Background

As the complexity of the EBP stack and team has grown, it has become harder to coordinate efforts across our team members. We have people in different time zones working on totally different parts of the stack, and newcomers to the community who are trying to find ways to get involved and participate in team processes. While we currently track progress and items in GitHub Issues, this is challenging for a few reasons:

• Issues are split across dozens of repositories, and it is hard to know where to keep up with new developments
• We don't have consistent processes for signaling intent and current activity, which makes it harder to coordinate
• We don't have a consistent process for requesting help from others

I think that we would benefit from having an "Activity Board" that is a single place to keep track of what we're working on across the project. The board would have two kinds of columns, detailed below:

Task Management Columns

These columns follow a basic task management workflow:

• Each team member chooses 2-3 issues that they plan to work on next, each of these goes to an Up Next column on the board, and the team member's that plan to work on it "assign" themselves to the issue.
• When a team member actively starts working on something, they move that card to an In Progress column. Issues in this column are expected to be closed within a week or two.
• When a team member finishes an issue and it is closed, it is moved to a Done column.

Team Coordination Columns

These columns are for highlighting and sharing information with team members:

• An Information column has important team information in it. For example, if somebody is taking time off, mark it here. If there's a meeting coming up, list the issue here.
• A Needs Discussion column should have 2-3 issues that require active discussion and decisions before moving forward.
• A Needs Review / Help column should have issues that require a team member to review or provide feedback (for example, on a PR).

A prototype board

I put together a prototype board here: https://github.com/orgs/executablebooks/projects/7?fullscreen=true

Thoughts and feedback?

What do others on the @executablebooks/ebpteam think of this proposal? Does it seem like it will improve our transparency and coordination? Does it seem lightweight enough that it is easy to follow? Or will it be cumbersome and unlikely to be updated?

Perhaps we can discuss this in the team meeting on Wednesday!