Monthly reports
Hello everyone, our team have been struggling since ages to get the monthly reports done in time. What we've done with certain success is an annual report https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ColombianTeam/ReApprovalApplication2012 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ColombianTeam/reportefinal2011 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ColombianTeam/TeamReApproval2010 is it ok if we keep doing like that, or we should solve our procrastination issue with the monthly reports? as always your insights are more than welcome, Best regards, Andres on behalf Ubuntu Colombia -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Monthly Reports
Aloha, going through the approvals and re approvals it's evident some teams do use monthly reports to let their team and others know what they are up to, but a lot don't. Monthly reports https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BuildingCommunity/TeamReporting/HowTo are a really good habit to get into for all of us! But for LoCo Teams it's especially good. It will help you keep track of your events and possibly if you aren't doing much highlight this to you as you'll see events decreasing which isn't a good sign of an active team. What is a good idea is to appoint one person to do up the team report each month. Mail the team saying the report has been created and let people add any other snippets of information they may not have heard about. This is a great way to stimulate conversation but also means it's not just down to one person to add content. Try and do your report a week before it's due to allow for any issues, such as people going away or not having it done on time. Or allow for people to blog/upload photos of a past event so it can be included in the report. Don't forget to write up a summary of past events, link to these on the report, link to photos. We appreciate not everyone is on planet Ubuntu, using the reports this way is a great way to learn more about the events that are happening. Leading by example, as we know we can't ask folks to do monthly reports without doing them ourselves, here is the July report from the LoCo Council https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeams/LoCoCouncil/TeamReports/10/July Laura -- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/czajkowski http://www.lczajkowski.com Skype: lauraczajkowski -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
Dear LoCo Council, Monthly reports would be much better automatically generated by a combination of the event organiser on the loco directory and a simple blog system that did not have to be manually tied into the greater blog network of planets. We fail at making things easy and instead insist upon the manual and monotonous. A re-instance of monthly reports do not make them more appealing, they make running a LoCo a chore rather than good fun. I would rather have the LoCo council focusing on how to recruit and organise developers effectively to put these problems to rest instead of focusing solely on social solutions. Regards, Martin Owens On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 13:15 +0100, Laura Czajkowski wrote: Aloha, going through the approvals and re approvals it's evident some teams do use monthly reports to let their team and others know what they are up to, but a lot don't. Monthly reports https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BuildingCommunity/TeamReporting/HowTo are a really good habit to get into for all of us! But for LoCo Teams it's especially good. It will help you keep track of your events and possibly if you aren't doing much highlight this to you as you'll see events decreasing which isn't a good sign of an active team. What is a good idea is to appoint one person to do up the team report each month. Mail the team saying the report has been created and let people add any other snippets of information they may not have heard about. This is a great way to stimulate conversation but also means it's not just down to one person to add content. Try and do your report a week before it's due to allow for any issues, such as people going away or not having it done on time. Or allow for people to blog/upload photos of a past event so it can be included in the report. Don't forget to write up a summary of past events, link to these on the report, link to photos. We appreciate not everyone is on planet Ubuntu, using the reports this way is a great way to learn more about the events that are happening. Leading by example, as we know we can't ask folks to do monthly reports without doing them ourselves, here is the July report from the LoCo Council https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeams/LoCoCouncil/TeamReports/10/July Laura -- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/czajkowski http://www.lczajkowski.com Skype: lauraczajkowski -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Martin Owens docto...@gmail.com wrote: Monthly reports would be much better automatically generated by a combination of the event organiser on the loco directory and a simple blog system that did not have to be manually tied into the greater blog network of planets. Martin, I agree that this would make them easier, and that currently they are not the most enjoyable thing to do. However, your proposed method would not work for most teams. For example, how would it know that we has been discussed/planned/agreed on/announced via the mailing list? How would it know what happens at IRC meetings? Blog posts also tend to be rather long/lengthy. The Team Reports are generally just a few bullets. Daniel Holbach had started working on a Django application that would make it easier to construct the reports (however, it would still be up to the teams to remember the events and write bullets about them), but that appears to have stalled for various reasons. So while I agree that we should make the process as easy as possible, I do not think that this is the best way to go about doing so. Nathan -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Martin Owens docto...