Much ado about ephemeral content (meeting notes, interview notes, etc)

[KatyHerrick]

I'm thinking about the best way to handle ephemeral content, e.g...
*notes about candidate interviews
*meeting notes
*collaborative planning documents for Startup Week

Google Docs is clearly the best place for such documents since it makes collaborating and editing so easy. But, if the goal of the intranet and wiki is to reduce reliance on Google Docs, do we want to keep doing this type of work there?

My opinion is yes, we should keep using Google Docs for collaborative planning and other short-term documents. I do not believe that short-term things like interview notes need to be kept from year to year, and it is okay to keep (or lose) them in our personal Google drives. To rephrase, we will still be using Google Docs to plan, but we will no longer keep them in a long-term, shared Tech@NYU folder.

I am open to having this opinion changed!

[ethanresnick]

Hey Katy,

Let's go through each content type.

Meeting notes: I agree with what you said in #2 that these are not wiki material, since they're essentially useless after 3 weeks. However, they do need to be written down somewhere (and ideally somewhere consistent week to week) because they're really valuable for people who are abroad or can't make the meeting on a given week. So far, I've been thinking that a field on the intranet, which would live on the event page dedicated to each meeting, could be the right approach. We've actually already built a version of this—it's the details field—and managed to actually use it for a couple meetings. Maybe this is good enough that we should just stick with it as the solution?

Interview notes: I think these should be kept + be findable year-to-year. That way, if an applicant reapplies, we have more context about why we rejected them last time and can decide whether those reasons still hold. So Abhi and I have already been thinking about how to add this info to the intranet, and I'd love it if you weighed in on that issue. Our goal, as you said in #2, is to "have interviewees apply through our intranet, so we have a profile of them that current eboarders can add notes to" and we'll replace a bunch of forms in the process.

Collaborative planning docs: yeah, I think these can and should be written in Google Docs in members' personal Google Drives. If a doc needs to be shared with other team members during the planning, that can happen over email. If a doc needs to be reused year over year, i.e. it's not ephemeral, it should either: 1) be turned into a wiki page (ideal) or, 2) if that's not possible (e.g. because it's a spreadsheet), I think it should be linked to from the wiki and, possibly, copied into some shared Tech@NYU Google Drive (so tech@nyu has a copy, rather than the sole copy residing with the member who created it originally, since who knows what could happen to that). However, I don't think people should ever need to browse the shared Google Drive to find stuff, since we already know that that's a horrible experience; instead, the discoverability should happen through wiki links.

Budgets: You didn't mention these above, but you did mention them in #2. As you said there, these should be kept somehow in a way that (at least the treasurer) will have access to the old ones. Abhi's been the main person championing putting these into the API, and I agree with him that that's where they should ultimately live. We haven't had time to go into the nitty-gritty of how that data modeling would work, but I just opened an issue where we can all start that conversation.

So, my ultimate takeaway is: I think meeting notes already work in the intranet (or are close to working), and budgets and interview notes ultimately make more sense there. That likely isn't be enough to totally eliminate our need for Google Drive, but I do think it would be good to wind it down to the largest extent possible, and soon. That way, we'll have one fewer things that new recruits need to learn about upfront and we'll minimize the likelihood that new docs that ought not to be on the shared Drive get put there (which I assume some people do just because they see everything else there). Does that make sense to you? Or maybe it's not worth it for now? If you were going to wind down the shared Google Drive, how would you do it? Some possibilities:

• Maybe write up a doc, which would live in the root folder of the drive, that’s a README FIRST about what should go in the drive and what shouldn’t
• Maybe remove as many docs as possible that are out of date, or that we can recapture in a more structured form (i.e. wiki or intranet)
• Maybe limit who can add things to the drive
  • This one seems the most risky, but perhaps there's some form of it that could work.

Thoughts?