Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce that we've just rolled out a new feature for the website to support Working Groups (WG). This enhancement is based on feedback from the "Community Working Group" session we had at Haystack Connect. We hope this feature will provide more visibility into all the activity going on within the Project Haystack community and enable you to more easily participate in Working Groups that you have expertise or interest in. Let me briefly describe how they will work.
Every WG begins as a normal forum post; perhaps as a suggestion for a working group, or one we have already decided to form through other channels. A project haystack admin will then mark the post a "WG". All forum posts that become WGs will have a special tag in the forum index to make them easily identifiable. Also, all WGs can be easily viewed by clicking the "WG" link in the navigation bar. (You may have noticed this forum topic is also a WG!)
The only thing required to get a working group going is a "champion". The champion will be responsible for working with the other group members to complete whatever task the WG is working on. By default, the champion will be the user who first posted the topic on the forum, but it can be re-assigned.
Anyone can join a working group. Just view the WG post, and there is a button at the bottom that allows you to "Join" the group. Members of a group will have the ability to see each other's emails for the purposes of offline discussion.
Working groups have a very simple life cycle:
Open: The working group has been formed and has a champion and active
work is being done on the project.
Review: The working group has posted a proposal to the topic and is
requesting feedback from the larger community on its proposal. Note: anyone can post to a working group topic (you don't have to be a member).
Closed: The working group project is finished and accepted/implemented.
Cancelled: The working group is not active and the work proposed in the WG will not be completed.
We hope to start using this feature right away. At Haystack Connect we had many community members volunteer to be champions for various tagging initiatives. We hope to have formal working groups defined for those very soon and visible on the website. Feel free to post if you have any questions. Thanks!
PS - If you want to keep up to date with what is happening in working groups, or the forum in general, please make sure to configure your Settings to receive a daily digest of activity on the forums. Thanks!
Justin TashkerThu 31 Aug 2017
What are the other working groups using for collaborative work?
We're probably going to use google docs to allow us to have a living document and share ideas unless anyone has a better suggestion to better track updates, member information etc.
Matthew GianniniThu 31 Aug 2017
Hi Justin - for one of the working groups I'm a part of we used a combination of web meetings, google docs, and offline email discussion. This working group was pretty limited in scope, so that worked well. The bulk of our progress was made during the real-time conference call.
If people are using other tools I'd be interested to hear also.
Matthew Giannini Mon 5 Jun 2017
Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce that we've just rolled out a new feature for the website to support Working Groups (WG). This enhancement is based on feedback from the "Community Working Group" session we had at Haystack Connect. We hope this feature will provide more visibility into all the activity going on within the Project Haystack community and enable you to more easily participate in Working Groups that you have expertise or interest in. Let me briefly describe how they will work.
Every WG begins as a normal forum post; perhaps as a suggestion for a working group, or one we have already decided to form through other channels. A project haystack admin will then mark the post a "WG". All forum posts that become WGs will have a special tag in the forum index to make them easily identifiable. Also, all WGs can be easily viewed by clicking the "WG" link in the navigation bar. (You may have noticed this forum topic is also a WG!)
The only thing required to get a working group going is a "champion". The champion will be responsible for working with the other group members to complete whatever task the WG is working on. By default, the champion will be the user who first posted the topic on the forum, but it can be re-assigned.
Anyone can join a working group. Just view the WG post, and there is a button at the bottom that allows you to "Join" the group. Members of a group will have the ability to see each other's emails for the purposes of offline discussion.
Working groups have a very simple life cycle:
Open: The working group has been formed and has a champion and activework is being done on the project.
Review: The working group has posted a proposal to the topic and isrequesting feedback from the larger community on its proposal. Note: anyone can post to a working group topic (you don't have to be a member).
Closed: The working group project is finished and accepted/implemented.Cancelled: The working group is not active and the work proposed in the WG will not be completed.We hope to start using this feature right away. At Haystack Connect we had many community members volunteer to be champions for various tagging initiatives. We hope to have formal working groups defined for those very soon and visible on the website. Feel free to post if you have any questions. Thanks!
PS - If you want to keep up to date with what is happening in working groups, or the forum in general, please make sure to configure your Settings to receive a daily digest of activity on the forums. Thanks!
Justin Tashker Thu 31 Aug 2017
What are the other working groups using for collaborative work?
We're probably going to use google docs to allow us to have a living document and share ideas unless anyone has a better suggestion to better track updates, member information etc.
Matthew Giannini Thu 31 Aug 2017
Hi Justin - for one of the working groups I'm a part of we used a combination of web meetings, google docs, and offline email discussion. This working group was pretty limited in scope, so that worked well. The bulk of our progress was made during the real-time conference call.
If people are using other tools I'd be interested to hear also.