@gmail.com wrote: Dear LoCo Council, Monthly reports would be much better automatically generated by a combination of the event organiser on the loco directory and a simple blog system that did not have to be manually tied into the greater blog network of planets. Nope. There is a reason they're done manually. If you can't spend ten minutes writing about what you've done, it's kinda an issue. If a team wants to auto-aggregate stuff and then use that to base their reports on, that's fine, but we can not automate reports. Then it just becomes mush. I don't want to read mush. If we don't read it then there is no reason to use it. We fail at making things easy and instead insist upon the manual and monotonous. A re-instance of monthly reports do not make them more appealing, they make running a LoCo a chore rather than good fun. Yes, because unlike other ways, we can actually read our reports. Automated mail sucks. I would rather have the LoCo council focusing on how to recruit and organise developers effectively to put these problems to rest instead of focusing solely on social solutions. Book-keeping is just as important. Regards, Martin Owens On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 13:15 +0100, Laura Czajkowski wrote: Aloha, going through the approvals and re approvals it's evident some teams do use monthly reports to let their team and others know what they are up to, but a lot don't. Monthly reports https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BuildingCommunity/TeamReporting/HowTo are a really good habit to get into for all of us! But for LoCo Teams it's especially good. It will help you keep track of your events and possibly if you aren't doing much highlight this to you as you'll see events decreasing which isn't a good sign of an active team. What is a good idea is to appoint one person to do up the team report each month. Mail the team saying the report has been created and let people add any other snippets of information they may not have heard about. This is a great way to stimulate conversation but also means it's not just down to one person to add content. Try and do your report a week before it's due to allow for any issues, such as people going away or not having it done on time. Or allow for people to blog/upload photos of a past event so it can be included in the report. Don't forget to write up a summary of past events, link to these on the report, link to photos. We appreciate not everyone is on planet Ubuntu, using the reports this way is a great way to learn more about the events that are happening. Leading by example, as we know we can't ask folks to do monthly reports without doing them ourselves, here is the July report from the LoCo Council https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeams/LoCoCouncil/TeamReports/10/July Laura -- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/czajkowski http://www.lczajkowski.com Skype: lauraczajkowski -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts -Paul -- #define sizeof(x) rand() :wq -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
I'd also like that you keep in mind Martin that most teams are ot native english speaking. So I relly doubt that they will do a separate blog for filling the reports in nglish.. That would also be no fun... Christophe --- Christophe Sauthier - 06 16 98 63 96 Objectif Libre www.objectif-libre.com Services et Formations Open Source On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Martin Owens docto...@gmail.com wrote: Dear LoCo Council, Monthly reports would be much better automatically generated by a combination of the event organiser on the loco directory and a simple blog system that did not have to be manually tied into the greater blog network of planets. We fail at making things easy and instead insist upon the manual and monotonous. A re-instance of monthly reports do not make them more appealing, they make running a LoCo a chore rather than good fun. I would rather have the LoCo council focusing on how to recruit and organise developers effectively to put these problems to rest instead of focusing solely on social solutions. Regards, Martin Owens On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 13:15 +0100, Laura Czajkowski wrote: Aloha, going through the approvals and re approvals it's evident some teams do use monthly reports to let their team and others know what they are up to, but a lot don't. Monthly reports https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BuildingCommunity/TeamReporting/HowTo are a really good habit to get into for all of us! But for LoCo Teams it's especially good. It will help you keep track of your events and possibly if you aren't doing much highlight this to you as you'll see events decreasing which isn't a good sign of an active team. What is a good idea is to appoint one person to do up the team report each month. Mail the team saying the report has been created and let people add any other snippets