Eh. Humans. We each have our own logic.
Like mentionned , this topic will be on next team buildings meeting. We’ll come to a proposal that will be presented in a PM (hopefully somewhere in january)
For the TB-structure, i totally agree that it is not intuitive. It’s linked to the history of team building (back in the days that we went scouting) and should be revised and updated. But as many teams, we struggle with time to do everything.
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This is not really something for a plenary meeting, more for a Coordination Group, but anyway.
January seems very far away though. Can it please be an option to prioritise bringing the communication with the architects back to Edgeryders ASAP? If it would be acceptable, I’d be happy to help.
Idem for the folder structure, where I offered help in my post above. What stands in the way of accepting it?
I have a meeting with S+F on 18 December to discuss our digital comms with them, including channels, folder structure and naming conventions. I’m doing this as a member of the team Building. I propose to await the outcome of this meeting. I’ve been reading what has been said and will take this into the meeting with S+F. Is that OK for now?
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Thanks Joannes for that clarification, this was not clear to me. If possible I’d be grateful for a 2 minute chat about this. I’d like to get some reassurance that the communication will remain as easy to follow as it used to be.
After an initial meeting with the architects, some comments on my initial proposal and a review by team Building, this is the latest proposal on S+F and The Reef will communicate. We will revisit this way of working as the need arises.
Communication channels
The Reef and S+F both have their own internal channels of communication. In communicating with The Reef, S+F are willing to use the tools of The Reef in the way we use them:
- Edgeryders (collaboration forum) (with an “architects only” private category)
- NextCloud (file storage)
- Signal (direct messaging)
- Protonmail (communication with outside world)
Document filing
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The Reef and S+F have their internal own filing systems. We’d like to align their structure and naming conventions as much as possible, even if they serve different audiences. This applies to the folder of Team Building only.
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File naming conventions
- File names are the same on both filing systems. This avoids confusion and error-prone manual renaming.
- Because the architects are at the source of most documents, we rely on them to make the file names meaningful and unique.
- We propose to use the suffix YYYY-MM-DD for versioning, either at the folder or the file level
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Folder structure
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At the top level of the filing structure, we have folders that represent the various phases of the project. We propose:
- scouting
- feasibility
- sketches
- concept (=“avant-projet”)
- permit
- RFP
- construction (=“chantier”)
- project management (a folder that contains planning and other overarching documents)
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The structure under each of these top-level folders is not yet standardised, but each folder representing a phase is likely to contain a folder “plans”, because in each fase, different types of plans are being produced.
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In each folder sit the most recent version of a document. Each folder also contains a folder “archive” that contains old versions of the documents.
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We abandon the separate “Stekke and Fraas folder” but instead keep some folders within the Team Building folder “Reef only” (for example our internal meeting reports)
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to improve findability, we create a readme at the top level
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To refer to a file, by default, we point to its containing folder. This makes the reference more stable
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See the end of this post for a representation of the above.
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Protonmail
- S+F puts building@thereef.brussels in cc in all their communication about The Reef to external parties (e.g., commune, builders, etc.)-
- The first recipient of an attachment puts it on NextCloud if necessary
Action items
- Create Signal account for S+F [S+F]
- Lie delivers a short training to the architects on how to use EdgeRyders and NextCloud [Lie]
- Create this folder structure in the team Building folder [Joannes]
- Migrate the information into this folder structure (best done by two people) [Joannes + ??]
Questions
- Is it necessary to distinguish RFP & offers? (>S+F)
- Is it necessary to distinguish sketches & avant project (>S+F)
- Does NextCloud support Windows-style shortcuts, to improve findability while keeping a single source for every piece of information (>Alberto)
- What about building-related information in the finance folder (>team finance)
The folder structure would look something like this:
- team-building
- readme.odt [with explanation of the folder structure]
- project-management
- meetings TB [reef-only]
- meeting S+F
- [phase]
- plans
- archive
- …
- plans
- [phase]
- plans
- archive
- plans
- …
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I think all, except for the topics with the tag ‘The Reef’s sensitive content’
Thanks a lot for that @joannes, much appreciated.
The forum that we created for the architects - https://edgeryders.eu/c/the-reef/architects-only/434 - is also private. It can only be seen by Reeflings and the architects.
The architects also already have accounts: “francois_s” and “serge”.
Our IT manuals (Nextcloud and Edgeryders) are saved in the “Onboarding” folder > Onboarding package: Nextcloud (public link)
The “which tool for which type of activity” is included in section 4.2 of the Onboarding Manual: Nextcloud
@alberto could you please have a look at this?
What you are proposing is our working methods, so I don’t see a need to wait for explicit consent.
What I see missing from the action items though is a short tutorial on how Edgeryders works online. Is this on purpose? If it can be useful, I’d be happy to offer one.
Other than that, given that it really helps me to be able to read everything, I was wondering to bring back the architects to Edgyryders in the near future, and if not, whether you’d be willing to set a deadline on it?
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Sarah and myself (keyholders architects) have started to reuse ER for the communication with the architects and I see they have replied to one of the ER posts…
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I would like to discuss this in TB (see agenda of monday’s TB meeting), to get clarity and i would like to discuss the folder structure in TB and not clear to me if the decision of the folder structure can be limited to TB or if it needs to go to the coordination group or sth else?
It is not tags that are public or private, but categories and subcategories. Private categories have the icon of a lock. The category The Reef itself is public; two of its subcategories are private.
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During the meeting, I demonstrated Edgeryders to François on the fly. It might be a good idea to give both Serge & François a quick tour of its capabilities after they’ve been able to work with it a little longer. @Lee, you’re very welcome to do so.
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Count on me.
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@alberto I just wanted to check: is it necessary to create a new proton email address, or is this something that we can do with the account that we have?
I did not yet update the draft to reflect the comments from team Building. No actions required as yet.
We already have several email addresses under our domain name, including building@thereef.brussels.
When sending a new message from Proton, you can choose the sender:
All emails addressed to these addresses will be funneled into the same Proton mailbox. To only see those sent to one particular address, just do a search, or create a folder in which to store those emails in particular.
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@stekke_fraas @francois_s @reef-building I updated “How to communicate with the architects”.
Serge, François, could you have a look? On peut en discuter lors de notre réunion lundi mais je crois que cela ne vaut que quelques petites minutes. Dans le cas où il y a des éléments qui méritent une discussion plus approfondie, menons-la en petit comité.
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Thanks for all that @joannes, this is great stuff.
Based on the experience of the last weeks, I think I would like to raise a point of attention, which is to split lists of questions per topic. If we don’t, and we just send all our questions from a plenary in one go, it will become impossible to retrieve the replies.
I’m not saying we need to create 25 posts for all questions, but putting some structure in it (e.g. “questions about the - 1 level”, “questions about the laundry room” etc), I believe will have a big pay-off for everybody. Does that sound reasonable?
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Careful: we agreed that S&F would use the forum “like email”. Part of the deal is, no one except us sees their emails. So you are only supposed to tag them from within the (restricted) dedicated category, Architects only .
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