway)
P2PU local staff meet-up in London
- Philipp is at OCWC conference, will come to London
- John is coming from Warsaw
- Bekka and Chloe are in London
- Nadeem will come from Birmingham
- Perfect -> APRIL 18 is first big launch! http://pad.p2pu.org/rounds
- Airplane banner (Chloe
Bekka to organize)
School of Webcraft
- Needs data for NSF grant application
- > WHEN WAS IT LAUNCHED?
- HOW MANY have enrolled till now?
- Any other impressive numbers?i.e. # of comments
- How many users enrolled in last years badge pilot?
- Following up on this by email
Hiring Update
- Philipp will dig through a long list of draft contracts on the weekend
- Full time developer, made an offer and accepted - starts 1 April 2012
Group / Course / Challenge + Cohorts Problem and Idea for a Solution
- John has been thinking about this a lot, and struggling to come up with a solution to this problem
- Q: Should we do away with courses? Sould we have courses, challenges, etc.?
- Suggestion: You create 1 thing as a "learning place"
- 1. building block for learning is a challenge
- 2. build lists (difference between sets and lists? none)
- funcitonality: grouping challenges
- 3. creation of a cohort (group, class, team): a group of people related by time+place
- when you create a team, you decide if it is public/invite only/apply
- teams can have start date / end date
- Thoughts:
- is there a "team" page?
- place for cooperative creation for challenges?
- a person itself can be a team?
- what are the mechanisms for "filtering" noise - e.g. you only get notifications from your team, what else?
- a place that aggregates all the interactions of cohorts aroung one challenges?
- use terminology that people are used to, in order to get people on board
- how will challenges change (i.e. which of its features will be splitted) ?
- cohorts: notifications, signup, ...
- WORDS/TERMINOLOGY >> should we make this a trello cards? bigger project:copy on the site
- This can be a problem and is super important!
- Nouns and verbs must be consistent
- Need three terms:
- Challenge - Content
- Set/ List - Order/ Group
- > can you explain this a bit more? is it "Sets?" aka grouping?
- Team - People
- may need to test the terminology with more people. i think these terms may not be as compelling to people who are coming to use from a more traditional model
- i think "course" is a good term for part of this (my pref would be to associate with people)
- Next steps:
- First draft / wireframes
- Share with small design team
- (you might also want to ask people who are good copywriters maybe outside p2pu)
- Please include: Karen Fasimpaur (School of Ed), Maria (School of Maths)
- Then community
Talked with Alan
- There are layers of content on the site, but at the moment we just have 2 option on the site, but perhaps we need to rethink this to something more along the lines of:
- Learn, Create, Connect
- +1 !! +1
- in the future:
- Learn page would have challenges
- Create: take you to the options for creating challenges/packages of challenges
- Connect page would allow people to create teams / find teams
Feb 2
Agenda
- Setting up a process for staff members taking time off
- Make sure you let everyone know in advance (how many weeks)
- As soon as possible or 2 weeks before?
- I think as soon as you know (at least 2 weeks before)
- Specify everyone: the usal email to staff?
- Yes email to all staff, and maybe to others (dev list for you maybe?)
- How do we add to the out off office calendar? I put a link to the calendar I think eveyone on @p2pu.org gmail accounts has access to it. right? I cannot add to it ... I can see it though :)
- Out of office email with contact info for others that can handle issues when you're gone
- also include help@p2pu.org
- Make sure nothing falls off the table while you are offline
- This sounds like a super power :) I will rephrase it to tidy up things before you leave for the holidays
- Basically - it just means: think about all the stuff you are doing, and what happens with it while you are not online / traveling
- Emergency contact numbers
- (let's define emergency:) Usually I would say we NEVER call while someone is away i.e. the website is down?
- Can it be the hotel number? Yes if there is no cell phone
- cell phone
- Prefer to use email, rather than phone, but in the case of the website (poor zuzel, sorry!) a phone number might be preferable.
- Put your locations into the P2PU calendar
- Question: How often or long do people take time off?
