We have deployed the Mattermost link, and outside contributors can now chat with us by visiting the Matrix room at this link. The website is nearing completion-- it just needs some links filled in, some photographs of team members, and then a contact form.
Aside from that, the site’s deployment needs to change a bit, so that either the app and the wordpress site can share a domain, or else the domain of the app is changed and the new website is at Listaflow.com. At that point we’ll be ready to announce more widely the work we’re doing as we’ll have a central portal for people to jump in and start participating and trying out the software.
The relatively recent change to show team members who hasn’t responded has greatly increased the participation rate, as I’ve been able to ping anyone who has missed their check-in. That’s given us much better visibility on the team’s progress and concerns. We’ve also gotten good feedback from less technical team members that the software is easy to use and understand, which is great praise for the UI/UX work that @Ali and @cassie have put into the program.
We have been banking much of the hours from month to month budgeted for the project, so we now have the room to start making bigger changes. However, we have also had the great fortune to have OpenCraft filling back up with client work. Thankfully it looks like Cassie will have some free time to work more on the interfaces we need to make the product more streamlined. We do still need refinement of chasing, although with the recent info on who has and hasn’t completed the work, it’s already much better there. However I realized as we were looking over how much better the completion rate was for OpenCraft that I wasn’t 100% sure we relayed this feature to the Core Contributors, so I reached out to @sarina and Dean today to let both of them know of it in case they didn’t already, since as I understand they’re both most involved in raising the participation rates.
Depending on how well the current changes handle their needs, we may either continue designing the chasing for now or circle back to it later to take care of some other critical functionality, like team management or checklist authoring.
The link sends to a meeting video, I think it’s the wrong copy-paste ;p
That’s great to hear! And +1 to try to apply this to the core contributors sprints, it would be really useful to the project to increase the response rate there too.
How do you usually contact the people who haven’t replied, by email? Maybe facilitating this ping would help, as there are much more people to reach out to there I think. Not automating it fully (otherwise that would defeat the purpose), but maybe a free form field for a custom message, that would then be sent automatically to everyone who hasn’t replied? I would be happy to help chase people btw, especially with such a feature that would make it straightforward.
No, I ping them on Mattermost, which has been working quite well. It almost always works and brings the submission rate way up. Pretty much the only people not responding now are Sabine and whoever is on vacation. Since Sabine hasn’t onboarded to our processes, it might make sense to remove her for now, but we could also try to push for further onboarding when she’s back from leave.
This sprint was very productive for Listaflow. We got two dev tickets knocked out – one on improvements to the archive UX, and one for pluggable Terms of Service and Privacy policy links. We also got several non-dev tasks handled-- The Terms of Service and Privacy Policy were finalized, we added a sign-up form to the marketing site and @cassie has more or less finished it.
So, we plan to launch the site on Friday, migrating Listaflow itself to app.listaflow.com while listaflow.com will be the marketing site. Normally this would be a no-no, but since it will be mid-sprint, no one’s workflow is going to be interrupted if there’s some disruption over the weekend. This was when Ryan was soonest available to work with us on this.
Ryan is doing a deep-dive on the Listaflow website SEO/Marketing strategy, using the original outreach planning document as input for a more comprehensive plan. I expect we’ll keep working with him to get the product reaching a much wider audience.
Woo! It’s been a minute since I’ve been out. Here are some updates
We launched the website! Yaaaaaay! https://listaflow.com/ is now live :D The app has moved to https://app.listaflow.com/ as planned, and the transition mostly went smoothly-- there was a bit of confusion with the way the certs were being generated, but this got resolved without too much fanfare.
The Listaflow chat on our Mattermost instance and on Matrix are now synced! Note that this means that all messages in the #Listaflow channel will be publicly viewable, so be sure not to put information about, say, production secrets of our deployment there, but be ready in case any visitors swing by
With the website going live, marketing is now underway: Ryan will be working on some blog content for us and also will be making some contacts for Open Source podcasts/YouTubers/etc for us to do interviews with to boost our profile. That should increase our visibility and hopefully net us some more contributors
They go to contact@. The subject line is ‘Listaflow Beta Signup’.
Initially this was the plan, but at present we’re just using a Matrix channel and this existing forum thread. This is mostly because I want us to be quite responsive to our initial folks joining, and figure most of them will want to prod us over chat to start. Besides, since most of the code for the site itself is on GitLab, GitLab issues can be used for more long-form Listaflow discussion for things that are best suited for that.
We can re-evaluate as things progress in case we end up with too much activity in the chat, for instance. But for now I’m wanting to err on the side of being more available and quicker to respond.
@Fox Thanks, sounds good! I’ll also keep an eye on both
For the forum, that’s fine to start without, but I mentioned it because they generally have different use cases, typically along the sync vs async lines. Some people prefer one, some the other.
@Fox@cassie I came across what I think is a small bug when I was filling out my “Sprint Retrospective and Planning” checklist today . Even though I had answered the two required questions (questions #1 and 2), the notification below the submit button still appeared (i.e. “2 required items remaining”). I also saw the “submit incomplete list” warning after selecting the submit button.
I played around with the checklist a bit more, and see that the notifications don’t seem to appear and disappear when they should e.g. when the user enters all required responses and then removes them, the warning notifications should reappear.
Are either of you experiencing similar issues on your side?
