Communication Guidelines

Communication on a project is a notoriously hard problem to solve. It’s especially hard at a volunteer group like Open SGF. It’s the responsibility of each individual volunteer to ensure that they are doing their part to streamline communication and keep everyone on a project informed. This document provides guidelines for how to achieve that.

What’s Important To Communicate?

When working on a project there are three key types of information to share: discussion, decisions and progress.

Discussions

Discussions are the lifeblood of communication. They are often required in order to make progress on a project. While it’s not important to communicate every detail from a discussion, it is important to communicate the outcomes.

Decisions

This is maybe the most important piece of information to communicate. If others working on a project aren’t aware of the decisions that are being made, they will likely waste time and effort working on the wrong thing or working on the right thing incorrectly.

Progress

Communicating progress on work is crucial. In many instances, one person’s work on a project has a major effect on other pieces of the work. It’s important that this information is shared with others on a project regularly.

How Do We Communicate Important Things?

It’s important when communicating important information that the communication remains transparent. We use a variety of tools for communication. Here’s an overview of each and some guidelines on what to put in each to ensure communication.

• In Person Meetings

  • These are a great place to have synchronous project discussions. However it’s important that major decisions and outcomes are accessible afterwards.

  • These can also happen outside of regular Open SGF meetings, but it’s important to transparently communicate with others that a meeting is happening, where it will be, and what will be discussed.

• Discord

  • Discord should be used as a mechanism for notifications to others on a project and a place to have discussions that don’t have an obvious place.

  • Avoid using DMs for discussions about the project. Opt instead to have it in the project channel but in a thread.

• Plane (and sometimes GitHub Projects)

  • This should be our source of truth for a projects progress. Because of that It’s important that tasks are kept up to date on their status.

  • It’s also important to note that this is a tool that’s common across developers and designers. This means that decisions that affect both should clearly be documented here.

    • This also means that this is the ideal place for questions and discussions between designers and developers

• Outline (docs.opensgf.org)

  • This is a tool that’s ideal for long form written documentation. It should be the primary place for

    • Meeting notes and agendas

    • Project requirements and documentation

    • Process related documentation

    • Contribution logs

      • A weekly status update written by each volunteer on their work specifically

• Github

  • The primary place for:

    • Source code

    • Technical requirements (ADRs) and technical documentation

    • Code reviews and resulting discussion

  • Developers should strive to be transparent about their progress by opening Draft Pull Requests ASAP and regularly pushing their code.

• Figma

  • This is the primary tool designers use for their work.

  • As designers are working together and need to communicate things to the other designers, they can and should use the Figma comments feature