Make decisions and share early and often
At the end of last year, we delivered a robust digital strategy to Julie’s Bicycle (JB), an organisation working at the forefront of the climate emergency and its intersection with the arts and culture industry. Together with our friends at Outlandish, we are at the beginning of a journey to:
“grow a welcoming Open Source platform and experience that gives the international cultural community the shared knowledge and tools they need to take creative climate action with measurable impact, inspiration, confidence, and solidarity.”
What is the Creative Climate Platform?
Well it isn’t one single thing, it is a series of technical and social solutions that will help JB have the impact it wants to have in the world. Each piece of the puzzle is complex. There are multiple communities in play, multiple sets of tools and resources. There are a variety of ambitions and pre-existing partnerships.
We know that setting up an open project can help JB. An open project can help them receive creative input to its product(s). We can establish some sustainable processes that will help JB staff, partners and community members get involved. We will showcase solidarity and understanding with what JB’s audience needs and wants.
Another Architecture of Participation (AoP)!?
We’ve applied our AoP framework often enough that we have a special page on our website to explain it. We’ve mentioned before that an AoP is a contextual exercise and with Julie’s Bicycle we have a blank canvas. The Creative Climate Platform is in its infancy, and we’ll be kicking off the Discovery phase of the project while maintaining the various components as separate projects and relationships. Because the work is to bring things together in the best possible way, we have an opportunity to ensure that our set up is tested and robust, using the best practices of open source.
Establishing the System Ecosystem
As we set up the project out there in the wild of the Internet, it’s important to establish and document a system to run the pieces we need. A “system ecosystem” is simply a map of exactly which tools your project is using. These maps can be more or less complex depending on what the project is. For example, a highly technical system ecosystem may have notes about the kind of tech involved (e.g. middleware, database, front-end). For our purposes, we just need a simple map of our systems.
We’re well aware that this won’t cover everything, but if we’re going to build a minimum viable product, we’re going to need a minimum viable set-up. Broadly, there are three categories of tools we know we’ll need right from the get-go:
- Code Repo & Issue Trackers — We intend to use a public Trello board for project management tasks and actions. We will use Github for code repositories and utilize Github’s issue tracker for development tasks.
- Communications & Feedback — The Digital team has a Slack channel hosted by Outlandish. We will use this for team coordination. We will publish regularly about the project to a bespoke Medium publication (TBD!). We will tie in with JB’s marketing team (e.g. Twitter) for sharing of outputs from the project. Another mechanism is an email list where the team can share outputs.
- Documentation & Project Overview — We will continue to use Google docs for project documentation, planning and notetaking. We will spin up a site / wiki (TBD) at project.juliesbicycle.com (TBD) to house an overview of the project, evergreen project documentation, contribution content, and other public facing resources about the project.
We haven’t made all the decisions yet! The TBDs above are things we, as a team, need to discuss. However…
Release Early and Often: Comms
One of the biggest problems in the world of open source is the flow of information from maintainers and/or paid staff to the wider community. It takes transparency and translation to take what is said at a meeting and turn it into documentation that everyone can refer back to. For products, this can be quite an easy translation — things end up on a product roadmap and in an issue tracker. When a project is a bit more complex, involving community engagement, storytelling, partnerships and more inter-personal relationships, it can be easy to lose track of where and how decisions were made.
The work of engagement is essential to this sort of project. So, in an effort to be fully transparent with JB staff, community and partners, we’ve created a communication ecosystem and workflow. This will help people understand how we move information from “inside” the project to become community engagement resources.
Open Licensing
For our engagement content as well as eventual resources in the Creative Climate platform’s E-Learning Library, we’ve recommended Julie’s Bicycle use the CC BY-SA license. This allows people and organisations to use and remix the resources, but crucially requires them to also share any derivative works under the same license.
Software licenses are a bit more complicated than permissive licenses such as Creative Commons. In this area, where almost every codebase includes code from elsewhere, instead of the default ‘All Rights Reserved’ approach of copyright we use copyleft licenses. We recommended the GNU Affero General Public v3 (in green). This closes some loopholes and adds SaaS competitor protection — other organisations providing a service based on the codebase would have to release any modifications to the source code.
You can read our full licensing recommendation here.
Get involved
We’ve found that specifically establishing and publishing the open standards your project will adhere to is a good way to make sure that typical problems around communication are mitigated. We, obviously, have more to do in this arena, but we are setting our intentions for the Creative Climate platform out loud!
We see contributing to climate-related open source projects as a way to use tech, design and collaboration skills to help impact-focused organisations respond to the climate emergency. There’s plenty to do, no matter what your experience or skill level — leave us comments or send us a note to get involved!