of information they may not have heard about. This is a great way to stimulate conversation but also means it's not just down to one person to add content. Try and do your report a week before it's due to allow for any issues, such as people going away or not having it done on time. Or allow for people to blog/upload photos of a past event so it can be included in the report. Don't forget to write up a summary of past events, link to these on the report, link to photos. We appreciate not everyone is on planet Ubuntu, using the reports this way is a great way to learn more about the events that are happening. Leading by example, as we know we can't ask folks to do monthly reports without doing them ourselves, here is the July report from the LoCo Council https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeams/LoCoCouncil/TeamReports/10/July Laura -- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/czajkowski http://www.lczajkowski.com Skype: lauraczajkowski -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
Hi Martin, On 27 July 2010 15:30, Martin Owens docto...@gmail.com wrote: We fail at making things easy and instead insist upon the manual and monotonous. A re-instance of monthly reports do not make them more appealing, they make running a LoCo a chore rather than good fun. I completely agree that manual recurrent jobs are tedious. One solution the UK loco has used is to delegate. We have a recurring item on every meeting agenda which is used as a reminder to the team. No one single individual is responsible for creating the team report, but one person creates the initial blank page. Once done, anyone can add single lines outlining what the team has done. We don't spend vast amounts of time on it, just enough to convey what the team has done that month. Here's some samples:- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/TeamReports/10/July https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/TeamReports/10/June https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/TeamReports/10/May This process should not be onerous, but it should allow everyone to benefit from learning about the great things other teams are doing. Cheers, Al. Cheers, Al. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
On 27/07/10 15:30, Martin Owens wrote: Dear LoCo Council, snip We fail at making things easy and instead insist upon the manual and monotonous. A re-instance of monthly reports do not make them more appealing, they make running a LoCo a chore rather than good fun. snip Regards, Martin Owens I believe the missing information in this conversation is what happens to all these team reports? do the wiki pages just sit there waiting for random readers to go hunting for them? Well actually no, there is a point to the terse format of them and the particular URLs they sit at. As a reward for contributing in your little report you get to read the big consolidated report with stuff from everyone in it. The June report is here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports/June2010 It does the consolidation by a bit of moin wiki magic, which you can see in the raw text of the page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports/June2010?action=rawrev=4 so it has lots of sections that look like this: === Ubuntu United Kingdom LoCo Team === Include(UKTeam/TeamReports/10/June) which goes and retrieves the relevant team report for the month and includes it in the big report, which is why the report has to be placed at a predictable URL on the wiki. Alan. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
I believe the missing information in this conversation is what happensto all these team reports? do the wiki pages just sit there waiting forrandom readers to go hunting for them? Nop the reports are publish on the ubuntu weekly news letter at the end of the month. That way readers get informed of their activities Enviado desde mi BlackBerry de Claro -Original Message- From: Alan Bell alan.b...@theopenlearningcentre.com Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:45:40 To: loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com Subject: Re: Monthly Reports On 27/07/10 15:30, Martin Owens wrote: Dear LoCo Council, snip We fail at making things easy and instead insist upon the manual and monotonous. A re-instance of monthly reports do not make them more appealing, they make running a LoCo a chore rather than good fun. snip Regards, Martin Owens I believe the missing information in this conversation is what happens to all these team reports? do the wiki pages just sit there waiting for random readers to go hunting for them? Well actually no, there is a point to the terse format of them and the particular URLs they sit at. As a reward for contributing in your little report you get to read the big consolidated report with stuff from everyone in it. The June report is here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports/June2010 It does the consolidation by a bit of moin wiki magic, which you can see in the raw text of the page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports/June2010?action=rawamp;rev=4 so it has lots of sections that look like this: === Ubuntu United Kingdom LoCo Team === Include(UKTeam/TeamReports/10/June) which goes and retrieves the relevant team report for the month and includes it in the big report, which is why the report has to be placed at a predictable URL on the wiki. Alan. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
