SOP updating?

Does council have any plans to update our SOP’s as some are outdated and some sections like SIG’s are not really active anymore?

There are currently efforts to update all Reps wiki pages:

Anyone is invited to chime in to help :slight_smile:

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Beside the wiki clean-up there are some specific tasks to update SOPs ( also in trello - which I think u have access to for along time now) most important one: https://trello.com/c/XTsGjGZT/89-update-current-sop-and-remind-mentors

Also a simple search gives me:

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In speaking with a module peer about this previously @nukeador they did not think that task
was something that could easily be jumped into since it is up to council to frame what
needs updating and the language IIRC. SOP’s are created by council so ultimately the language needs to be something that comes from council or at least approved by.

@Ioana ^

it is most definitely something people can jump into. I think council is always interested in how the invitation can be made clearer to help out. For example I am changing mentoring SOP in the next little while and could use help.

I can understand what Benjamin means, some SOP’s require Council approval before going live, for example: Budgets, Swag, Mentoring, Screening, etc. In this case, its the best if you want to help to work together with someone of the Council, yet the critical SOP’s are always kept up to date by the Council, only those that require longer discussion or are not a priority are on Trello.

Other SOP’s are just about documenting things we already do, things that do not need Council approval since its about things we already do, but its not documented anywhere, for example Emma Mentoring best practices its about sharing your knowledge and experience on mentoring with the rest in a well organized document.

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I think that council shouldn’t be responsible for writing the SOPs, jus for making sure they they get written/updated. Council makes the policy, but anyone can write up a document that lists the policy. Eg, if council agrees that after 3 months of inactivity your mentor should schedule a meeting with you, that is very simple, Anyone can write that.

I actually have a proposal about this, I will run it past @r_oVhPfcJCUUC5wbm6i4_C2Q to make sure it fits in with his plans, and if so I will share it on the general list to see who’s interested in helping.

How do the people not on council learn about the policy? While @emma_irwin has been good about giving us updates on meetings the descriptions of discussions are pretty short so it would be tough to understand the gist of an approved policy to then document it.

I like that idea but I think if that is the case then there needs to be a better way then just four or five words of communicating specific policies or changes the council has approved.

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I agree.

I think there are possible solutions in terms of how policy is decided on - voted in the portal? If so then this would work a lot like a city council where there is a clear proposal then voting results. Those results (could simply be x proposal passed/failed) could then be public and people who want to help with documentation should be able to take it from there.

For Community IT we’ve been using meetinghero.com to take notes, which actually has a section for decisions. If members of council want to check it out, let me know and I can make a fake meeting and let you play with the agenda.

I think it would make everyone much happier, council included, if these decisions were better documented in a short hand form. Too much stuff gets lost in meeting logs that doesn’t make it to an SOP.

Anyway, that’s what I’m suggesting. I would love to get council’s feedback but I imagine this will need more time to think about than the AMA allows.

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Thanks for sharing this Kensie… I know in the case of the Fedora and Ubuntu Communities they use a ircbot to run meetings which logs the entire meeting discussion plus summarizes all actions taken.

Then they document those on the council wiki page so future councils can reflect back on why certain decisions were made for clarity and so can the community members:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/CC