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What Is the Guides Team Working On?

edwardsarah edited this page Oct 10, 2024 · 2 revisions

Transitioning Guides from COPs to Knowledgebase-Content

This process grew out of conversations with COP leaders that they did not want to be responsible for managing the guide-making process. The goal of the process it to take guides from the various locations across the organization where they have been created and put them in one single repo, with a standard set of labels and milestones, that the Guides team can track.

The repo is called knowledgebase-content in reference to the knowledgebase repo. Knowledgebase stores issues related to the creation of an automation to convert guide documents into markdown for the website.

There are a number of steps to this process:

Transferring Guides from the COP repositories to the Knowledgebase-content repo

The current iteration of the Guides team as of writing (10.9.2024) is familiar with this process. The focus here is just on getting the guide into knowledgebase-content without losing any material associated with it and standardizing the format of a guide issue.

Triaging Guides in KB-C

The aim of this process is to put the guide issues in a state where they are ready to work on. We need guides to be triaged so we have issues ready for volunteers to work on when we begin the workshops.

In the triaging process, old comments are hidden, appropriate labels are added, and the guide is evaluated to determine where on the process it actually is.

Ideally, at this stage we are also asking the question - should this be a guide?

Some of the issues in the guide issues suggested include:

  • Duplication across COPs
  • A topic is not suitable for a Hack for LA guide (ex. not a practice specific to our org, or very quickly become irrelevant/outdated)
  • The scope is too broad for a single guide

Writing Guidance for Guides

There are a number of phases involved in creating a Guide. Each phase is noted in the Guide issue's description (ex. 'Gather Examples Solo', 'Gather Examples Collaboratively') and links to a particular wiki page.

The wiki pages tell you what to do for each step in a phase. HOW to accomplish this is outlined in a series of slide decks.

The best way to understand the process is to pick a guide issue and try to work on making a guide.

Current Status of Slide Decks and Wiki Pages

Phase 1 & 2 Gather Examples and Overview

Up until this point, the Guides team has primarily focused on the Gather Examples slide decks and the Overview. These have been the most extensively reviewed. In 'Gather Examples' I am also including 'Using GitHub Search' and 'Choosing and Self-Assigning.'

HOWEVER

These slide decks have not been updated since we moved guide issues to knowledgebase-content, nor has it been tested as an actual set of presentations. They will need to be revisited when the transition of guide issues is complete to fix any outdated information. You could make an endless number of updates to these slide decks and never feel finished with them, the point is not perfection, it is 'testable.' More tweaks will need to be made after the workshops run.

Phase 3 - Writing a Guide

These guides have not been brought up to standard.

Phase 4 - Peer Review

These guides were updated in 2023, but will need to be reviewed and edited to reflect the new structure.

Resources

Guide Creation Presentations

How to Gather Examples: Solo - this is the first wiki page someone would encounter when creating a Guide.

UX Research - Guides Team Workshops

Once the guide issues have been transferred to knowledgebase-content and enough of them are up to snuff, the goal is to run a pilot workshop where new Hack for LA volunteers try to make a guide over a series of workshops. Each presentation in the Gather Examples: Solo series will be delivered as a Zoom workshop, and volunteers will be tracked on their progress throughout the workshop so we can identify what's working and what isn't with the presentations.

Rhoda is our UX research lead - she was developing the research roadmap and research plans. It's a collaborative process, however, because the PMs are heavily involved in deciding what we are trying to figure out and what questions are most important. Here are the broad strokes of the process, as I understand it:

  • We are (or were, as of my departure from the team) waiting on finalized templates from the Internship team. There are a number of issues in our repository copied from them that deal with UX research, but we cannot finish fixing the templates we need until they've made all of the appropriate changes. Bonnie should know the most about this, but you could also consider reaching out to the Internship team directly.

  • Once we have copied their new templates, we also need to set up a wiki structure to store our research, and Rhoda needs to fill out the templates with her research plans. We have a research roadmap already though I'm not sure how much it will change.

  • There's also the issue of recruitment. This includes the rest of the UX research team who will be working under Rhoda, a PM to manage the workshops, and the workshop participants themselves (at least 10).

We discussed launching the workshops to coincide with an influx of new Hack for LA volunteers. This may be in January, or in May/June at the end of the academic year.

Resources

Guides Team UI/UX Research Issues - this includes a lot of the template issues we created

Guides Team Research Folder - this includes templates, the research folder structure, and roadmaps

Guides: Research Roadmap: Guide Creators - our completed Research Roadmap for the workshop

Internship Team: Research Output Overview

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