Hey Everyone, Having had a thought about what I was trying to say and how it came across. I wanted to apologise, what I meant was for a constructive dialog on improving the situation and I'm aware that what I wrote was not a primer for that. Instead I feel I may have put communicated doubt in the good work of the loco council and it's members and that was not my intention. Sorry. On a more positive note, I think I could attend some of ideas directly to the loco directory and perhaps after consultation, give a way to report on events contextually. Martin, On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 10:30 -0400, Martin Owens wrote: Dear LoCo Council, Monthly reports would be much better automatically generated by a combination of the event organiser on the loco directory and a simple blog system that did not have to be manually tied into the greater blog network of planets. We fail at making things easy and instead insist upon the manual and monotonous. A re-instance of monthly reports do not make them more appealing, they make running a LoCo a chore rather than good fun. I would rather have the LoCo council focusing on how to recruit and organise developers effectively to put these problems to rest instead of focusing solely on social solutions. Regards, Martin Owens -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
În data de Ma, 27-07-2010 la 09:36 -0500, Nathan Handler a scris: On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Martin Owens docto...@gmail.com wrote: Monthly reports would be much better automatically generated by a combination of the event organiser on the loco directory and a simple blog system that did not have to be manually tied into the greater blog network of planets. Martin, I agree that this would make them easier, and that currently they are not the most enjoyable thing to do. However, your proposed method would not work for most teams. For example, how would it know that we has been discussed/planned/agreed on/announced via the mailing list? How would it know what happens at IRC meetings? Blog posts also tend to be rather long/lengthy. The Team Reports are generally just a few bullets. Daniel Holbach had started working on a Django application that would make it easier to construct the reports (however, it would still be up to the teams to remember the events and write bullets about them), but that appears to have stalled for various reasons. So while I agree that we should make the process as easy as possible, I do not think that this is the best way to go about doing so. @Nathan, just replace blogs/microblogs in what Martin wrote. Having let's say an instance of status.net or a spider to fetch statuses by hashtags, would be much easier compared to wiki edits. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
I agree with what I believe was the essence of Martin's initial post. I don't believe that filling out the reports should be automated/aggregated, but I really think that most of the point'n'click'n'edit'n'save that goes on an awfull lot of times (at least once per report made) of creating a new wiki page, and updating archive lists and so on, would be possible to automate. It's a simple repeated process, which is done in exactly the same way by a lot of people. It should be possible to make team reportings a fill-in-the-blanks issue, instead of the current chore. Jesper Jarlskov Ubuntu-dk On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 13:14 -0400, Martin Owens wrote: Hey Everyone, Having had a thought about what I was trying to say and how it came across. I wanted to apologise, what I meant was for a constructive dialog on improving the situation and I'm aware that what I wrote was not a primer for that. Instead I feel I may have put communicated doubt in the good work of the loco council and it's members and that was not my intention. Sorry. On a more positive note, I think I could attend some of ideas directly to the loco directory and perhaps after consultation, give a way to report on events contextually. Martin, On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 10:30 -0400, Martin Owens wrote: Dear LoCo Council, Monthly reports would be much better automatically generated by a combination of the event organiser on the loco directory and a simple blog system that did not have to be manually tied into the greater blog network of planets. We fail at making things easy and instead insist upon the manual and monotonous. A re-instance of monthly reports do not make them more appealing, they make running a LoCo a chore rather than good fun. I would rather have the LoCo council focusing on how to recruit and organise developers effectively to put these problems to rest instead of focusing solely on social solutions. Regards, Martin Owens -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
