Discourse: collaboration, record keeping, and project management
Think of Discourse as our living and working space. In order to help everyone do their best work, we are careful about which categories or groups we post to.
Public category
Privacy: Every forum user can read and respond to posts in the #projects:board category, but only members of the board group can create a new topic.
Posting: Board members can post via the #projects:board category page or by emailing discourse+board-public@nycedu.org.
Notifications: No one is automatically notified when you post on #projects:board, so it’s important to mention the appropriate people. You can choose to mention the whole board or mention individuals.
If you want to be notified of every post in our public category, regardless of if you were mentioned or not, you can also follow these directions on how to keep up-to-date with every post in our public category.
Examples of appropriate content:
Default to this category because we want to build-in-public!
Group messages
Privacy: Only members of the board and forum administrators can read and write group messages. You can see a full history of our group messages in our group inbox.
Posting: Send group messages via our group inbox, by adding our group to a private message, or by emailing discourse+board-private@nycedu.org.
Notifications: Everyone on the board gets notified. Email notifications will have [PM] in the subject line to let you know it’s private.
Examples of appropriate content:
- Discussions with partners who need confidentiality
Personal messages
Privacy: Only the individuals or groups messaged and forum admin can read private messages.
Posting: Send personal messages via your messages page or by clicking on an individual’s username. You can even message non-forum users by adding their email address in the
Add a userbox.
Caption: Screenshot of adding an email address to a personal message.Notifications: Only individuals or groups included in the message gets notified. Email notifications will have [PM] in the subject line to let you know it’s private.
Examples of appropriate content
- Private contact information
Private messages are very similar to emails, but better, because the content of private messages are saved even if you need to switch email addresses in the future.
Google Drive: document creation and storage
We keep documents and assets in our Board’s private Google Drive folder. Documents need a home. Make sure they are well named and safely filed away in its parent folder. If a document title includes a date, format it as YYYY-MM-DD Title.
Google Calendar: events and deadlines
Board events and deadlines go into #NYCEDU’s team calendar along with events and deadlines from other work circles. This allows us to coordinate across the organization. Contact the secretary if you haven’t received access to the team calendar, yet.
Kudos to Enspiral for creating a Comms Guideline for us to emulate.