Background and goals to the CoNZealand Crew website

This is partly a development environment for the CoNZealand Worldcon.

In that spirit, we welcome comments suggesting improvements and what could help you with your job.

Tools and Philosophy

It’s our goal to try to provide suitable tools for keeping track of information and helping communication.

There are a plethora of such tools out there and it’s confusing and annoying to try to learn new tools.

[quote cite=”Norman Cates”]I know from personal experience that a new tool can often be stressful because the benefits aren’t clear, and until I’m used to it, it makes my job harder.[/quote]

Goals:

  • Provide clear information about the tools available and how to use them. And why to use them.
  • Provide self service tools as much as possible so that HODs, area heads etc have the ability to mange their own people.
  • Provide support/request tools that keep track of requests so that all crew can see the status of requests.
  • Provide tools to members on the front end of the website so they can see their status in the bid and the convention.
  • Provide tools to members to change their own information.
  • As best as possible, support devices from desktop computers to mobile phones.

Tools

Email

We have access to Google Suites for Non-Profits, so you will have a Google Suites account. This allows your email to be archived on the Google servers, along with the mailing lists.

Hence our asking that official convention business be done through CoNZealand email accounts. That way, if you ever have to leave, there is a continuity of information.

Advantages

  • Everyone is familiar with email and how to respond to messages
  • Email applications can be used offline, messages read and replied to and then sent when back online.

Disadvantages

  • Emails can reside wholly in individual inboxes. It is possible but difficult to have a shared mail box.
  • There is no continuity of information if someone drops off the face of the planet. All their emails go with them.
  • Emails tend to be person to person. Distribution lists can be used, but they are clunky and prone to email storms.

Solutions

  • We are using Google Suites with email. This allows the emails to be archived on the Google servers.
  • We also use Google Groups as mailings lists. These conversations are then archived and available for all to see.

Content Management System

Facebook

Many people are familiar with Facebook as a social platform. It also has ways of connecting people together into groups and creating events. However, Facebook is not used by some people for security, privacy and other reasons

WordPress

Instead of Facebook, we’d like to try using WordPress combined with Buddypress, a WordPress plugin. This combination allows a Facebook-like experience that is completely under our control.

This is where you are now. This site is running on WordPress.

Advantages

  • We can create an intranet with information in the form of blog posts or static pages.
  • We can create our own profiles and populate them with relevant information. Research shows that when working remotely, knowing a little about the people we are working with helps communication. So we would be asking Crew to fill in a short fannish resume. This should include relevant skills, but also something about interests. This puts a human face on those we are working with.
  • Speaking of human faces, we strongly encourage putting a profile photo, and a main picture. Again, this helps in putting a human face to those we are working with.
  • Most crew communication is probably going to take place on the Google Groups (Mailing Lists). However, the WordPress groups are available for use, or to create your own if you think that the WordPress groups are a good way of working.
  • WordPress Groups allows you to receive notifications about new posts so you can check them out.
    • There are other plugin options that would allow two way email communication. eg. We could reply to a comment or Group post via email. Since everyone is probably comfortable with email, this would allow archiving of conversations, and allow email to be used as part of the communication tools. This may be the best of both worlds.
    • We can communicate with the Crew by emailing them from inside the web interface.
  • We can put information like project management timelines into webpages for Crew to see.

Disadvantages

  • It’s a new and sometimes fragile structure. How to use this correctly is not set in stone.
  • Because this is hosted on a bare metal VPN, backups are critical.

Solutions

  • We are learning how to use this optimally.
  • We are running regular snap shotted backups of the server to Norman’s personal NAS. Recovery procedures need to be tested.

Project Management

For a project of this size, Project Management is critical.

Is has been pointed out to us that traditional project management, such as is detailed in Microsoft Project or similar is not the best paradigm because our volunteers will tend to complete tasks periodically rather than steadily.

So a timeline and task assignments are probably entirely sufficient.

We have found a project tool for WordPress called Project Panorama. It SEEMS to be pretty suitable for us. Not overly complicated, and the learning curve is pretty gradual.

Advantages

  • Panorama is hosted directly on the WordPress site.
  • Panorama provides graphical indications of progress.
  • It can be set to only show people tasks and projects they are involved with, reducing clutter in the interface.

