Goals for this session:

• How do we communicate better? How do we collaborate better?
• How do we make sure everyone knows, the things they need to know, when they need to know them
• How can we be more cohesive as a distributed team? And does this mean that, at least for some of the time, we have to think like "good management"?

• Comments: 
  • This might be a useful resource about the work that's private  > work that's open and shared spectrum http://openmatt.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/how-to-work-open/
  • My retrospective question for this - How can you best be a happy, distributed working community?  - PB
  • Is this session only for 'Staff' members? Answer: No

Results:


Staff page / profiles - Owner: Bekka

• People who run schools
• Staff
• Short description - self-written
• Contact details (email, twitter) - link to your P2PU profile page

Board page - Owner: Bekka

• Add a page with board members

Shared calendar - Owner: John

• Everyone should have a NAME@p2pu google calendar that is shared with all staff
  • Track all P2PU relevant meetings
  • Schedule meetings with other @p2pu staff
• Set up one vacation / travel calendar
  • Everyone in @p2pu can edit that
• Keep one P2PU community calendar

Task list - Owner: Philipp

• Add project page to the site
  • Staff can edit
  • http://pad.p2pu.org/the-list
  • Keep same format from the-list (stakeholder)
• Pick a few examples to try together
• Each project owner pick a tool and move together with their team

Staff Call - Owner: Bekka (to add to P2PU calendar)

• Add everyone to the admin call once a month
• Schedule
• 1st Thursday of the month

Improve the community call - Owner: Bekka

• Turn it from a one person telling others, to a real discussion
• Prepare background info in advance
  • Main goals for discussion
  • Any background information that is relevant
  • Avoid "presenting" to the community call as much as possible
• Added benefit: we can also share this out (via blog)

Retire duplicative and messy online spaces -  Owner: Alison

• Retire wiki.p2pu.org
• Retire uservoice
• Retire Q&A
• Retire tracker.p2pu.org
• Needs message to community about this

School Owners can have @p2pu email addresses - Owner: Zuzel

• School forwarders - sosi@p2pu.org -> 
• People: Alan, Maria, Jane (School of Open), Karen ... etc.

Use the community list more effectively - Owner: Bekka

• Describe the process for sharing things on the community list
  • Announce work
  • Go away and do something
  • Share the results
  • Discuss, take feedback into account (!!!), make changes
  • Let people know about final version

Onboard process for staff and community - Owner: Bekka (with John)

• Community feedback process
• Intro on the call
• Bio for the site
• Assign "sponsors" to new joiners
• Cover community norms (rough concensus, openness, etc)

Additional Calls - Owner: Philipp

• Clarify what we want to get out of it?
  • Sharing updates (don't want to do that too often)
  • Avoid duplication
  • Make sure 
• Review list of slots for calls, and then Philipp makes the call if we decide to have it
• Calls need an agenda

Hangout, IM, Realtime


Rough Notes


Calls 

• Need to make sure they are productive
• As we grow, we have more calls
• Not always 

Where are people?

• Have a place where we track where everyone is

Too many email lists with too many people

• Create a staff list?
• Who do you email with specific questions - it's not clear
• We got better at email
  • Highlander (there can only be one)

Works well: preparing well for board meetings

• Use similar approach for other calls

Do more work one-on-one and share out to the community

• Easier to do one-on-one

Discussion happening off-list

Staff task list

Different time zones make synchronous communication hard

Focus on action items

Works well: Asking for useful feedback on the community list

• That's how I find out about everything

Works well: Status reports in the community call

• +1 (AW)

Who is responsible? 

• Not clear who is responsible sometimes - we figure out too late that there was misunderstanding

Email

• When I see something I usually email it, and the post on the etherpad
• We mention it on the call
• Emails get lost

Works well: Trello

• That has been working well
• Question if this will scale

Need to know what people are working on and when we are missing deadlines

Staff finds out about stuff that's going on at the same time as the community

• How do I ask about it without seeming I haven't paid attention

Works well: Face to face meetings

• This is when big discussions happen
• We get more out of this than months of email and calls

Development

• I don't suggest ideas for development, because I am not sure what discussions are already happening
• Not sure what is being discussed, what's being planned
• How can I add ideas for features