☎️ Team Communications

Email

• When you copy team on an email, state the expectation for response

• Always ask a specific person or specific persons [FYI vs. @person]

• When the expectation changes (ex. it was FYI, but now I need input), make that clear

• When something is urgent, say so in the subject line and include the deadline

• Think twice before adding or removing people to email threads

Slack

• Limit private messages to banter

• Keep channels aligned with meetings & projects

• #updates-comms is an automatic feed of news alerts, forum posts, and social media mentions

• #updates-github is an automatic feed of issues, pulls, and pushes from primary Github repos

GitHub

• Use issues for discrete, comprehensive documentation of bugs, mistakes, or individual small features. The amount of time it will take to address the issue should be immediately clear.

  • Learning-Circles issues for anything related to the Django app (i.e. learning circles)

  • P2PU-website issues for Github pages sites (e.g. landing page, about, facilitate, etc.)

  • CIAB issues for the course in a box template

  • Learning about Learning Circles issues for online course

• Use projects to aggregate issues across different deliverables.

  • Add urgent items to General Prioritized

• Use labels on issues to denote urgency and scope of issue

Discourse

We use community.p2pu.org as our public community space. Often times, what we want to discuss as a team can be discussed there. If a forum post exists on the topic, opt towards having conversations there, i.e.

• • Discussing topics for upcoming community calls

  • Giving feedback on mockups

  • Sharing feedback about courses

Google Drive

We use Google Drive as a storage and collaboration tool for most of our shared work. The primary folders are:

• Communications > Conferences, workshops, swag, p2pu gatherings, media mentions, etc.

• Community > Calls, working group agendas, and moderation practices.

• Courses > Everything related to learning resources: courses we create, topic guides, facilitator guides, etc.

• Current Project > Funded projects that we're working on. Some of these are just folders for contracts and admin info, others are more like workspaces.

• Finance & Ops > Budgets, cost allocation, salary model, bank details, etc.

• Governance & Strategy > Board meetings, WIP, P2PU Governance notes, and strategy documentation

• HR & PD > Job descriptions, contracts, travel/time off, and professional development meetings

• Lead Generation > Past proposals, unfunded work, and active proposals

• Membership > Documentation related to managing ongoing member relationships with teams

• Roadmap > Feature development roadmap

• Staff Folders > Personal folders for each team member

• Tech > Software feature docs, Course-in-a-Box, website, and sysadmin stuff

A few best practices that we’ve identified when working with Google Drive

• Make sure that all files are stored the appropriate folder with appropriate permissions

  • Default to private documents with edit access across @p2pu

  • For public-facing resources, add whichever public permission (read, suggest, edit) based on what makes sense for the resource.

• When resolving somebody else’s comment, always a leave a comment to notify them, even if it’s just to say “cleaning up comments to prepare doc to share” or “incorporated feedback”, etc.