Figure out how to represent "emerging" projects or projects in need of a lead

[jasonlally]

This one is tricky, but something we are thinking about at the City. How can we surface pain points and opportunities around issue areas where someone could step up and attempt to "answer" the problem, but where there hasn't yet been a project lead identified. I imagine this part of the site being a tool to help connect people to real issues being experienced at the City and in the community. Maybe there could be special events to generate these opportunities across the City. This would be one way for the Brigade to go out to other groups to facilitate these needs findings events.

A platform would allow us to describe ideas coming from different sources in a way that

1. Captures the opportunities at events in a compelling way
2. Presents them to people with a diverse array of skills with a clear way for someone to "step up" and "claim" an issue (or maybe even multiple people)

This married with clear on boarding approaches and ways to engage could be really powerful in amplifying impact.

[prestonrhea]

Having projects tagged with skill types and next steps would be helpful for
this. With the same system you could find a way to display the projects at
each meeting and show what you worked on last time, and what skills are
needed at this meeting.

On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Jason Lally [email protected]
wrote:

This one is tricky, but something we are thinking about at the City. How
can we surface pain points and opportunities around issue areas where
someone could step up and attempt to "answer" the problem, but where there
hasn't yet been a project lead identified. I imagine this part of the site
being a tool to help connect people to real issues being experienced at the
City and in the community. Maybe there could be special events to generate
these opportunities across the City. This would be one way for the Brigade
to go out to other groups to facilitate these needs findings events.

A platform would allow us to describe ideas coming from different sources
in a way that

1. Captures the opportunities at events in a compelling way
2. Presents them to people with a diverse array of skills with a clear
   way for someone to "step up" and "claim" an issue (or maybe even multiple
   people)

This married with clear on boarding approaches and ways to engage could be
really powerful in amplifying impact.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#4.

Preston Rhea
Brigade Program Coordinator
Code for America
+1-202-570-9770
@prestonrhea

[pbthompson]

@jason is what @preston is mentioning not similar to what the Chicago
Brigade has done? I've never had the time to dig into how they use
this... but recall you and others talking about it. May be a place for
Preston to start getting a sense as to what this could look like in
action. General guidelines to implement etc.

On 6/26/14, Preston Rhea [email protected] wrote:

Having projects tagged with skill types and next steps would be helpful for
this. With the same system you could find a way to display the projects at
each meeting and show what you worked on last time, and what skills are
needed at this meeting.

On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Jason Lally [email protected]
wrote:

This one is tricky, but something we are thinking about at the City. How
can we surface pain points and opportunities around issue areas where
someone could step up and attempt to "answer" the problem, but where
there
hasn't yet been a project lead identified. I imagine this part of the
site
being a tool to help connect people to real issues being experienced at
the
City and in the community. Maybe there could be special events to
generate
these opportunities across the City. This would be one way for the
Brigade
to go out to other groups to facilitate these needs findings events.

A platform would allow us to describe ideas coming from different sources
in a way that

1. Captures the opportunities at events in a compelling way
2. Presents them to people with a diverse array of skills with a clear
   way for someone to "step up" and "claim" an issue (or maybe even
   multiple
   people)

This married with clear on boarding approaches and ways to engage could
be
really powerful in amplifying impact.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#4.

Preston Rhea
Brigade Program Coordinator
Code for America
+1-202-570-9770
@prestonrhea

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#4 (comment)

Peter Thompson | B-Comm | Eng. Tech
AtlanticFusion Inc. *
*SFO: 415.463.9110 | YYC: 403.613.6497
[email protected]

http://www.linkedin.com/in/pbmthompsonhttps://twitter.com/consultantweet

[jasonlally]

What Chicago has done is currently what is implemented here, except for the piece that pulls project needs from GitHub issues. It starts with tagging the projects with needs and next steps per @prestonrhea comment.

The API doesn't have all of the issue endpoint information in it yet, so it's a little difficult to do exactly what Chicago does. However we can start, as a Brigade, tagging issues in GitHub with 'project-needs' as a general best practice and when the API does include issues, it'll be easy for us to hook it up, if this makes sense to the overall management of projects.

Doing this will require good general practices among all projects including getting GitHub set up by project and providing guidance on when generally a repo should get set up. There's also some quick things we can do before the API includes all the issue data where we could probably do a quick round up of the projects for the opening presentation.

For projects without code or a GitHub repo, communicating project needs can't rely on the GitHub infrastructure. For this we could possibly do something lightweight on the website and just check in to make sure those needs are updated from time to time.

I believe Kyle was working out a general guide in this vein and investigating standing up the project tracker from Reallocate.

[jasonlally]

Oh, I may be wrong about the issues thing. It looks like they are included in the API by project. And there's a project_needs object that ostensibly includes links to those issues identifying needs?

@ondrae is this implemented in the current CFAPI?

[ondrae]

@jasonlally /issues were just added to projects and as their own endpoint yesterday. Happy hacking.

We want to make a copy and past widget that works something like IssueHub that every Brigade can put on their website. If you're interested in it, talk to @chrisrodz whos going to start working on it soon.

[ondrae]

I'm going to eventually add a status column to the cfapi. See this issue.

We could have a status of project lead needed an feature them in a special way on the site.

[hackajesse]

@jrkao any comments on this?

[jrkao]

I have a non-technical answer - which is since we're starting to organize more around causes and we have core team members leading each cause discussion, this core team member should be the one managing the pain points and raising issues related to the cause, potentially tapping people who've expressed interest into becoming leaders on a project.

In addition to having a list of projects on the CfSF website I think it would be great to have cause pages where volunteers can connect to their cause. The core team member would be responsible for the content on their cause page but I imagine it to have projects related to the cause, issues, interesting articles/discussion points, etc.

[juliagoolia]

100% agree

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 10:08 AM, Jean Kao [email protected] wrote:

I have a non-technical answer - which is since we're starting to organize
more around causes and we have core team members leading each cause
discussion, this core team member should be the one managing the pain
points and raising issues related to the cause, potentially tapping people
who've expressed interest into becoming leaders on a project.

In addition to having a list of projects on the CfSF website I think it
would be great to have cause pages where volunteers can connect to their
cause. The core team member would be responsible for the content on their
cause page but I imagine it to have projects related to the cause, issues,
interesting articles/discussion points, etc.

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.

[ondrae]

We've got the status column working on our staging server. We'll have it in production soon. We're practicing pulling the status from spreadsheets ( I added a new column to the CfSF project sheet.).

The topic pages idea is good. What kind of common elements should each topic have?

• Name
• Short description
• Topic Leaders
• projects from that topic (pulled from the cfapi)
• Relevant data sets?
• relevant forum for discussion?

[jrkao]

I'd like to add to the list -

community partner

[hackajesse]

Agreed. Implanting the end user into each project description will not only
help with n00bs understanding the project, but also with user centered
design.
On Mar 23, 2015 10:55 AM, "Jean Kao" [email protected] wrote:

I'd like to add
**community partner

to the list

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.

[jszwedko]

Looks like needs was a suggested field for civic.json here: BetaNYC/civic.json#5, but the the CFA API doesn't currently return any such field nor is it an available field on http://open.dc.gov/civic.json/builder.html.

[jszwedko]

We do currently support projects creating and maintaining their own sub pages -- this could be a place where this information could live (along with within the project description itself), at least for now.

I know this is a bit of a dead issue at this point, but I'm curious if you still have thoughts around this @jasonlally (or others).