This is awesome @NJUX. I love it.
I’m curious, what is your opinion on how we compile these resources? I’m struggling with a key principle of understanding the scope of my project when I’m on a chat thread of any kind.
If we were to compile into a thread, it gets very lengthy and easy to walk away from, quickly.
A visual document or editable list makes this easier to work on, in my opinion. How should we start checking off these list items?
after re-reading your comment (And realizing I totally missed your initial mention of google docs!) I really feel like Nuclino can be a good resource for us to use.
It’s free, it’s public and it allows anyone to edit “documents” and link them to other related items and people. We can “resolve” comments on things that need to be edited and it even lets us embed mockups from figma into the workspace so we can just all be on the same page, quickly.
I found it when I was particularly scatterbrained with information overload last year. I was driven to google “personal wikipedia tools” and somehow stumbled upon it. Totally one of the coolest things that I have used to date, though. It combines process documentation, collaboration, and all sorts of necessary project management functions into an integrated experience, that even gives a visualization of information networks. Like… auto-mindmap!
Anyone can check it out and let me know if it’s viable. My public workspace link is Nuclino
Documentation. We debated this with the dev team and settled upon using discourse to house our documentation. All the wonderful ideas you had you can create a category for here:
https://discuss.focallocal.org/c/42-category/46-category
we are still debating whether this would be less confusing with a standard forum structure rather than a dynamic one (so right now if you reply to a topic it become the top one, rather than staying in a set structure). I like this, but i think it requires a second forum so discuss.(forum) and docs.(forum)
good idea. i’ll get onto that right now
we’ve always failed to find a system of regular conference calls which works across time zones and schedules, so right now it’s just up to you guys to set them up when you feel. I’d love a more robust system, but they always seem to end up pushing people out when they can’t join in
I don’t think we have any. It’s all been informal and more UI based until now
can you please expand on these and create cards in the Trello board as i’m not upto date with the technical terminology in UX design.
this one i’m also not familiar with. i’ve made a card for it in Trello anyway
Looks good to me. I’d suggest using a combination of nuclino for doc storage and a central location, Trello, and the discussion board here and where Andy linked for communication and dissemination. That’s a bit much but workable I think? And yeah, you’re not alone in getting lost in threads, it’s part of what prompted my post.
@danyalamriben we can use different tools if required. Is it possible for us to use Trello to achieve the same as that is the system we’re building the platform around (although it may need to be moved in house as more users join in)
Here’s the link: https://trello.com/invite/b/PFj7RlgM/a12e9b4bdc6fff4a5e7439754c9a7e3b/focallocalorg
We could also make separate boards for UX if its confusing having all the Dev teams on the same board. Basically the two UX lists are the main ones.
@NJUX your list is amazing, its exactly what we needed to get rolling. I’ve moved all your points into Trello (unless you guys decide it’s not possible to use it to organise our action). Would you mind heading over and expanding the cards into actionable missions in occasions where they need further details.
For the stages we operate within trello’s limitations, by simply putting the tasks at the top of the lists which need completed 1st. Although if we create a separate board then we can put stages in.
we could solve the problem of getting lost in threads if we switch to a traditional forum structure rather than a dynamic one. i believe the main reason the discourse guys argue the dynamic one is better for community building is that people reply to a topic there and perhaps no-one sees it for months.
In a dynamic forum you can just go to the homepage or category and see the most recently active topics
oh, there is one more consideration. we want to have users active on this as soon as possible, basically next week if the dev team can sort out our V2 discourse integration (which is taking longer than expected and will solve a lot of our fragmentation issues of the site).
a long term build plan is critical as we’ve clearly wasted a lot of energy building without having a coherant UX policy. It would be great to consider that devs will be building on the site and making improvements while designing that though.
If we could draw out key tasks to the homepage/splash page right away then that would help them, while the UX team goes about refining and building a plan that goes further and deeper than just sign up and engage
p.s. i’m not locked to the idea of making people sign up. it’s just not working right now as we have a lot of visitors and none engaging.
thats amazing. it sounds like a lot of leg work, would it help if we advertise for people studying UX? if you put the cards in simple terms i expect they would find that to be an excellent learning opportunity. Or do you prefer to handle that all yourself to make sure it’s done correctly?
This is unfortunately a bit centralised now. Basically we need to have a central team who create boards for new projects. That won’t scale well past a few hundred active users, so we’d need to automate creation of the things required which are:
A project card containing:
Currently i create a card in Trello’s backend that creates a card at action.focallocal.org. I then create all the required links. The forum creation will be easily automated with v2 of the Docus integration
The plan is that the action center houses a set number of projects and global happiness flashmobs based on user base.
for example: number of active users / 50 = spaces for projects currently being built
This is to focus attention on building.
(i’ve removed Github as i don’t think this team needs to engage over there. probably easier for you to post improvements to the devs and let them add it to Gitub)
I don’t yet think that Trello is a better alternative to what Nuclino would offer because I would use it similar to @NJUX ‘s suggestion, centralized documents and the links between the documents to help understand how it’s related to the project.
I feel like the current workflow we have here with the dynamic forum and trello board sorta limits us because it isn’t the most efficient and intuitive way to go between to two platforms and quickly understand “what do I do next?/where was the link to that bit of resource material?” Type of questions.
I’m not sure how the different discourse forums would play out differently but I am certainly willing to learn. My only concern is that would take time and attention away from doing the actual Ux work, since it’s hard to be efficient currently.
I don’t personally know what it means for me to go into trello’s backend and how to get work done using that list of steps you outlined. I still would be open to learning but it’s something to consider when on-boarding new teammates. There’s a lot of little friction points in that process that could stall doing a task or collaboration that should in theory be somewhat simple, right?
Sorry, the list of steps was just to explain the system. Right now it’s just me who is doing that which is ok for now, but we will need to design a
automated better system when resigning the action centre as the current one can’t scale
‘because it isn’t the most efficient and intuitive way to go between to two platforms and quickly understand “what do I do next?/where was the link’
I agree completely. There’s a lot of friction which we need to remove. My proposal is that we use the system we are building for users so we can improve it as we go. Trello isn’t ideal. @tmcnulty was looking at some project management solutions directly in discourse, although I felt they were lacking in features
Is it possible to build on Nucleo? Or is there an open source alternative?