Distinguishing Between Brigade "Sanctioned"/"Official" Projects and other Projects

[Andrewyaz]

Hello Brigade Network!

I am on the Core Team of a new brigade in Milwaukee, and we are trying to make decisions on how projects either receive extra resource support from or become owned/managed by the core team vs those that simply have dedicated time and space at a hack night. I was wondering if other core teams make these distinctions and how.

Some things we have been considering with respect to this idea are:

1. The political nature of a project, and our pledge to be non-partisan
2. Our responsibility to serve the community, this cannot be completely apolitical at all times
3. Resource constraints
4. Making sure core-team commitments are manageable and sustainable (as far as how many projects we are providing extra support or mgmt support to)

Any advice or thoughts would be very helpful!

Thank you very much,

Andrew

[tdooner]

Hey @Andrewyaz, welcome to Discourse!

You’re posting in the right place-- this is a common topic in the Brigade Network.

The current Brigade policies around this have been indexed in this Discourse topic:

Project Frameworks/Guidelines/Checklists/etc

Based on recent Slack discussion, I put together a list: Code for Atlanta Connector - Projects management tool Open Austin Civic Tech Canvas Project Idea Github Issue Template Code for Baltimore civicideahub Code for Boston New Project Requirements Code for Charlotte Project Starting Process Project Criteria Project Canvas (based on Open Austin’s), has a few variations used for data exploration and community asset mapping Project Process Doc, for sharing with new partners (they a…

There is probably quite a bit more discussion to have though, as those resources probably don’t directly answer all of your questions!

[chris]

I touch on this topic a bit in the Civic Cloud proposal:

Project Charter: The Civic Cloud

About this Topic This topic is a wiki document for the collaborative development of a project charter. Let’s evolve it to a point where it answers all essential questions for a wide audience in establishing a need and justifying an approach for a proposed national project Please post replies with any questions that need answering or suggestions for improvements of the presentation or the plan itself Direct improvements via wiki editing are also welcome Background The Code for America Brigade N…

I think an important dimension to a project becoming an “official” brigade project should be ensuring a complete technical handoff of the deployment process and accounts. That means taking projects to a point where the whole original dev team can cancel an their credit cards a disappear without the project’s online components going down, and that a new volunteer could show up and open a PR and the brigade can ship that without the original team

The norm these days is brigades can’t and don’t keep anything online after the original devs disengage, and that severely hinders our reputations in our communities and the good faith available to future projects

[Andrewyaz]

Great. Thank you for directing me to all that great institutional knowledge.i will definitely go through the materials and post follow up questions in the thread