Lots of forum posts without a ticket to log time. Everything except off-topic is work and should have an associated task.
+1 to that one - please be mindful of this, when we open a forum post we need to know of which ticket to put it in. If you are not sure, ask the cell sustainability manager before posting the forum thread, otherwise it creates a burden on people to keep track of the time until it is created, in addition to have to ask about that task.
Let me take the opportunity to voice a contrary opinion to this - and by this I mean the whole āevery post must have a ticket to log timeā concept. I believe this has a limiting effect on the utility of the forum: if something doesnāt have a clear ticket, the potential poster might just avoid posting in the first place.
Plus, itās now a public forum, so what happens when people outside opencraft start posting? Are we not to answer them because thereās no ticket? Or is answering external posts to be handled by rotation, as we do the edX forum? It can be argued that either option is also limitting.
What if, instead, we instituted a personal budget for communication? A recurring ticket with a set number of hours for open comms, say. Posts (and emails, or anything else) that do have a clear ticket will continue to do so, but people will have the freedom to post (and reply) less bureaucratically about topics that are not yet clear-cut enough to have a ticket.
Say, for instance, if I wanted to propose the above on a separate thread. I must admit I havenāt the faintest idea of even which account to create the ticket under, let alone epic. And if I have to go to the sustainability manager before I even postā¦ To be perfectly honest, Iād probably just not post at all. 
Plus, itās now a public forum, so what happens when people outside opencraft start posting? Are we not to answer them because thereās no ticket? Or is answering external posts to be handled by rotation, as we do the edX forum? It can be argued that either option is also limitting.
Iād like to suggest instead it be the responsibility of the first responder to make a ticket for logging time, so that the ticket is high in the thread and everyone can log to it. For all members of the team, itās easy enough to create a ticket. For all outside persons, it makes sense for us to create the ticket for them, and I think it makes sense for the first person who decides to respond to be that point person.
As for the account, itās fair to ask in your post āhey, can someone verify I have the right account for this?ā The most important thing is that the time be logged somewhere, and that we understand what conversation it was logged for. Knowing which threads took the most developer time tells us which topics are most valued by the team-- information thatās lost if we just have a recurring āforum responseā ticket.
Creating a standing ticket with hours allocated to it also risks a tragedy of the commons on how those hours end up getting used. While we donāt want to stifle communication, we also donāt want to spend an outsized amount of time writing up forum posts, or finding ourselves in positions where we donāt respond to forum posts out of fear a more important forum post will come up later we need to have the hours for (or, say, discovering later there was a more important post to respond to and weāre out of hours while the conversation is heated).
This is precisely the assumption Iām challenging. For many things, yes, creating a ticket is straightforward. For many others, some of which would prompt a new top post, that is not the case.
To be fair, if the company/team stance is: āthe reduction in communication stemming from the ticket-to-log-time rule is desireableā, for whatever reason, then Iāll just pipe down. ;)
Well, I think Xavierās comment about talking with the Sustainability manager, for instance, was a fallback option. In most cases I know what account to put a forum post under. For the cases I donāt, and I canāt figure it out, I donāt think itās unreasonable to get a consult from the sustainability manager on those items. Those items which are hard to figure out a specific billing account have a good chance of being long-running discussions that take a lot of time anyway, since theyāre something weāve not made (or not made an obvious) category for.
So in a way, yes, that is desirable. We want to make sure that for discussions that are more likely to be difficult to pin down, that the cost of creating them is a little higher and requires us to think about how weāre handling their accounting first so they donāt overrun budgets.
My feeling is that for topics that fall in this category and are important to discuss, weāll find a way to create a ticket for because the alternative-- not finding a solution, will be worse. If a nebulous topic isnāt important enough to go out of your way to pin a target account down for, then Iād suspect itās likely to be a time sink.
As sustainability manager I wouldnāt know where to log time or create tickets for some of the discussions, in particular those related to company processes.
If we need to ask for permission or advice before starting a discussion about company processes, it will have the effect of blocking these discussions. It already happens with some topics (e.g. the last one I saw: about company rates).
Adding a sustainability manager to the process just makes it more complex, and much more likely that youāll get answers like āno, we canāt do unbilled workā, āletās wait until we update the budgetsā, āletās check in another cellā, etc.
All Iām sayinā.
@Fox has already expressed pretty well what I would have said on this, so Iāll just highlight this:
Otherwise, itās very easy to end up spending all our time discussing things, rather than actual deep work on important projects or more focused efforts on the most important discussions. Threads in the forum, like meetings, can quickly eat a lot of everyoneās time ā we need to be mindful about it, and prioritize the discussions we want to have. Having the step of creating a project and finding an account for it ensures that we donāt just shoot a post in the forum and open a new thread whenever something crosses our mind, without further precautions. Just like we donāt have the time to do everything we would like, we donāt have the time to discuss everything we would like. When something is important, taking the time to write a ticket should be the least of the concerns.
As for picking the right account/epic @daniel, remember that you manage your cellsā accounts - you can use any of them as much as you want, for any topic, as long as the sustainability ratio is right at the end. And if nothing fits, there is always the āCell managementā one that can be used.
Edit: Iām moving this discussion to a dedicated thread. Would it be ok to make it public btw?
No objections from me!
Ok to make it public.
I disagree with the details of the processes commented above.
But I agree with the original idea (forum posts related to work should have a task to log time).
Works for me!