In-person, 2-day team brainstorming and planning sessions

in-person
meeting
brainstorming
planning
Details and agendas for our 2-day in-person sessions.
Author

Luke W. Johnston

Published

November 27, 2024

Details

  • Informal dinner on Nov 27 and full team dinner on Nov 28.
  • Main aims:
    • Understand each other on more personal levels (related to work and Seedcase).
    • Not to focus too much on technical aspects, but more on human and social aspects.
    • Become informed about other projects that we might collaborate with and how we can contribute.

Schedule

The schedule is meant as a guide only. We might spend more time on some topics and less on others.

Nov 27

Time Item
10:00 Align understandings on Seedcase
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Personal goals and perspectives
14:45 ☕ Coffee break
15:00 Roadmap, deliverables, and milestones
16:30 Wrap Up
17:30 Dinner and visit to ARoS

Nov 28

Time Item
10:00 Overview of progress and current state
11:45 Lunch
12:30 Status update with Annelli
14:00 ☕ Coffee break and debrief
15:00 ON-LiMiT and DP-Next project presentations and brainstorming
16:30 Wrap Up
17:30 Team dinner

Sessions

All brainstorming sessions start with some dedicated individual time to think and write down thoughts, then we will discuss them all together.

Maybe use stickies to write down thoughts and then discuss them?

Align understandings about the current state of Seedcase

Aim: Make sure we are all aligned with what we are building and why and for who and what it might look like.

  • It seems like there is a bit of a drift in understanding of what we’re doing, why, and how. So this is some dedicated time to assess how we all understand things and take some time to update and discuss it.
  • Discuss and brainstorm how Seedcase will look like in the end and how users might interact with it.
  • Start broad with all of Seedcase, then slowly focus in on Sprout and it’s subcomponents.
  • Lastly, Luke share his broader vision for Seedcase.

Personal goals and perspectives of what we create

Aim: Brainstorm, share, and discuss our own personal goals and perspectives on what we create and do when working on Seedcase. This is mainly to help us understand each other better and to help us support each other in working with our strengths, interests, and passions.

  • Write out and share how we each would like to see Seedcase develop in the next few years and what we would like to work on over that time.
  • Brainstorm what we can do to support and encourage these goals and perspectives in our work.

Roadmap, deliverables, and milestones

Aim: To agree on and set the priority of each deliverable and level of interest in working on it, so that we can set the order we want to work on them.

  1. Review updates to roadmap in pull request seedcase-project/community#67.
  2. Decide on the priorities for them and interest in each, then sort them.
  3. Review the deliverables at the top of the list we sorted, then discuss and agree on milestones for them and what we might (very roughly) estimate for a timeline.

Overview of progress and current status

Aim: Discuss where we are at and what we’ve done in order to connect with previous sessions.

  • What we’ve achieved so far and how close we are to an minimum viable product (MVP).
  • Discuss any barriers and challenges, both individually and as a team.
    • Brainstorm ways we can work to resolve them.
  • How does the progress and current status, as well as the challenges and barriers, align with the goals and perspectives we just discussed?

Presentations/updates

  • Status update to Annelli:
    • Broad overview of current state and status.
    • Review main deliverables and a general overview of the roadmap.
    • General update on what we’ve done in the year (e.g. with Mjølner).
    • Share any challenges and barriers we’ve had.
    • Share how we intend to showcase our work to people (e.g. with data showcases and guide).
    • Any future plans (collaboration projects).
  • Presentations on ON-LiMiT and DP-Next projects:
    • Aim: Learn about new projects, what their needs are, and how we can contribute.
    • ON-LiMiT by Daniel Ibsen (~15 min).
    • DP-Next by Daniel Witte (~15 min).
    • Seedcase by us ☺️ (~15 min).
    • Discuss their needs and how we can contribute (~60 min).

Minutes

Warning

I had forgotten to write these minutes out after the meeting, so there are some things that I might have missed or forgotten. In general, these meetings were more about aligning our understandings and discussing our overall goals and aspirations, so there were fewer concrete minutes to take.

Alignment and interests

We spent a good amount of time aligning what we understood we were building towards. Then agreeing on what we each individually wanted to be doing and working on. In the end, we all felt more aligned and understood each other better.

Signe

  • Develop in Python more
  • Expand on software design skills, such as what functionality is needed, how can it be designed, etc.? Learn about best practices/strategies
  • DevOps (e.g., GitHib Actions)

Kris

  • Pivot to focus on usage of Sprout and user documentation / user side
    • Work on the example repos, using real world data
  • Would also like to help on git4cats, but only on reviewing tasks

Marton

  • Doesn’t mind which bits, can see the usefulness of all of them
  • The problem domain is generally very interesting! 👍
  • Software engineer workflow is nice in a meaningful setting
  • Learn more on Python and the design side
  • Learn more about the researchers themselves (when they start using it)

Luke

  • More courses!
  • Would love to hire more people (for documentation+training side of things)
  • Work with more people who are excited to use this stuff that we build
  • More funding to keep going
  • Less time on wasteful IT and bureaucracy stuff

Roadmap and deliverables

We trimmed down many of the potential deliverables to ones we wanted to work on, moved several into “potential/interested” and kept only a few in “will do” or “doing” categories. We also went over and agreed that more detailed roadmaps would be on the GitHub Project Long-term Planning board.

Potential collaborators

Our meetings with ON-LiMiT and DP-Next were very helpful and informative. Since they both are early in their development, we don’t have any tangible actions, expectations, or deliverables yet. But we do plan on collaborating and revisiting these discussions in future meetings.