Disadvantages

  • None spring readily to mind

Solutions

Video Conferencing

Skype

Skype is common for video / audio communication. It allows 4-5 people to communicate via video or audio. However over the years it has slowly become less reliable.

Zoom

Zoom is a video conference tool that we’ve been trialing for a while for meetings. We are finding it significantly better than Skype in terms of reliability and quality. It has clients for every platform we can find. Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Linux. At also allows people in the USA to dial in via phone to a freephone number. We are using the free version which has a few limitations, primarily a 40 minute meeting limit. But we can just reconnect again and go for another 40 mins. We may be able to make this a feature? In that a little enforced break may be a good idea…

Zoom

Advantages

  • We are finding it significantly better than Skype in terms of reliability and quality.
  • It has clients for every platform we can find. Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Linux.
  • It also allows people in the USA to dial in via phone to a freephone number.

Disadvantages

  • A new tool.
  • We are using the free version which has a few limitations, primarily a 40 minute meeting limit. But we can just reconnect again and go for another 40 mins. We may be able to make this a feature? In that a little enforced break may be a good idea…

Chat

Instant communication

There are many tools that allow instant communication nowadays. Facebook Messenger, Slack, Zoom and we could go on.

With our Google Suites capabilities, Google Hangouts is another chat mechanism that we will have available by default.

Chat communication is useful for quick conversations. Many clients will keep a record of the communication in the various channels.

We’re not sure what instant communication tools we should use. Inevitably, some people will have some but not others. We are considering Slack in that it can create multiple group channels if needed. It also has quite a lot of support for interoperability with many tools like WordPress.

Mattermost is an opensource tool with much the same functionality as Slack.

Advantages

  • Most of these tools are relatively easy to use.
  • Instant and live chat
  • We would want one that lets us create groups where the chat threads stay organised.

Disadvantages

  • Instant and live chat. 🙂

Google Tools

Google Drive and Team Drive comes with our Google Suites acocunt. We have a reasonable amount of webserver space that we can use but Google has the entire infrastructure of Google behind it for backups and international communication. As a non-profit we have a business account for free. You can go to drive.conzealand.nz. This will show you your personal CoNZealand drive and the Team Drives shared with you.

Advantages

  • Google Drive and related tools allow user based security for access to folders, files etc.
  • The entirety of the Google infrastructure is behind Google tools.
  • Google docs allows shareable documents, spreadsheets, presentations and so on.

Disadvantages

  • Our data is on the Google servers. There may be security or privacy concerns there. But so far Google has appeared to be trustworthy.
  • For information about data security and privacy, Google has a Security page
  • Our understanding is that Google Suites accounts do NOT use this data for advertising or personally identifying information, and do not automatically connect other Google accounts.

Solutions

  • Every crew member gets a @conzealand.nz account that can be used for documents and so on. WIthout this account, crew will have very limited access to information.

Member Tools

Our member information is critical for us. We need to be able to administer it internally. And ideally allow members to log in and see their own information, and update it. There are any number of solutions for this, some paid. We are evaluating some of them

Worldcon 75 membership system

FREE. This system was created by Worldcon 75 (Helsinki) for their membership system. We are trying to get help to install and evaluate it. We need to find out how it works. This would create a membership system that we hold locally.

CiviCRM

FREE. CiviCRM is a Constituent Relationship Manager plugin for WordPress that has been developed for non-profits over many years. It’s very deep and wide. Norman has been testing it out to see if it’s suitable.

Norman says, “CiviCRM is huge. It has enormous numbers of options many of which would be useful for us. For instance, out of the box it can keep track of organisations and members. It can join families together.

It allows emailing to our members directly out of the interface. It has a plugin that allows creation of attractive emails, much like MailChimp.

We can keep track of volunteers and their skill sets.

It has some small limitations around upgrading or downgrading memberships. This can be dealt with via custom code.

It has its own plugin architecture with various useful plugins available for free.

It has its own API and REST interface for communication with the outside world.

Grenadine

PAID. Grenadine was developed by fans over a number of years and parts of it have been used over the last 10 years for Worldcons. This has been at a steeply discounted rate. In the last few years Grenadine has added pretty much a full management interface which allows registration, websites, mailings and so on. It’s largely become Convention Management in a box. But all this comes at a price we might not be able to afford. We are investigating if we can get cheaper pricing.