Team reports

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 5:08 AM, Simon Quigley <sqawesome99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The goal is to say organized. Team reports are an organizational tool.
> Something for you to gather everything and be able to look at it
> saying, "this is what we did this month." It can also be looked at as a
> way to feel accomplished for all the hard work that has been going on
> in your team, so you don't feel alone. So actually, I approve of the
> team reports, because it provides moral and organizational support(if
> that makes any sense).

Very well put!

I'll also add that it helps with team continuity over the years. Using
LoCos as an example again, before I moved to California I was able to
look back at the approval application to learn what the team had been
up to before I moved here. It helped me have a connection to the past
and understand the key players and kinds of activities people enjoyed
before starting to run any of my own events here. Team Reports collect
this all nicely into one space so it's easy to glance over when you're
new.

Of course this can be done with a well maintained blog too :) But very
few teams have them, the ones that do and I know about in the US are
part of the US Teams planet: http://planet.ubuntu-us.org/ The
loco.ubuntu.com front page has a planet-like feed, but it hasn't been
updated since May and I got tired of emailing IS to fix it all the
time, so it remains dead. No one else seems to have noticed.

Which leads me into the format. The wiki is very slow, and while
timeouts and lost work are less common these days, I still find it an
annoying process. And as cm-t points out, aside from the link being
published in UWN (which apparently no one notices ;)), the wiki is
often "hidden" to most teams and this leads to preparing reports being
an extra thankless effort. I probably wouldn't have fallen so behind
on writing reports myself if people noticed, but most teams I'm on
didn't even notice I haven't been doing them for the past several
months.

Historically-speaking, when Nathan Handler was running the team
reports I believe he sent out a reminder to some teams (though I don't
remember where). When I took over I didn't really do this, and there
has been declining participation in reports since then. So reminders
did help some.

But at the end of the day, most of us are volunteers. When the options
are "write team report" or "plan next event/write new feature/fix a
bug" the writing of reports tends to be dropped, even if there is some
value to the team.

If you noticed I'm undecided about the value to effort ratio of team
reports, you'd be correct. I'm not sure if more reminders, better
tooling or anything would really get us using them again or if it's
worth it.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2