Proposal - list of jobs in the space

I would like to propose a new category for discourse.

A place where we can post things that need doing around the common areas of the space. These are all areas that don’t fall under a specific a tech area like wood or laser.

Our current system is not very open and easy to get involved in as usually involves private conversations between members which puts the workload on a few people that are either skilled or happen to be in the right place at the right time.

The aim is to spread the workload and make jobs that need doing more visible.
Get more members involved and use the source of skills and talents we have in the membership to improve our space.

A place where we can post things that need doing around the common areas of the space. These are all areas that don’t fall under a specific a tech area like wood or metal.

There are a lot of things to do around the space and often people don’t know what needs fixing or maintaining.
Of course this is very much like a to-do list and we could use a task managing tool for this but we have proven before that any system outside discourse will quickly get over looked and abandoned.

What I am proposing is a new category where people can post when the see something is broken, needs maintaining or upgrading.
This can be anything from a broken light bulb to painting the floor or getting a new printer, dishwasher.

If you see something that you either don’t know know to fix or maintain or have a suggestion then post it in this category and someone else is able to pick it up and complete the task.

9 Likes

We need Agile here, tickets and Jira.

1 Like

At £7.50 per user per month and times that by 250 members we could as well just employ someone part time to fix all the stuff.

Jira is great for developers but just wouldn’t work for us. Too expensive, complicated interface, no collaborating, not part of our current system.

We need something that is easy to use, access and quick. And any new system will require more time to set up, learn and get used to which could be used doing other stuff.

2 Likes

Good one Andrea :slight_smile:

1 Like

Having used Jira extensively at work, I agree that it’s very much overkill for managing tasks around the space.

Perhaps something much simpler like Trello (which has a free plan within which I think our requirements would fit) would be enough?

Another alternative, assuming we have a self-hosted Discourse installation, would be a plugin like https://meta.discourse.org/t/tickets-plugin/97914. I’ve not investigated it in great detail, but it seems like it might do what we need, as well as providing the massive advantage that @Julia mentioned of keeping this within Discourse - an external ticketing system is no good if people forget to update it. I think keeping the admin and ceremony to a minimum is something that’s often overlooked in cases like these :slight_smile:

This is not to say that a category of posts would not be enough, but I do think that the free-form label-based admin we would end up needing to do quite quickly just to easily track things which are outstanding vs worked-on vs done, track who is assigned to what issues, etc would be painful enough that a slight bump in formality to something like a plugin might warrant the increase in complexity.

Considering discourse pricing structure I believe it’s self hosted, am I correct?
+1 for the tickets plug-in

We are self-hosted, but a word of warning: Discourse (the software platform) is under continuous development, as are plugins. Things can and do break, and the job of running/testing updates is fraught!

Besides, after reading the thread on that Tickets plugin, it seems like only Staff members can access the functionality, with people complaining that it’s ill suited for decentralised communities.

Tags are probably enough administrative overhead to make this work in vanilla discourse. TaskOpen, TaskAssigned, TaskCompleted should be enough. Heck even just editing the thread title would work.

3 Likes

I really like this idea! As a recent new member, it really wasn’t obvious how I could get involved to start with.

Best start are members meetings and coming for events :slight_smile: There was a new welcome role created to help new members with that :slight_smile:

1 Like

I’m on the brute squad. You are the brute squad! -The Princess Bride
Glenn and Mark are helping out a lot on the welcome team and I believe Glenn was the one to bring up finding better ways to connect members with tasks at the member’s meeting before last.

3 Likes

Cool! I didn’t know/forgot who is part of the welcome team! thanks

A QR code posted in the space linked to a simple Google Forms form with like 3 questions? Connected to a google sheet maybe. That keeps the gathering of data simple, yet lets us do all the nerdy stuff we want w/ the google sheet.

3 Likes