- NOTE: We should start thinking about what will be the procedure when my times off start to be on Cuba and even if I am contacted I will not be able to fix things because I don't have internet
- Maybe figure out who can help with quick fixes on the server
- Don't make me worry about more things now Zuzel ;-) Let's cross that bridge when we get there. We might have ad additional full time tech person by then.
- I always hope that time (me visiting Cuba) will come soon ;) (I hope so too for you)
- Community call improvements
- Today's call was great - focused on something practical / working (also productive!) Yes!
- How can we make future calls great?
- Do we want more discussion? Or more collaboration? YES! how can we make more people talk?
- People like to discuss things, but sometimes discussions led nowhere, which became frustrating
- Having something practical is helpful, and productive
- John: less discussion is part of the evolution, and this is okay.
- If the call is about getting the community involved in discussions, then we should think about what the objective of the week is, and think about how we frame them.
- Having the "laundry list" is helpful and convenient, so we need to find a way to keep some aspect of this
- Agree (but maybe put in writing, and only discuss if there are questions)
- Chloe: What if we had different types of calls, like "making" calls, "open discussions" calls, Announcements/Presentation of UX calls, Community driven- open mic call
- Alison: taking advantage of the hacking aspect of the call is something we should use freely, but the standard format has value, especially for making the community feel like they can talk about anything
- Ideal situation: encourage folks to take ownership/stewardship of the call on occasion
- Philipp: getting better about putting stuff in writing can save a lot of time, give the sense of sharing, and allow us to reserve time to discuss anything, do some making, etc
- also make a point of reading everything
- The discussions need to have a concrete outcome planned
- Bekka to own:
- Identify topics for future calls - make a list (with names)
- Work with the people owning a topic to prepare
- Be bullish about tasks/todos
- Approach the community and ask them to present topics in the call
- Discuss Berlin fellowship framing
- http://pad.p2pu.org/berlin
- Support with travel and accomodation based on individual situation
- Question -> Up to 50% of travel costs, or up to 300 EUR (you cover the rest), or you cover 200 EUR (and we cover the rest)?
- This looks different from the rules of the workshop. Why?
- Is staff comfortable with the model?
- I will not be confortable if what I have to cover from the travel costs causes a considerable increase on my expences that month (excluding Luis expenses). Otherwise looking forward to the meeting (got a visa until august 1st so I will probably not much paperwork this time)
- Moved from Berlin pad:
- How do we make this work for staff?
- How do we manage this for part-time vs full-time staff
- How to part-time staff's roles fit in with the "get things built" vibe of the meeting
- One of the main purposes of being in Berlin would be to just work in the same place, doing the same work we normally do, but together.
- People who have a 2nd job might take a hit, so we need to think about how to keep being in Berlin from costing them.
- Goal:
- Coming to Berlin doesn't increase your normal costs
- Full travel
- Accomodation?
Jan 5th
Attendees
- Zuzel
- Alison
- Bekka
- Chloe
- John
- Philipp
Agenda
- Update on onboarding process
- Berlin timing
- Project pipeline
- halted by challenges work (waiting for release next week)
- dev vs non-dev projects
Onboarding (once people have been hired)
- Nothing formal is written, but we know what we want - with the new design hire coming in, it's a good opportunity to document the process
- Although Aleks is a special case (only a few hours / week, and probably won't be as active in the community as we would expect from others)
- Set up an email address @p2pu.org
- Info on how to use P2PU calendars
- Join community calls
- Brief introduction to some processes (on an onboarding call / in interviews)
- Work in the open
- Share on the list
- Rough consensus
- Community call
- One on one calls
- Dev call (not for everyone)
- New staff to-do list (mentioned in old notes below)?
- Acquaint with P2PU mailing lists
- Send introduction to the list
- Add your schedule to the P2PU calendar
- Create a work board on TRELLO
- Join community calls
- To do:
- Bekka to add to the onboarding document (http://pad.p2pu.org/onboarding) where anyone who will interact with the new hire can add details
- Keep notes on all interactions with new hires on the pad
Berlin timing
- Starting to plan virtual office in Berlin (as discussed at last workshop)
- Possible to add a month in the US as well?
