Weeknotes 14

Hello again. We've been really busy over the last few weeks quite apart from Coronavirus.

We are struggling a little to keep putting out Weeknotes with the usual level of polish we'd like. So we are trying a new approach where we just get it down and get it out.

These weeknotes cover weeks 16 and 17 of 2020. We have skipped week 15.

What we got up to

In Week 16, Coronavirus came home to us directly. It's obviously something many many people have been coping with. As well as the worry, it caused lots of hyperdocumentation in Notion especially for some of our technical work. Thankfully the case close to us seems like it was not serious.

We've been working mainly on consultancy work since we last did Weeknotes.

We've been building a new Drupal theme for a forthcoming campaign, working on a website and campaign software for Nurses United and completing a website for a new international political organisation that will be launching soon.

Project Retrospectives

This quarter one of our objectives is to do more project retrospectives. We pretty good at coop-wide retrospectives, having them every week, but felt we need for a deeper look given that we're currently working on lots of discrete projects.

We're putting the retrospectives in a database in Notion. We hope that this will allow us to can identify emerging themes across projects, increase visibility and change the way we work more systematically. We can maybe use this database at other reflection and feedback points like quarterly OKR planning sessions.

We use the Stop, Start, Continue retrospective format for all project retrospectives for now. This keeps them compatible with one another across time and projects. We can look back at the lists of what we'd like to continue, start or stop when we begin a new project.

We're also keen on other retrospective matrixes like Appreciations, Problems, Puzzles and Ideas. We run this during our weekly coop retrospectives.

We've not seen a database approach to retrospectives elsewhere, but if you do it, let us know.

Nurses United

We have been finishing up the website for Nurses United which should be released next week.

We did a round of user testing for it which, as usual, was extremely valuable. All of our projects have some element of user testing in, or a pause to gather feedback from a live project. Sometimes it is good to remember why you make such things as important parts of your work. Our reflection is we should have done this earlier using Figma - the design tool we use - to directly prototype. We know this would been the best move, but didn't see it until after we'd done it.

A major reminder from this round of testing was: copy is key.

In building this website we've been using Tailwind, a utility first CSS framework. We've been discussing its merits and challenges extensively internally and may publish our thoughts on this later.

Labour Together

We've had two meetings editing the Labour Together report with the other commissioners involved. We are getting into the final stages of putting this together.

Everything Else

We are also coming to the final stage of negotiation with a couple of projects we should be able to talk about in coming weeks and months.

Soon we will be also getting into our work with United Voices of the World we are very excited about.

What we're reading

We liked this use of code to explain how meetings are supposed to work from Thoughbot.

Notes From Below have set up a Workers Inquiry Writing Fund that everyone should use.

Stripe Partners are serialising their research findings on micro-organisations which we think is a good proxy for activist inquiry, something that New Socialist are focusing on as a project.

This is interesting and something for us to think about in the construction of learning platforms.