@Ali Thank you for spotting this I hadn’t seen it before. And some weird things happened when I tried to capture what I was seeing. So thank you again!
*** I’ve since realised the above issue might be because I’d previously entered items into the two mandatory questions. I did however remove them and refresh. It should pick up that nothing has been entered in question 1, even if previously entered.
Review Video 2
Issues we need to test and add to tickets:
“None of the above” answer in Question 2 is not easy to spot
There seems to be some weird things happening with checklist submissions, Ali got an error, and when I submitted without filling in the mandatory items the checklist submitted. I think we need to do some testing here.
“x items remaining” does not update in real time but does on form refresh. This is confusing
It’s not easy to deselect items, on the lists, eg:
As discussed with @Fox I’ll create issues for some of the items mentioned above We also need to do some testing on some of the items mentioned before we add any other issues.
Ryan joined us today and we got an update on his progress contacting folks at the Ubuntu summit. We may have a guest appearance coming soon on a podcast, so stay tuned for that
Ryan will begin working with the software locally to understand it better before writing on the initial blog posts. Cassie will begin the design/setup of the blog.
There were a few bugs recently found (noted above) that are likely linked to the upgrade to providence. It’s unclear whether this is a bug in providence or else an issue with code that previously worked even if it should not have, and the changes to providence revealed an issue. In any case, @cassie will be creating tickets to investigate.
The design for read-only checklists also fixes several issues with the display of lists and runs that were difficult to pin down previously. The changes in these designs have been spread over three tickets, which have been assigned in the upcoming sprint.
Hey @Fox, we have some thoughts after discussing this a little internally. Here are my assumptions:
We want to grow the number of people using and contributing to Listaflow, with the goal to help polish the product and put it on a sustainable long-term path.
Because there isn’t a self-serve mechanism for people to try Listaflow, and it’s not particularly easy to spin up instances for trial on your side, we’re going to be encouraging people to install and try it on their own.
If they try it and like it, but don’t want to manage the infrastructure and updates, then we’ll encourage them to enroll in the Beta program, which is (or will become after some future 1.0 release date) a pay-per-user service.
If these are correct, we may need to take down a few hurdles even before a big marketing push. Here are our thoughts and questions:
Our primary call-to-action right now is “Join the Beta”. It seems like this should be “Install & Try It” (or something like that), pointing to documentation and a process accessible to our target audience.
Right now the GitLab documentation for installing Listaflow seems to require a Kubernetes cluster. I lost the link you shared in the meeting. Was that pointing to a simpler, localhost Docker install guide? I hope so. If not, then I think we need to create one or else we’re going to lose all but the most interested, skilled, and committed samplers.
In addition to written documentation, a video showing how simple it is install Listaflow on one’s own machine will lower the perceived bar further, and is something we can pull together or help edit within a reasonable amount of hours.
This all assumes people will be interested enough to jump these hurdles to try it. We may need to create some simple demo videos or equivalent to motivate people further to make the effort. While we’re assuming there are open source friendly organizations that would adopt Listaflow, and within these organizations there are people who are fluent in Docker, Kubernetes, etc., we shouldn’t assume these are the same people within these organizations who want to try Listaflow. I feel like we need to lower the barrier to entry, else our publicity campaign is going to fall flat.
These are my assumptions and related thoughts. Please correct and respond as appropriate. Thanks!
Thanks, @ryangorley ! These assumptions are pretty close to correct, and your suggestions on next steps seem sound to me. I’ll create some tickets in the backlog for addressing these items.
@ryangorley brought his associate Chris who helped out by cultivating a list of podcasts to contact about an interview. Currently, the app is undergoing come changes to run/list listings, which are ongoing. A fix is almost in for the state management issue (that is, the thing that’s keeping the app from showing that it’s saved the user’s choices).
@cassie let us know that the design for the blog is ready to go for when our first article is written. We discussed making an intro video for people coming to try Listaflow for the first time in order to recruit additional devs.
IMPORTANT NOTE: After the meeting I had a chance to look over the budget. We need to freeze work for now. All tickets currently in the sprint can stay, but we’ll not be taking on further work until January except in the case of emergency fixes. This is due to a couple of tickets exceeding estimation in this last sprint, as well as factoring in the hours from Ryan’s team. The result is that we have about 16h left for the year.
@ryangorley : Go ahead and quickly create the GitLab issues you needed to with Chris and we’ll circle back come January.
@Fox I need to create those tickets for the marketing website, so I’ll go go ahead and do that. But we can discuss the marketing website changes in January
@cassie@Fox I’m interested to hear what you think about making some changes to how the logo is displayed in Listaflow emails.
Feedback we received from some Core Contributors is that they don’t really understand the purpose behind the Listaflow questionnaire. @antoviaque and I were wondering if it might help to replace the Listaflow logo in the emails with the Open edX logo (“Listaflow” might not mean much to contributors, but “Open edX” does). We could then make the Listaflow logo a bit smaller and move it into the email footer. What do you think?
We also spoke about possibly changing the title of the CC checklist to include “Open edX”. Maybe it could simply be, “Open edX Sprint Retrospective” / “Open edX Sprint Retro”. Interested to hear what you think about these ideas.
I’ll also keep an eye on both 
. Even though I had answered the two required questions (questions 
I hadn’t seen it before. And some weird things happened when I tried to capture what I was seeing. So thank you again!
