Last week I moved back to my home town after ten years away. I’m excited by the new challenges that this will bring myself and the company in the coming year. One facet I was particularly interested in was getting Hover Craft involved in community projects. As it turned out, I ended up getting stuck in pretty much straight away. Within two days of arriving I had taken part in my first community meeting. Our town has a small but committed group of people determined to improve the area, resources and opportunities for the people living in it. They meet regularly to discuss ways in which things can be improved.
One area they were looking to focus on was reaching out to the community as well as the diaspora around the world. Utilising technology was seen as a key component of this, be it the use of SMS texting, email or social media. The group came up with a large number of great ideas that would need to be carried out over the following months. One of the first things I was asked to do was to help figure out how we as a group could best organise our various tasks and stay in better contact while doing so.
The Solution:
With this in mind I started to look at what technologies we could use. As the group was spread out around the town and countryside and would only meet in person once a month it was essential that we were able to come up with a system that would allow use to progress our tasks. We needed some system that would allow us to do three main things. They were:
1) Communicate easily and efficiently between all members of the group
2) The ability to share and store documents centrally amongst members
3) Assign and track individual project tasks
The solution also needed to have no costs associated with it.
With this in mind I came up with a solution that combined all of the below listed applications:
a) Google Groups for communication
b) Google Drive for document storage and sharing
c) Trello for assigning and tracking task progression
Google Groups
As most communication between the group would be done using email and as most of the group were already comfortable using email and in particular Gmail, it was important to ensure that our solution for the communication problem was allied closely with this. In its simplest form Google Groups can be seen as a group email address. All members that are added as members of the Google Group will receive an email if that email is addressed to the Google Group email address, something along the lines of mygroup@google.groups.com.
On top of this the members of the Google Group are provided with a separate group-only inbox, in reality it is a discussion forum, located at a different URL, but the interface is very similar to your Gmail inbox. It was my recommendation that when possible we use the forum to create new discussions or reply to old ones, as opposed to emailing the group through Gmail. The reason being simply that the forum only contained group messages and as such it would be easier to see what was happening compared to Gmail where you may need to search through pages of random emails for the ones related to the group.
Google Drive
One of the things I wanted to ensure was that the members of the community group would not need to sign up for several different services and have the added concern of remembering several different sign in details. As the members were already signed up to Gmail/Google it made sense to go with Google Drive as our cloud storage solution. I was able to create a folder in my Google Drive that would store all our documents and then I shared that folder with the Google Group (no need to add each member individually!). With this in place each member could upload and edit all of the various documents that the group members added to the drive.
(Alternatives include Dropbox and Skydrive)
The final piece of the puzzle was how we manged all of the actual tasks we as a group would need to carry out over the next number of months.We could have just written them in a document and added it to the drive but that wouldn’t be ideal. It would be difficult to assign members of the group to individual tasks and to track how they were getting on with the tasks. Luckily there are some great project tracking services out there at the minute, for example Basecamp and Trello. We went with Trello for a couple of reasons. Firstly its free, or at least free for what we needed it for. It does offer more advanced features for a price but we didnt need that. Added to that it allowed you to create a Trello account using your Google account. This is a small thing, but again, ease of use and ease of sign up means a lot in this day and age when you are overloaded with accounts to remember. This link with Google also meant that Trello tasks could be easily linked back to Google Drive documents. This was useful as most tasks involved creating a document or two of some sort.
Within Trello you create an Org Board, essentially a logical container for related projects, called Boards in Trello, but yes, boards are essentially projects. Within each Board you can then create Cards. Again, cards are basically the individual tasks that you have broken your project/Board down into. Once you have mastered these concepts you are ready to go. As the Org Board Creator I invited all the members of the Google Group. I was then able to assign members to Cards and they could assign each other too. The cards could then be progressed from ‘To Do’, to ‘Doing’ to ‘Done’. This meant we were able to see what tasks we needed to do, who was doing the task and how far they had gotten with it.
Conclusion:
That was it basically. Most members have gotten the hang of the Google Group, some are starting to upload documents to the Google Drive and all our current tasks have been added to Trello. Its early days yet so I will write a follow up post on what I’ve learned once we really get into it. It’s not easy for many who might not have that much experience using computers but none of the above services are overly difficult to learn and even master. If you are looking to set up something similar for your community group or whatever it may be I hope the above will give you ideas on how technology and the internet can help you manage your projects more effectively. If you have any questions feel free to get in contact.
– DK
david.kivlehan@hovercraft.ie