I would love to see a single vehicle for announcing and after action reports for events (pictures, etc) that could also be leveraged for monthly team reports. It would certainly, due to format differences, need to be a well thought out data structure and application design. If it is possible to make both the LoCo Council's job easy to track teams and the team's job to advertise and report on its activities it is a worthy target to pursue. I agree with doctormo and nhandler, so the question is how to bridge the issues and meet both. cprofitt On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 09:36 -0500, Nathan Handler wrote: On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Martin Owens docto...@gmail.com wrote: Monthly reports would be much better automatically generated by a combination of the event organiser on the loco directory and a simple blog system that did not have to be manually tied into the greater blog network of planets. Martin, I agree that this would make them easier, and that currently they are not the most enjoyable thing to do. However, your proposed method would not work for most teams. For example, how would it know that we has been discussed/planned/agreed on/announced via the mailing list? How would it know what happens at IRC meetings? Blog posts also tend to be rather long/lengthy. The Team Reports are generally just a few bullets. Daniel Holbach had started working on a Django application that would make it easier to construct the reports (however, it would still be up to the teams to remember the events and write bullets about them), but that appears to have stalled for various reasons. So while I agree that we should make the process as easy as possible, I do not think that this is the best way to go about doing so. Nathan -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 16:12 +0100, Alan Pope wrote: I completely agree that manual recurrent jobs are tedious. One solution the UK loco has used is to delegate. We have a recurring item on every meeting agenda which is used as a reminder to the team. No one single individual is responsible for creating the team report, but one person creates the initial blank page. Once done, anyone can add single lines outlining what the team has done. We don't spend vast amounts of time on it, just enough to convey what the team has done that month. Here's some samples:- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/TeamReports/10/July https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/TeamReports/10/June https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/TeamReports/10/May This process should not be onerous, but it should allow everyone to benefit from learning about the great things other teams are doing. That is one strong advantage to the wiki -- everyone can edit it... I would still like a nice system that provides a single point of entry for teams -- not necessarily an automation of work... but one point of entry. More to ponder. Thanks, cprofitt -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
quoting name=Stas Sușcov date=2010-07-27 time=21:53:30 +0300 Having let's say an instance of status.net or a spider to fetch statuses by hashtags, would be much easier compared to wiki edits. Our own instance, or a free community version of status.net is totally doable, btw. locoteams.status.net was set up as a test of this a while ago, but did not materialize to anything (due, in part, to my lack of time to devote to it). If you can make a good/persuasive use case for it, I'm all ears! Greg NOTE: locoteams.status.net has been neglected (by me) for a while, so there are a number of spam accounts. I have removed many just now (to make the public/default timeline clean) but there are many more to go. If we do this, I can work on getting it cleaned up. -- | Greg Grossmeier | | http://grossmeier.net | -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 8:04 PM, Greg Grossmeier g...@grossmeier.net wrote: quoting name=Stas Sușcov date=2010-07-27 time=21:53:30 +0300 Having let's say an instance of status.net or a spider to fetch statuses by hashtags, would be much easier compared to wiki edits. Our own instance, or a free community version of status.net is totally doable, btw. locoteams.status.net was set up as a test of this a while ago, but did not materialize to anything (due, in part, to my lack of time to devote to it). As well as my lack of time (greg-g you can't take all the blame :-P) If you can make a good/persuasive use case for it, I'm all ears! Greg NOTE: locoteams.status.net has been neglected (by me) for a while, so there are a number of spam accounts. I have removed many just now (to make the public/default timeline clean) but there are many more to go. If we do this, I can work on getting it cleaned up. Greg I'll help later this week if you still need it just let me know. Amber -- | Greg Grossmeier | | http://grossmeier.net | -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts -- Amber Graner//akgraner// http://akgraner.com/ http://www.ubuntu-user.com/Online/Blogs/Amber-Graner-You-in-Ubuntu Just me Amber. There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is. Linus Torvalds -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
În data de Ma, 27-07-2010 la 20:04 -0400, Greg Grossmeier a scris: quoting name=Stas Sușcov date=2010-07-27 time=21:53:30 +0300 Having let's say an instance of status.net or a spider to fetch statuses by hashtags, would be much easier compared to wiki edits. Our own instance, or a free community version of status.net is totally doable, btw. locoteams.status.net was set up as a test of this a while ago, but did not materialize to anything (due, in part, to my lack of time to devote to it). If you can make a good/persuasive use case for it, I'm all ears! Greg NOTE: locoteams.status.net has been neglected (by me) for a while, so there are a number of spam accounts. I have removed many just now (to make the public/default timeline clean) but there are many more to go. If we do this, I can work on getting it cleaned up. Looks like just a couple of people would like to see it in use, the rest are for wiki thingy. :/ P.S.: Sadly, counting the mates in my loco that are familiar with the wikis, one hand is more than enough for me... -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
