Organisational goals for the next 1-2 months | General | Forum

Just some quick thoughts on where, in my opinion, we should be focuisng our attention in the upcoming month or two.

Obviously, preparing for SpaceUp is our current number one priority.

After that, I think we should really focus on incorporation.  We have the money to do this and 90% of the required knowledge.  The required next steps have been presented clearly in the relevant thread for a long time now.  There is really no excuse not to get this done before the end of March.  Sitting on all that money and working on other things when this task is so very doable makes us look bad.

After incorporation, or parallel with it, it seems like we need to lay down some more organisational guidelines.  The two things that I think should be our biggest priorities are:

• Establishing a "CSTART Engineering Process" which describes exactly how decisions get made.  It should incorporate all our recent discussions on documenting design decisions, should include making a design task tree like we have done for OHKLA, but should also describe the process of actually making decisions (when can we do this, how do we do this) and documenting them (i.e. a page of decisions which are "locked in").
• Establishing a "CSTART Project Lifecycle" which would basically be a polished version of the Green-Yellow-Red system I proposed earlier, explaining how people can propose future projects, how we can showcase likely future projects to generate/guage interest, and how we decide when to promote projects from "likely future" to "current".
• Investigating (and hopefully, but not necessarily, installing/developing) the kind of software we need to manage both of these aspects of our organisation.

It should be possible, I think, to get everything on this list done within one or at most two months of the end of SpaceUp.  With these things done we should be able to function much better as a group.  New comers should be less perplexed about how to go about helping.

Thoughts?

It would indeed be great to have these things done by SpaceUp, but I doubt we could.  Perhaps if we weren't all so busy with exams and late working hours etc. around now we could do it, with Herculean effort, but realistically I think we will just have to wait until afterward.

The one bonus to this is that the influx of people from SpaceUp could actually help us to plan the Engineering Process and Project Lifecycle.  Some of them could have good experience to bring to the discussion.