A few weeks ago, I put together a Google Docs survey as a sort of internal reflection for the end of the school year. Five people responded out of a total of 11 people that are on our internal list. For each question I presented in the survey, I’ll add several of what I think are the most telling and useful responses.
What are a few of our strengths?
- Core team is dedicated, puts a lot of energy into content, new ideas.
- Amazing group of people with a diverse range of talents and abilities
- Our services are clearly needed and in high demand
- We’re high profile; there are a lot of people aware of and interested in what we’re doing
- We’ve started to recruit new blood; we need to keep that up
What are a few of our weaknesses?
- Too much talk sometimes, but usually better to have more than less
- A little too much bickering at times, but that goes with the territory. Too much content to sustain.
- WAY too many unnecessary tools and arbitrary deadlines
- Delegation and responsibility of tasks. There’s a certain percentage of tasks that either don’t get done or are passed from person to person
- Stackoverflow is dangerously close to what we want to build, the good news is that they’re proprietary, and run on a MS stack – we can be the open source alternative
- We don’t have a clearly defined future
Continue reading ‘Internal reflection results, May 2009′
Adam, Joey, and I sat down on the Skype this morning to talk about systems for managing hosting and finances. Before the call, however, Miles fortunately reported that he’s been working on a Django contacts app for tracking hosting and support clients. Rather than have a heated debate about which tool we should use, we’re instead going to do it ourselves. The big consideration is that we establish the foundation correctly so that we aren’t cubby-holed in the future.
Joey’s goals for the week include sending out an email with a list of all of our clients, contracts we have, contracts we’re missing, etc. as well as going through QuickBooks to identify all of the features he might need for managing our finances. Once he has this feature list, he’s going to send it off to Miles to gauge how difficult it’s going to be to build.
Adam’s goals for the week include working on drafting a hosting associate job description, finishing up the bylaws, helping Andrew Spittle with design camp, shopping around the Community Ninja position, and figuring out what we’re going to work on next. One idea is to do another iteration of our website design such that we also bring in the wiki, etc.
My own goals this week include prepping editorial content, prepping for the first official board meeting on Sunday afternoon, helping with design camp, and meeting another milestone within the first stage of the Edit Flow Project. Plus a bunch of other things.
Mo Jangda, Andrew Spittle, and I had a short conference call yesterday to discuss two things: one, how labor is going to be divided on the project, and two, how we’re going to split up work for the first stage of Edit Flow, custom statuses. Mo has done a good job on outlining the technical design for stage one, although it looks as though we’re probably going to have to break into some private WordPress functions.
In the next few days, I’m going to get the shell of the plugin up on GitHub so that everyone can start working on different parts. I’m going to work on writing a function that will tap into and alter WordPress core statuses, and Mo will do the plugin settings page. Andrew is going to start mocking up stage two because there isn’t too much UI stuff that needs to be done now.
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This Week in Startups has actually been running for a few weeks now, but I’ve finally taken the time during my run to listen to the first episode. If you have the time, I’d encourage you to listen as there are a lot of ideas related to building a CMS. Most notably, they talk about the value of using wiki-type software for topical landing pages (in this case, different verticals).
Sunday night’s call was short and sweet. Although lacking in participants (indicative of the start of summer), it was a productive discussion that resulted in changes to the frequency of weekly team calls. Daniel, Joey, Andrew Spittle and I were in attendance.
Hosting
Although Miles wasn’t around to talk about hosting, Joey got a good start on revamping the demo site. He updated it with a Woo Theme template to better reflect the sites CoPress launches. The revamped demo site has a stronger emphasis on users’ ability to login and mess with the WordPress backend.
His goal for the week is to fix the thumbnails bug and feature formatting examples on the frontpage articles.
Community
There was a lot to talk about in the community portion of the call this week. Andrew Spittle kicked it off with a brief recap of his plans for the summer design workshop. The camp will take place May 28 to July 8 through a series of conference calls and screen-sharing sessions. We’ll start promoting the camp this week through a combination of a Facebook group (which Daniel will set up in association with the CoPress page) and a Google form (which participants will use to sign up).
Thursday at 8 a.m. PST, Joey, Daniel, Andrew and I will do a test run of Adobe Connect Pro to determine its support capacity for screen-sharing. Before fall quarter starts again, we’ll feature a wrap-up of the projects that resulted from the summer workshops.
Continue reading ‘May 17, 2009: End of the weekly call’
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Daniel, Adam, Joey, Miles, Lauren, and I were on the call this evening.
Hosting
Discussion looked forward this week as Miles summarized the latest in the late fee policy, which states that as it stands right now, late payments will be compounded 2% each week. Miles also noted how he thought it would be nice if Joey send out a weekly email regarding who is missing payment, missing contracts in order to make the hosting needs meet with that of finance.
Also, the need to have a site monitoring service was brought up once again. Miles confirmed that one should definitely be in place by the fall when CoPress will be launching many more sites. Adam suggested possibly using AreMySitesUp.com.
Organization
Discussion was light this week, with Daniel and Adam confirming that the bylaws need to finished up by the 19th for the Board of Directors meeting on the 31st.
Continue reading ‘May 10, 2009: Dia de Madre’
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Friday afternoon, Andrew Spittle, Drew Geraets, Mo Jangda, Lauren Rabaino Tom Altman, and Jason Kristufek joined me on a Skype conference call to start wrapping the ideas we’ve generated for a better editorial workflow for WordPress into more concrete deliverables that can be used to draft a spec.
This was the first time Tom and Jason had been able to join the discussion, so we kicked the conference call off by discussing their use of WordPress with Gazette Communications. Tom has more of the code expertise, while Jason has a lot of experience with WordPress. At the moment, Gazette Communications is running twelve to thirteen websites with WordPress. Most of them are niche websites with one to two people interacting with the admin, but they have a few where more people are involved (Iowa.com as an example). In the near future, their flagship Gazette Online website will be moving to WordPress and will have 12 to 15 people working within the admin.
Continue reading ‘Discussing WordPress Editorial Admin Features’
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Returning from a two-week hiatus on general conference calls (due to widespread attendance at BCNI Philly), the team got back into the swing of things on Sunday night. Though we started thirteen minutes after schedule due to unrecorded conversation beforehand, Daniel, Greg, Emily, Bryan, Lauren and I covered the usual areas with an unusual amount of expediency. As such, I will reflect on the meeting using bullet points.
Organization
Goals for the next month include:
- Finishing bylaws & holding the first official board meeting (tentatively scheduled for May 31)
- Figuring out the logistics of our “Web design club” (discussed later in the meeting)
- Evaluating staffing needs for the summer and establishing how they will be covered
- Writing a spec for the “better WordPress admin”
Continue reading ‘May 3, 2009: Getting in the Groove’
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