For many months now the Participation Team has been using GitHub to coordinate as a team.
We work in three week sprints called “heartbeats” and each of these heartbeat kicks off with the creation of a series of issues that will move our quarterly goals forward, and which we believe we can accomplish in three weeks.
At the end of each heartbeat we meet to discuss which of our issues we were able to complete (or closed) and what stopped us from meeting the goals that we missed. We then share what we learned and our successes in a public “Demos” call that we invite everyone to attend. It’s been really effective for managing the staff team but there are many more people working towards participation goals!
We also work with a bunch of amazing contributors and it has been my task to figure out how to better integrate volunteers into our GitHub process.
Part one of this has been the realization that we don’t all need to be in the same Repo!
I recently created Repos for:
In these Repos the permission structure is this:
- Contributors who are managing it have admin permissions
- Staff who are advocates/helping manage the group are admins
- Other staff or contributors who are involved can get write permissions by requesting it from current admins
Each of these Repos works a little differently but each one is a space for larger groups or projects related to Participation to create issues and work collaboratively on projects.
How To Use The Participation Team Repo:
My idea is that this Repo is for Participation Team Staff and for contributors who are working directly to move forward the Q1 Goals. Because the accountability structure is different between staff and contributors, there are a few labels and milestone that are different for contributor issues.
Permissions:
- Admins are Participation Team Staff
- Contributors who are regularly contributing towards the Participation Goals are given write access
Labels for contributor projects are:
- Volunteer Driver - Projects that are being driven by a contributor
- Volunteer Task - Projects look for contributor support
- Owner Needed - Looking for a volunteer to take ownership of the project (issue won’t close without volunteer engagement)
Contributor Issues should be tied to one of these two kinds of Milestone:
- Heartbeat Milestone i.e. H1 January 29th - For all issues that can close in one heartbeat, for anyone who wants to work within the heartbeat system and be accountable for their progress on a 3 week basis (mandatory for staff optional for contributors) (Note: Contributors who have issues in here will be invited to the accountability and demos meetings).
- Quarterly Milestone i.e. Q1 Contributor Driven Tasks - For contributor driven projects that are longer-term and that either want to work outside of the heartbeat process, or for projects that want to record their quarterly goals in a “meta issues” in addition to their heartbeat issues. As for all things in this repo projects must be driving one of the OKR’s forward.
Please let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, or concerns!