team work & coms
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 design4web agreement
Let’s agree to the following points to get into a nice flow with Slack – and to keep an eye on our limits (we are on the free plan with Slack).
- team work 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 :) - 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 coms tool, not official file storage.
(and you are keeping backups of all your stuff anyway? right?!? :D)
private yet open :)
This is a suggestion only: to keep the conversations within our team open and easy to contribute to, it would be great if you used the threads in Slack ;)
Threaded replies will be attached one specific message, be hidden from the main channel and can be viewed separate from the main stream. This allows for focused conversations and impromptu chats between only a few people without cluttering up the channel.
To start or join a thread - you will use the 'reply in thread' button instead of the usual comment box. The conversation can be accessed via the link showing number of replies.
