teamwork & communications
As newly formed team, we'll best get to know each other by frequent communication. This can take any form we like, let's talk about options. For starters, we'd like to invite you to our Slack team.
Slack is essentially a messenger tool - and is very popular with web teams as it is flexible and perfect for both live chats and asynchronous conversations. Ideal for sharing code snippets, links and more - we can all help each other with various design or code problems quite easily.
We have our team, called design4web and you will be invited to join. Members of this team are exclusively students of the MA and your tutors. There are topical channels for specific subjects and you can use direct messages for more private matters. We hope you will love it as much as we do :)
Slack's workings
As we are on the free plan, there is a time limit of 90 days. This means that messages will be available for this set period only and then archived. This should not affect our weekly dealings much but is something worth keeping in mind.
If there is anything useful that you'd like to keep, make sure to copy/paste or download accordingly. There will be no way to get back to the content of the archived messages.
Threads for easy workflow
Threaded replies are replies attached one specific message. The are hidden from the main channel and can be viewed separately from the main stream. This allows for focused conversations and impromptu chats between only a few people without cluttering up the channel for everyone. We will make use of this for our team work in groups for various projects as it will make it easy to collect messages and give/receive feedback .
For more details, please read Tips on how best to use threaded messages
Slack design4web agreement
Let’s agree to the following points to get into a nice flow with Slack.
- teamwork via public channels
In the spirit of teamwork, let’s agree to favour the public channels over private messages (DMs). This will allow us all to get involved in conversations – you might not be the only one wondering about something, or asking this question :) This will be especially important for feedback on design and help with code – keep it public and we can all chip in ツ
And if you do ask us anything via DMs we feel would benefit everyone, we might just post your question and our replies to the public channel as fitting. This will ensure everyone can learn ~ and we will stay sane :D not having to repeat ourselves too much ツ - consensus on new channels
The current channels are intended to focus our conversations on certain topics and we can expand upon this. Let’s agree to vote on any new channel to avoid overload. If you have a suggestion for a new topic – please use the #general channel to propose it. We can then put this to a vote. - uploading / removing files
Feel free to upload as many files as you like, be that course related or just for a smile – we can have fun on Slack :)
Due to the limit of space for us – let’s agree to do some housekeeping every once in a while (maybe during the holidays?). After a few months, let’s all check on our files and delete those heavy ones which are no longer needed to lighten our collective load. - no guarantees
We all understand that files uploaded to Slack, or text/code pasted, is not a secure backup option. We are at the whim of Slack and its workings and while we’ve not found any issues – we have to be clear that this is merely our comms tool, not official file storage.
(and you are keeping backups of all your stuff anyway? right?!? :D)
One limitation we have, being on the free plan only, is that messages, including files, will only be visible for about 3 months. After that, they will be archived but will be inaccessible. This has not been a major issue but something to be aware of. So if there's anything important, do copy/paste or screenshot it to make a backup for yourself.