Talk:MN Collaboration tools

Tools We Don't Use

I think this is an important section. If we've tested a tool and decided it didn't work, then we should discourage members from starting up with the same tool unless the tool has changed in a way that overcomes the objections we found. For instance, BaseCamp didn't work for us after quite a bit of live testing; a member who wants the organization to use BaseCamp should be aware of our previous testing experience. Jschrempp (talk)

Ok I understand a bit better what this section is trying to say now. I take issue more with the name of the section more than anything. In the set of all tools, the subset of all the tools we don't use is very large and to only list a small section of them is confusing to me. I'd like to change it to something like Evaluated Tools Not Recommended for Use. My opinion on tooling and collaboration is more of a pragmatic approach, and that members can use whatever tools tickle their fancy for their projects. That obviously doesn't means MN will pay for their use or deploy them across the community, but they shouldn't be restricted or discouraged from the tools that allow them to collaborate and be productive. For example, I'm sure a lot of members use Dropbox for sharing files, and if they have files they would like to share or get feedback on, telling them or suggesting to them that "No, we don't use that here. We're a GDrive shop!" is counterproductive to the goal of easy collaboration. I want members to be empowered to test any tool to find what works best for them, and if they come up with a system of collaboration that wasn't thought up and tested by the steering committee or some other top-down decision process, we should all be able to benefit from their experience. PatrickL (talk)

I see what you mean. I'll redo the title - good idea. And certainly members can use whatever tools they want; that's not for us to say. I think the concern is more when someone wants to join in the management of the shop and decides, "Member feature XYZ will be implemented in JIRA and all staff will need to become JIRA users." That's a big step. I liken it to the R&D engineer working in a Java shop that says, "I did this cool thing for us in Erlang..." Jschrempp (talk)

Communication Committee

I see this as a new addition to the organization but don't see it defined yet. We need to know what it is if this page relies on it. Jschrempp (talk)

The section previously said Communication Team. That wasn't defined in the wiki but I think it already exists in some form (since the website does get updated). Since the concept of a committee already exists in the organization through groups like "steering committee", I made the wording more consistent. I have a draft of the committee page to more formally define what those can look like. PatrickL (talk)