Toronto Workers Co-op offline.systems Process Meeting (Part 2)

🗓 Calendar
📑 Retreat Planning Board

Time: 14 Sep 2018 4:30 pm EST
Location: https://appear.in/offline
Attending: ansuz, benhylau, dcwalk, garry, elon??

[TOC]

Agenda

1. Protocol Labs RFP drafting retrospective
2. Open work model
3. Document policies
4. Project management tools
5. Review potential actionable items from last meeting
6. Budget
7. November in-person meeting plans

Notes

Protocol Labs RFP drafting retrospective

• Evan is on vacation but has a review committee looking at proposal:
  • small review committee will start looking at it, we don’t really know their process otherwise
  • Evan will be back in two weeks
  • 1 month after the date of submission, there will be a decision
  • it would be nice to plan a call with people who have weighed in on our proposal
    • since they seem to be making up this process as they go along, maybe we will have more ability to ask for things
    • Matt wanted to be involved somehow, but he’s balancing many things
• drafting process retrospective
  • call with Evan (context missing from Ben, Juan, and Matt)
    • 5K for 2018, what is appropriate to ask for 2019? what is interesting to the review committee?
      • publicly visible projects are appealing
    • committed to a timeframe which was not ideal. missed involvement in early calls. how to move forward?

• open up to reflections on process:
  • a: trying to balance with other committments (conf, work), hard to follow the chat at first. Now in position to look ahead and plan for the next while. Will make things easier
  • g:
    • trying to find the right thins to review… seemed the doc was already fleshed out when review. Unclear what/where feedback was needed, given timeframe.
    • how doc was structured, expectations unclear
    • gdocs was a good environment to work in
    • not having single author proposal and then follow through on
    • OKRs!!!!
  • b:
    • evolved to be a lot bigger than when started (and initial expectation)
  • d:
    • would have been nice to be involved in an earlier, more collaborative stage
    • timeframe was difficult because of travel, bad data availability (i can’t do those short turnarounds in general due to other committments)
    • how often to be available in chat (riot feels like a waterfall sometimes)
      • g: notified if mentioned, but not checking channels on the regular
  • b: a lot of people are having trouble keeping up with riot

• was the call with evan the time to involve people? should we have regrouped before committing to anything?
  • actionable understanding on peoples’ avail to help guide turnaround?
  • d: used to practice of always sharing in advance if a call is being set up (not expecting folks to attend)
  • d: EDGI consensus/non-hierarchical model means that there is always a regroup period (or things that folks can’t agree on alone)
• low-noise signal:
  • e-mail ?
• calendar for shared visibility of calls and deadling
  • invite workflow for communication ?
• setting a standing time
  • d: best-effort (generally available time (GAT))
  • d: set up a poll?

Ben was taking notes in another place in the doc :(

• benhylau: should have involved more contributors when first spoke with evan
• ansuz: hard time following chat (also personal bad timing)
• garry: timeframe to review long document was tight, but we talked through it
• garry: Google Doc format is good but need more collaboration early on
• dcwalk: need more lead-time, context, where to provide feedback, and earlier involvement
• dcwalk: we seem to have slightly different ideas of an OKR
• dcwalk: Riot is a struggle
• ansuz: idea about people’s turn-around time
• dcwalk: announce a call even though it’s last minute
• dcwalk: do not commit anything without at least two people on a call (this is EDGI’s model)
• benhylau: set a weekly standing time block

Open work model

• Availability expectations
  • General Availability Time
  • Part-Time/Full-Time
  • current availability expectations
    • when nobody is working full time
  • d: not going to have a lot of time to be generally available
  • b: at least $days notice
• Response lead time
  • d: how available am I for urgent decisions, how available am I for general questions
  • generally avoid same-day decision requirements
    • NYC-time
    • how do we notify people that their input is required?
      • escalating model?
    • people have different means of communicating (riot, signal, etc)
    • make a riot URGENT channel
      • email? (ben hates email, dawn lives in email, garry also lives in email)
        • Content details are on riot, but ping people on email for urgent matters

Document policies

• d: Garry said Google docs was a familiar editing workflow, why don’t we make a shared folder?
• how are we going to organize things across google-docs, hackmd, hackfolders ?
• what services are we comfortable relying on for the long term
  • self-hosting ? are we more reliable than google?
  • what about migrating meeting notes into .git when they stop changing?
  • print it out onto archival paper?
  • microfiche?
  • backup to tape
• are we committing to using google docs?
  • not necessarily, but it’s easy
  • we can export to *
  • +1 to exportable content in standard file formats
    • pdf, markdown

Project management tools

• riot
• email (urgent things, if necessary for correspondance externally)
• google docs (as staging area)
• hackmd
• google calendar
• .git backups rm -rf .git
• kanban ?
  • who are the haters?
  • let’s hold off on this for now?
  • github project management?
• crazy spreadsheet setup? <!-- you mean nothing to me -->
  • ben says no
  • the example is work-related and can’t be shared
  • dawn has used spreadsheets
  • so has Aaron

November meeting plans

• meet for a weekend, have two weeks of async to form working groups
• what about Patcon? we have to plan around some remote participation (probably)
  • Patcon’s contract is full time, indicated that he won’t be available (on the table)
• what about low-commitment involvement?
  • hopes and dreams?
  • let’s reach out to people but not pressure them to be available
• a: can’t necessarily commit to being there in person
  • let’s poll for a tentative date
• synchronous/async
  • there are a lot of topics which will be better communicated by having people in the same room
  • two weeks for a retreat is huge
    • a few days or a number of 3-4 hour sessions
• d: maybe we want to set up a planning board for this? dawn just finished planning a one-year thing, so she’s tired of it.
• b: spread work among three people?
  • d: always good to spread the work
• udit and rob should be involved in planning (across project areas)
• should we plan time for async actions?
  • it will probably be helpful for people to just have some time to think about particular issues, so that they can come back with ideas..
  • reading network (for the coop?)
    • not necessarily papers or news, but general content which we should have all reviewed

Budget

• Potential grant money allocation

Review potential Actionable items

Recall..

• establish shared calendar
• establish shared email
• crm/spreadsheet of contacts
• top-level coordination tool
• establish how we plan to be self-sustainable (financially)
  • keep this in mind for our future grant processes
  • service business? (we act as contractors)
  • diversify income sources (Rob and Udit) in the future

Actionable items

• dawn: set up a poll to arrive at a Generally Available Time so we know when to schedule things
  • there are several scheduling questions
  • Poll: https://www.when2meet.com/?7093076-eOJLY (ET)
• ansuz: set up a google docs shared folder
• ansuz: make a git repository with a (possibly self-hosted) upstream
• ansuz: set up a mailing list?
  • mailing list with cryptography.dog
  • get emails from the offline.networks proposal
• ben: loop Rob and Udit into the planning process for coop meeting
  • project board?
  • shouldn’t live only in Meeting notes!
  • d: let’s start planning now (I can share old docs)
    • b: can’t foresee people being available now because we planned to start in November
    • d: if we can’t plan now, we shouldn’t schedule now.
    • give people time to be successful –d
• ben: plan another meeting for next week?
  • to catch up on status of actionable items
• future: Talk about our plan for what we do if we don’t get the grant
  • this informs how much time we ought to allocate towards coop activity before we know the status of the grant
• create a policy for a coop reading networks
• name the organization
  • buy a domain?

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