On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 07:41:25PM +0000, Waldman, Simon M wrote: > 1. Now that a number of sub-groups such as comms exist, some care > needs to be taken about information getting to the places that it > needs to be. This is a natural hurdle in any organisation as it > expands, in that one can no longer assume that a volunteer knows > everything else that is going on (or has gone on) in the project.
We haven't always done a good job preserving the history behind our
material (font decisions [1], source for graphics [2], history of
graphics [3], or even lesson history [4]). I think we've gotten a lot
better at this sort of thing recently, but we still have some missing
pieces from before we were being contentious about it. As we fill in
those pieces (or start from scratch) this should be less of a
technical problem going forward. It's also important to have a
sub-group structure that is easy to navigate (so newcomers know who to
ask), and I think the recent subcommittees help there [5]. The last
piece of the puzzle (and this is just one of those things that you
have to work on constantly) is to have good communication between the
various sub-groups so that you can either answer questions directly or
refer the asker to the appropriate party. Identifying when you're
*not* the best person to answer a given question and figuring out (and
documenting!) who would be a better resource is hard, and I expect
we'll do better with that once the subcommittees have some time to
gel, but I agree that on a number of issues we aren't there yet.
In cases like this (badge graphics), I'd suggest the Git history as a
useful place to store the creation routine. We currently have
messages like “Adding helper badge from 'bc' repo [3]”, but that would
be more useful if it had a message body like:
Created with:
$ ./bin/badge-create.py …
Then folks don't have to remember how a repeated task works, they just
have to check the version control history and see what the last person
to do something similar has to say about how they accomplished it.
Cheers,
Trevor
[1]:
http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/communications_lists.software-carpentry.org/2015-March/000002.html
[2]:
https://github.com/swcarpentry/site/commit/caa249b7e67ad0cd018a597e2feb888938523007
[3]: https://github.com/swcarpentry/communications/issues/1
[4]: https://github.com/swcarpentry/bc/pull/79
[5]:
https://github.com/swcarpentry/board/blob/master/subcommittees/subcommittees.md
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