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Community Based Surveillance Community Sprint

Heather Leson edited this page Jan 19, 2019 · 5 revisions

January 18 - 19, 2019 Oslo Norway

The CBS Community is one year old. The following is a co-created community analysis to support the next steps. The methodology follows open principles and community management best practices. Edits welcome.

Methodology

Who is the community?

There are three main groups in this community:

  1. Software community (remote/codeathons)
  2. Norwegian Red Cross, business partners, technology companies, IFRC, and other National Societies
  3. Local Community Volunteers

Structure

There are two main parts of the cycle - the software and the community volunteers in local branches/ National Societies. The software teams are organized into 5 teams: alerts, notification gateway, reporting, analytics and administration. They have 34 different channels on slack for the sub-parts.

Roles

Some of these roles exist. Some are needed. This list needs definitions and roles. As well, descriptions on how to get involved.

  • Core Team
  • software developers
  • advocates
  • front-end/backend
  • ux/ui
  • humanitarian
  • technology lead
  • logistics/event organizer
  • issue maintainer
  • open source process engineer
  • volunteers
  • tech leads
  • code reviewers
  • hardware
  • data viz
  • health professional
  • facilitators
  • communications/storytellers
  • humanitarians
  • program lead

Community Values and Norms

We discussed the open principles: transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, and community. Participants provided the following feedback about their community norms and values:

  • facilitators /experts in the teams
  • "life savers"
  • learners
  • Friendly, social
  • 138 slack, 109 github
  • participatory spirit
  • CBS system believers
  • adapative, unorthodox solution providers
  • mixup groups, onboarding
  • positive, useful, feel engaged
  • care giving/checkins
  • engaged
  • eager
  • community management/support
  • wants to know why people leave/go and not return
  • people know they can ask questions
  • respectful
  • inclusive
  • curious
  • people can see the progress
  • inside jokes (ducks) make us connected
  • consistent communication
  • organized (?)
  • transparent
  • team bonding/self-selected
  • self-organized
  • documented roles

Why

  • saving lives
  • network
  • new technology

Gaps/Norms

  • local communities need solid solutions
  • need IFRC and National Societies to be responsive
  • need to be clear on what to do
  • ownership of project needs to be "open"
  • independent from IFRC/National Societies
  • everyone does everything
  • decision-making flow
  • information flows from NorCross - what is going on?
  • Traditional organization moves slow
  • structure may need to adapt
  • branded as Red Cross - needs to be more "Open"
  • active checkins needed (on an individual level)
  • software onramp is not easy - 6 different pieces of software
  • structure may need to adapt
  • who's community?
  • pilots are moving faster than the software
  • improve on these values and norms
  • duplicate processes in various sections of software
  • leave without documentation or code committed
  • tech partnerships have to be managed via Red Cross hierarchy
  • "open" is not enough, add growth and others
  • too much hierarchy to invite partners
  • needs to assess time needed on tickets
  • wants more notice for events, schedule 3 months ahead

Risks

  • convert - tasks to open source methodology
  • sustainable $
  • pilots don't scale
  • project management
  • missing skillsets
  • people not returning
  • cost of mobile services
  • undervalued/underused
  • "leader" driven
  • time between codeathons - losing momentum
  • need own github, not IFRC
  • no pathway to being truly "open"
  • codes needs to be refactor
  • onboarding is hard, takes too long to learn how to help
  • switching code bases

Next Steps

These items need to be prioritized and divided into projects/tasks (small, medium and large). As well, the community needs to decide who does what.

Small

  • weekly notes/updates
  • ask for more help
  • tasks/issues to build out the community
  • ambassadors to support in between times (codeathons)
  • need process for delegation of work
  • open up dialogue with humanitarians and partners (business) to open up this work (build faster, more useful)
  • engage people in small tasks more
  • someone to go to OSCON Europe and/or Mozfest to learn about open community management

Medium

  • we wrote a draft governance document
  • roles are documented/roles and responsibilities need to be better written/there are developer role gaps
  • there is a 3 year project plan
  • outreach to larger open source and technology communities plan and networking
  • community management training for core team
  • need code review process
  • always be charging - your community needs updates and engagement strategies that they can support and own
  • decide how to grow
  • communications plan - slack, github, newsletter, social media etc
  • write out history - tell the full story while you go
  • ask for in between event help - clear asks, small tasks to medium
  • provide more onboarding documentation, mentors
  • create a brief intro to the project(for developers to get started)
  • mandate/purpose, more docs, 'open' on ramp to grow
  • strategic vision and plan
  • status updates on github - next steps for technical and supporting members. give project updates/timelines
  • consider models to design your community plan e.g. Public Lab, Ubuntu (Contributor policy)

Large

  • governance - self-sustained community
  • CBS's open source license
  • need to learn more about licenses and tie this to strategy
  • partnership strategy/ budget for cbs
  • roles within IFRC and Red Cross

We also created a list of how to talk about data for the community volunteers with other national societies. They need to have feedback loops. This may go into the Data Playbook Beta Project