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LD4 Community Engagement Group Project Template: Getting Started
- Planning Doc, Week of [Enter Date for Planning]
- Doc’s Audience: Conveners [Clarify who will see / take part in this planning document]
- Name / contact (email, github username, etc.)
You should have at least 1, but preferably 2, conveners or leaders for any project or group. Neither needs to be a LD4 Partner, but having at least 1 LD4 Partner convener is strongly recommended. If that is not possible, you should have a LD4 Partner who agrees to be the contact for the group to LD4 Partners.
Propose a preliminary scope for the group, which can be refined or confirmed with the full group if needed at a kick-off meeting. A scope should include not just what you will cover, but also what you will not cover. Scopes are important for situating facilitators and setting expectations within and around this project/group. You might include a section like the following:
This project / group is an effort to:
- motivating use case, goal, or need 1;
- motivating use case, goal, or need 2;
- ...
Clarify and list use cases, goals, identified work areas, or questions above to help focus the work areas in your defined scope. This can help with then generating a work plan.
You might also choose to include some definitions you may want to clarify for your group or project here. Working across projects, domains, and areas of expertise/practice, we will have divergent understandings of terms. Being explicit about this allows up-front and inclusive discussion and decisions on these terms, so work can progress. An example:
Metadata here is used in an expansive way to cover not only traditional bibliographic metadata, but also descriptions for emerging resource types & metadata domains (rights, administrative, structural, etc.) as applicable to the group’s efforts.
You might also choose to include some indication of why this group or project formed or the source for the project - motivating use cases, feedback on a project or at an event, etc. This can be a helpful clarification of scope and motivations to keep proposed work on track to the surfaced needs. An example:
The above is generated from LD4 Community Meeting Feedback, which included the following points:
- ...
- ...
list your proposed outputs or artifacts for this group here. Being clear on what you're working on will help the work progress and avoid frustrations. These can be reviewed and approved by the project's members or working group via a pull request review period, through discussion on an issue, or at a meeting/call.
Conveners setup: Work through this doc, decide on our action items, have call for participation ready by [enter date when you want to gather participants in your ready working space and communication channel(s).
Group Outputs: Enter your proposed timeframe for work outputs. Focus on smaller deliverables with shorter timeframes (< 3 months), as well as parallel work to cover a few different areas of work at the same time. Shorter timeframes on smaller outputs allow us to avoid frustration at lack of output.
Group Planning: Plan on an assessment at 1 year (or earlier if things seem to not be working). The 1 year mark is a time to rotate conveners, choose new meeting times, refresh the goals, disband, morph, etc.
Decide on your primary workspace. If you're here, it will probably be like the following:
- GitHub repository in LD4 Organization space all collaborators added as contributors to our project GitHub Organization team. GitHub as our workspace allows us to use repository for versioned outputs, wiki for meeting notes and public reports, GitHub Projects for project management tracker, and Issues for discussion threads & communication.
Contact this person to be added to the repository: add if a different contact from the conveners
Decide how you want to communicate with your project team or working group. Some options are included below - you can use multiple, but if you do, make sure to indicate what is the primary channel:
- Regular calls (monthly or biweekly frequency, 30 minutes - 1 hour)
- Github Issues for discussions, questions, feedback, etc.
- Github Projects for project management (puts issues into columns for tracking work)
- Slack Channel for informal discussion (the LD4 Slack is available)
- Email list for meeting reminders, notes, and discussions of decisions. Do not use an email list for one off announcements only if possible - re-use LD4-discuss Google Group or another existing space, and use GitHub to handle work communication.
Indicate who can take part in this working group or project, and list people who have already expressed interest. You might also mention where you will solicit for participants if there are particular domains you wish to focus on / bring into the LD4 Community.
Once you have this planning proposal together, here are some items you need to do next (not all will be applicable to everyone):
- email LD4-discuss and LD4-partners to share the propose, request feedback, and get approval for moving forward;
- Create GitHub repository in the LD4 Organization for this work (or request one be created for you and conveners are added as repository admins);
- Give your GitHub workspace a README.md, WORKPLAN.md & CONTRIBUTING.md (use this proposal and our starter template repository to help fill this in);
- Email LD4-discuss, LD4-partners, and other appropriate external lists for requests for participation;
- Confirm that the group / project's name, contacts, description, and workspace link have been added to the appropriate space on the LD4 website;
- Create doodle poll for kick off meeting (even if you don't have regular calls, a kick-off can be helpful for getting a lot of group decisions made for getting work started);
- Add above folks to communication channels & workspaces:
- GitHub repository team;
- LD4 Slack;
- ...
Some email templates for the above steps are below; feel free to use (or not):
Hi all-
Thank you for volunteering to take part in a LD4 Community Working Group on [Topic].
To get this working group started, we have a few action items for you:
- Please review & note anything you’d like to add/edit the scoping documents we’ve started in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/ld4/[enter your repo]
- Add your name, email & GitHub handle to the Participants section of the README.md via a Pull Request or GitHub Issue. Alternatively, you can email that information to the conveners and we’ll add it. We’ll use that for future communications and setting you up with permissions to the Working Space.
- Put your availability for our kick-off call in this Doodle by [give date]: doodle poll link (make sure timezone support is enabled)
We will be in touch by next [date for kick-off date confirmation] with a kick-off meeting time and setting up your access to the Group’s working space.
Thanks! [Conveners' names]
Hi all-
We had a number of people express interest in forming a Working Group around the topic of [topic]. As a result, we (conveners' names) have taken on convening a LD4 Community Working Group on Reconciliation. You can read more about the proposed scope and outputs here: https://github.com/ld4/[your repo name]
If you would like to join this work, or just learn more at our kick-off meeting, please follow the steps listed at the end of this email.
As outputs are achieved and milestones reached, we will share periodic reports back to this mailing list.
Thanks all! [Conveners' names]
to do:
- Please review & note anything you’d like to add/edit the scoping documents we’ve started in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/ld4/[enter your repo]
- Add your name, email & GitHub handle to the Participants section of the README.md via a Pull Request or GitHub Issue. Alternatively, you can email that information to the conveners and we’ll add it. We’ll use that for future communications and setting you up with permissions to the Working Space.
- Put your availability for our kick-off call in this Doodle by [give date]: doodle poll link (make sure timezone support is enabled)