Enhanced collaboration tools

The goal is to setup official internal QS tools for collaboration.

For that we need to choose the tools that match our requirements.

Please update the document with the candidate tools you may know or want to test and the features you would like to have.

Scope

Three tools to deploy:

• Documents management (e.g. Google Drive)
• Knowledge management (e.g. Wiki)
• Instant messaging (e.g. Gitter)
  • focus on async text messaging
  • if replace efficiently whereby as visioconf tool, why not..

Various info

• Constraints
  • Fine grain permission for doc management
  • Cost: to give an idea Google 10.5€/user/month & whereby 50€/year
• Type of service: online, self-hosted,…
  • Focus EU hosting
  • No administration tasks

How/When

• ask for contributions / list ideas (~T0+10days)
• shortlist / test some (2-3max) (~T0+20days)
• scorecard (~T0+30days)
• deploy (~T0+2months)

Ideas/List of candidate tools

Documents management

Store documents like Statement Of Work, presentations,… .

Candidates

• NextCloud
• Google Drive
• Whaller

Features

• 1/ Fine grain permission on files (some files must be private for some QS employees)
• 2/ Share some documents with people outside of QS
• 3/ Online edition
• 4/ Backup

Voter	Feature ids
@example	1,3
@adelsalle
@davidbrochart
@dmonad
@fcollonval
@hbcarlos
@jeremytuloup	1,4
@JohanMabille	1,3,4
@madhur
@marianameireless
@martinrenou
@sylvaincorlay
@wolfvollprecht

Notes:

• Jeremy: we should be careful to not roll our own solution and add maintenance and operation costs. Sure some OSS tools are cool and can be self-hosted, but someone has to keep an eye on it or bring it back up online when it goes down…

Knowledge management

Share knowledge like todo list for new employee, minutes of meetings with client, discussion on technical subject, description of technology or tools,…

Candidates

• Coda
• XWiki
• wikiJS
• MediaWiki
• HackMd

Features

• 1/ Share some pages with people outside of QS
• 2/ Support Markdown
• 3/ Backup

Voter	Feature ids
@example	1,3
@adelsalle
@davidbrochart
@dmonad
@fcollonval
@hbcarlos
@jeremytuloup	1,2
@JohanMabille	1,2
@madhur
@marianameireless
@martinrenou	1,2
@sylvaincorlay
@wolfvollprecht

Notes:

• Jeremy: for projects that can be developed in GitHub repositories:
  • "todo list for new employee" -> Contributing guide in the docs
  • "minutes of meetings with client" -> summary of the discussion in a GitHub issue. The issue doesn't need to mention the name of the client, only the content is useful
  • "discussion on technical subject" -> GitHub issue or PR
  • "description of technology or tools" -> GitHub issue or PR

Instant messaging

Exchange internal information without claimed persistence.
Any information that should persist should be stored in the documents management or knowledge management infrastructure.

Candidates

• Gitter
• Element
• Slack
• RocketChat
• Mattermost

Features

• 1/ Support efficient search in history
  • even if persistence is not the purpose, it's handy
• 2/ Support code blocks
• 3/ Support pretty previews of links (GitHub PR, etc ?)
• 4/ Channels without people outside of QS
• 5/ Connect to Gitter communities public rooms

Voter	Feature ids
@example	1,3
@adelsalle
@davidbrochart
@dmonad
@fcollonval
@hbcarlos
@jeremytuloup	2,5
@JohanMabille	1,2,3
@madhur
@marianameireless
@martinrenou	1,2,3,5
@sylvaincorlay
@wolfvollprecht

Notes:

• Martin: As much as I dislike gitter, I am not a big fan of moving to another instant messaging tool, as we already use Gitter for other community discussions.
• Wolf: I think for chat we're going to stick to gitter since all other communities are there already, and move to element once they cut the cord of gitter.
• Adrien: it's still possible to connect communities public room using your matrix account from Element -> it's a feature, maybe critical, that's the point of doing a scorecard of the features
• Johan: the point is not connecting to gitter (or whatever messaging tool) using your matrix account but rather where you want to have your community. For now it's on gitter, if we ever decide to move elsewhere, we should advertise that on the different repos.
• Jeremy: we should give up on the idea that the chat is searchable. Information should go somewhere else where potentially long discussion should happen, for example in GitHub issues. Having the chat be searchable (for example Slack) can also let people wrongly assume it is good place to put information for long term use.

Information classification

ID	Info
1	SOW/Technical part
2	SOW/Commercial part
3	Project roadmap
4	Work progression report (technical project management)
5	Timesheets (HR project management)
6	Issues (bugs, feature request, question, support)
7	Internal processes (newbies onboarding, tooling (video call, softwares), …)
8	Internal roles and structure (organization, decision process, …)
9	QuantStack templates (slides, docs, etc.)
10	Calendars (days-off, meetings, working hours, etc.)
11	Code documentation
12	Client discussions (meeting notes, informal discussions, …)
13	Internal administrative tasks (work contract, expense account, medical insurance, …)
14	Informal discussions (meeting reminder, )
15	Grant proposal (may be written with other organizations/companies)

Location / Info ID	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15
Google Drive	x	x	o	x	x		c								x
x	GitHub			x			x
Gitter						x						x		x
Visio												x		x
Client messaging						x						x
Discourse (Jupyter)						x
Google Calendar										u
GMail												x	x
readthedocs											x
HackMD							t					t
Grant websites			x												x

x: assumed location
o: possible other locations, no rights rules
c: DUER, possible other locations
t: tested
u: under used

https://2i2c.org/team-compass/practices/info-location/

Some clients block some usage - like Bloomberg uses its own Drive, so it is easy to copy-paste in our drive
There is always a copy of the reference documents on our Drive.

tags: team, internal, management