The dark room in the basement that keeps the lights on for everyone else. The strong foundation every act of kindness and positive change that we facilitate in the world stands upon. Tools: Getting started Guide - Join the Team
Getting Started Guide
Welcome! This is the getting started guide for the Sys Admin, Backend and Security Team at The Public Happiness Movement. Posted below is a getting started guide and the main resources we are currently using.
There’s a lot going on here so I recommend reading this post then diving right in by grabbing a task on the tasks board and making something happen, rather than getting overwhelmed trying to understand everything right away. The community members that stick around are always the one’s who dive in right away.
Download the App
Which makes it much easier to stay up to date with what’s going on in discussions and tasks you’re working on.
Current Platforms:
- Public Happiness Movement (Meta): Uniting communities to create a world with more peace and well-being in
- Brighter Tomorrow Map: Bringing communities together to provide support to people who are in need of support nearby. Focused on homelessness and disaster relief.
- Dogs Allowed: A Dog owners app (waiting for a team).
- Happyist: A space for atheists and theists alike to explore the meaning of life in a light-hearted way where no-one claims to know the answers. Created for the many people who come to PublicHappinessMovement.com wanting to create spiritual and religious activities (waiting for a team).
Introductions
Come and say hi and tell people a bit about yourself and why you want to join us on this mission for a happier, kinder world. Don’t forget to follow the thread and say hi and make new members feel welcome. Their skills and enthusiasm brings all of our dreams closer.
Join the Team
Joining the team means other members can reach out to you when they want feedback on their work and suggestions, or to ask if anyone can help with a React or Meteor related task. If you want to be actively engaged you should join this team. You will receive more notifications.
Current Team Tasks
To find, discuss and post specific tasks click the Sysadmin tag and then the ‘Tasks’ (or ‘board’) tab to find, discuss and post sysadmin related tasks.
some users are seeing this tab called ‘Board’. Its a bizarre bug we’re working to solve
These should be broken into self-contained actionable slices of 30mins to 1hr so people from around the world can contribute in bite-sized time contributions, rather than excluding those who aren’t able to commit large amount of time, and help those with bigger eyes than stomach who often start a big task with great intentions, but never finish it. They can be strung together, just move them all over and assign to yourself if you plan to tackle them in one sitting.
Please try to keep to this rule when posting tasks as much as possible. If your idea is large and can’t be broken into a self contained one yet, then use add [Discussion] at the beginning of the title, and add tags for all the groups needed to discuss and break it up into self-contained tasks. (reactjs, ux, html, writers, etc).
Setting up a Local Dev Environment
The guide linked should be pretty complete, but there are many helpful people here to help if you run into bugs
How Implement a Change to the Platform
Simply create a post and tag it ‘Reactjs’, ‘Web-Dev’ and ‘Backlog’. It’ll now appear as a task for both the Dev and React Teams to be discussed by others, and implemented by those with the required skills.
Generally you’ll be adding the ‘backlog’ tag for new ideas. If you deem it an urgent change you can use the ‘sprint’ tag. If work has already begun you’d use the ‘doing’ tag.
Collaborating with other Teams
You may also want to involve other teams to help solve the task by adding their tag. For example: ‘UI’, ‘Graphic-Design’, ‘Copy-Writing’, ‘UX’.
If you need support from another team then your suggestion is probably not ready to be posted as a self contained ‘task’, so consider tagging it as a discussion and adding [Discussion] to the beginning of the title.
Its also often a good idea to tag their team in the post to get more eyes on it using the @ key
Call on Other Teams
- Add a tag for them when creating a new discussion or task
- @ their team if you want to call their attention, or get their voices into an existing thread
Seeking Paid Work
We run r/webdevjobs on Reddit to help team members who are looking for jobs. Each month we’ll pin a post of the profile of all the active members here who are looking for web dev related jobs so you get more offers.
Just fill in this Wizard and we’ll post your profile in the monthly pinned post.
Resources
**If you cannot access any of the below resources, please contact @AndyatFocallocal.
Most up-to-date links to project resources:
- How to Post Correctly in this Forum
- Google drive folder
- Documentation Category for server settings and who to contact for access (or use tags to search)
Tools
- Threads created in this forum to discuss ideas and plan with each other
- Tasks in the Team’s Tag for project management. Add the tag ‘Backlog’ to create a card for a non-urgent tasks. Sprint is for priority tasks aimed to be completed this month (impact / time to implement). Please assign cards to yourself and move them into the ‘Doing’, then ‘Done’ lists. Click ‘tasks’ or visit this link to access
- Sitewide Documentation can be accessed and searched here, or by navigating to the relevant team and searching for the documentation tag
- Team Calendar Its common to put volunteer commitments off, and many community members found the most helpful thing they could do is to have a monthly or weekly reminder to schedule your intended time to work by adding it to your team calendar. More details here
There is a supplementary Slack channel linked to the General thread in this sub-category, for those who have a specific need to use Slack rather than this forum at times. The Slack channel is here #security-backend and within the resources listed below. It will be synced with the general discussion thread in the Team’s space in this forum so you can communicate with everyone here.
Please move all actionable ideas out of discussions on the forum and create cards for them. They will get buried and lost if left in this forum. Cards are ordered with the ones to be completed next at the top of a list, and can be claimed or assigned. Users do not have to follow this strictly, its just to aid prioritisation. Ideally each card should take 30mins - 1hr to complete. If longer please try to break it up.
Other Rewards
Its definitely best to join in because you want to see the changes it can bring to the world, and be part of a fun, positive and pro-active community.
We also invite anyone who plays a significant role into our team page, and are enthusiastic to support you if it helps your resume building: Public Happiness
Everyone who completes any tasks will be rewarded with Public Happiness Tokens at launch. We don’t guarantee they’ll ever be worth anything, tbh they are an experimental tool to add more fuel to drive the vision. I’m increasingly confident though.
Who’s the Boss?
Well for now anyway. Andy is me and i can also be seen as the biggest limiting factor on our productive capacity. I do my best to represent the founding vision, and the work and decisions of all community members who are not currently active, preventing a situation where everyone joining in throws out the work of others and starts over.
The more decisions you take for yourself the better. I am there to guide until teams grow to be autonomous. Run ideas by me to begin with, until there are enough active and experienced members here to switch to the voting system. Your goal is to make this your space.
We have a Roadmap which will lead to a reputation-based decentralised governance system where you, and all community members are the boss, with votes weighted by how much they’ve contributed to the vision.
The Roadmap for transition is:
- Run ideas by Andy
- As team members understanding of the concept we are building, and vision grows we move to a leadership council made up of those who’ve contributed the most the vision
- Arriving at a reputation based decentralised governance system.
You can read more about governance in chapter 6.11 in the whitepaper
The real answer is: You are the boss, as soon as you are ready…
Notes
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You may find some references or links to focallocal.org and Trello. We are not using these anymore so please report them to a moderator to be updated. The site name PublicHappinessMovement.com may be changed before launch as it’s not perfect either.
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A more detailed plan of building our eco-system and vision for a world with more attention to peace, well-being and happiness, is here in the Whitepaper. Be warned it is a very long read
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Check and edit your user settings by clicking your icon in the top right. Some new members weren’t receiving notifications, there may be a hidden setting. Its also good to choose how often, and how you are notified.