- Would this coincide with a November workshop?
- What are people's timing like - what's the longish timeframe?
- Possibility: Either April/May or July as the core month, with people dropping in and out on either side.
- Bad times between March - September
- CV: in Europe till May. June+August in US (can be somewhat flexi - August 15-30)/ September in Athens\
- April- May would also work for me
- Bekka: Any time up until September is good
- AC: Can stay 1 month+
- Will be nearby in UK for a wedding (June 24)
- JB: Before June ... I can probably do a bit before and after June
- In Warsaw until June
- After June flexible
- April - May could also work
- ZV: Preferably after summer term (june-august) ... ouch, what about april-may?
- How long are you willing to stay
- PS: 2-3 months ;-) (but that's not an expectation to anyone else!!!)
- CV: 1 month (also could be 1 month and then - 15 days)
- JB: 1 month easy, 2-3 months depending on timing... more but gets harder to schedule with other things
- Bekka: 2-3 months is doable - I'll probably be doing some research there anyway.
- 1 month (preferibly after may -- summer term) [Will Luis be able to come as well?] He still does not know at witch point of the summer he has to do the pre-defence of the thesis or phd examination so it will depend on the dates.
- Not winter... please
- What do we offer to people coming to Berlin?
- general idea is to cover local costs - free accommodation, and we'll fill the fridge
- Need to think about staff vs volunteers (is there a difference, and if so how do we manage that?)
- Food - free
- Main thing is to work together for a few weeks/months
- We provide a place to work (and give you three meals)
- We offer you an optional shared space to stay nearby
- If you can stay with friends, that's great
- Travel
- Basic amount covered by the person, P2PU tops up
- Could consider travel support for those staying longer or coming from further
- Staff preferences:
- JB: Free Shared accomodation (or happy to pay for own)
- AC: Happy with a tent (although that's hard to find in Berlin) I can find a tree ;-)
- PS: Will cover own accomodation
- ZP: Cost is a major factor - will probably choose the cheapest (= shared)
- BK: probably cover my own, or see if one other person wanted to split an apartment
- CV: if i come for longer than a week > i will cover my own accomodation
- Concerns:
- VISA - need to look at what visas people can get, and for how long
- Staff/volunteer distinction (potentially) cringy
- People who come with partners may have different ideas of appropriate accomodation
- Consider offering a housing subsidy and people can organize their own places +1
- Encourage people to stay with friends/make other (free) arrangements as we do with the workshop
- Summer (July/Aug) better for students to do interns
- Next steps:
- Bekka and Philipp to look at timing and mail the list with a summary, look at possible venues
- loosecubes.com - I have a friend there, they might sponsor workspace [John]
- Alan mentioned a few links in Berlin
Project pipeline
- Look at the project pipeline on TRELLO for the timing and dates, dev has been working on hackasaurus in December, but stuff will be moving out of dev.
1 December 2011
Agenda
Attendees
- Bekka
- John
- Philipp
- Alison
- Chloe
- Onboarding Process - What needs to happen when a new person joins staff
- We need a page with key information (e.g. links like Padsearch (http://dev.p2pu.org:1000/padsearch.php)
- Use next staff member as our pilot (keep notes to create a template for the next one)
- A new-staff to-do list / challenge might be useful
- For example -> http://p2pu.org/en/groups/become-a-mozillian/
- Update your P2PU profile
- Subscribe to the P2PU calendar
- Get a @p2pu.org account and be online on IM/skype
- Blog your introduction & post a message to the community list
- Figure out how many lists exist (trick question)
- Dev:
- Github
- P2PU-dev
- IRC channel
- Trello boards
- Etherpad
- Go back to http://pad.p2pu.org/workshop-staff and check if something is pending or if something did not work
- Let's go through this list really quickly - only speak about "blocked" ones
- I've done this a bunch of times on my own... I think we're pretty close but I may have missed some things.
- Let's add this call to the P2PU calendar
- Adding stuff to the staff pad agenda as soon as you think of it is a great way to store ideas and keep track of things - we can laways clear up the agenda later, and we should default to the community call whenever possible.