played around with design ideas to display the member count on top of the member list
Bruno suggests to put a chat bubble for each member there as well, Janina is not a fan of too many buttons there, Tilmann says the karrot buttons could also go away as it makes the list very slow to load
Bruno reminds of the open issue to potentially remove the group invite feature as it makes it possible to smuggle people into a group without going through the application process
Janina points out that it could be cool to have the possibility to sort members by karrot count
another idea is to display active members in groups of editors, members and newbies
a complete redesign of the member list could be useful at some point…
Promotion and headhunting
more people on the team would be great - but how to get them?
mastodon seems to be our best shot so far; there is some engagement so we just keep it going
Janina will have a call with Big Belly Taiwan to tell them how foodsharing works in Germany
Solikyl using places on Karrot for discussion (Bruno)
Karrot doesn’t have much space for casual chatting, so chatting places are talked about: one for random, one for board and one for managing applications
the places are marked with ‘[+]’ prefixing the name
so far only the board place was created but others will follow
still early to evaluate how it works, Bruno will keep us posted
Connectors between Karrot team and specific groups
enhance personal contact, formalize what’s already happening and create connections where they are missing
everybody present can imagine taking over some contacts
Nick is interested in pursuing this more when he is back in Göttingen
Tilmann made backend dependency upgrades work again; also had a look at automatically marking wall messages as read
Tilmann wonders if the wall message marking is important enough to put a lot of time in solving this
there are some issues because of the two different possible reading patterns
messaging generally is complex, Tilmann would have rather never implemented it; Nick points out that it’s the feature everything is about in the end - but now it’s too late anyway since we already have it
Tilmann doesn’t like to work on the conversations, he finds it frustrating because it still doesn’t work properly and he gets the feeling that he will never get it to a satisfactory state
Nick and Bruno suggest to identify smaller issues, maybe get more feedback from the community about what actually is annoying or missing - that way it could also feel more motivating because there’s an immediate user need
Hi Tillman.
yes, if i get everything right, we can join the https://meet.jit.si/karrot at sunday 08-16 17:00 (UTC+2)
As we’ve never used the software: do i need to sign up or something?
Thank you
That’s right.
You just need to open the link in a browser, no signup necessary. It will use your computer’s microphone and speakers, so you might want to make sure they work
update with Fausto about what’s happening in Quito, Ecuador
There is foodsharing Quito, but Karrot is not used much to organize it. People rather just go to the store and do the pickup.
Foodsharing Quito does have official cooperations, even though some have stopped due to covid.
Karrot (the old foodsaving group) is used more for a new urban gardening project.
Another idea (dreaming stage): Use Karrot to connect and distribute free sleeping spots.
Right now foodsaving and other things happen in the same group and Fausto prefers it like this to not have everything separated.
Bruno and Nick recommend to switch that group over to the general purpose theme, then people can try it out and see if it makes more sense.
Fausto looks at MLH Local Hack Day group on dev.karrot.world and agrees that the general purpose theme fits better. Nick will switch the foodsharing Quito group over.
Could be cool to have the general purpose theme translatable - in this case to Spanish. But for now it’s not that importan since only a handful of people use the Karrot group anyway.
Fausto unfortunately got connection problems and left.
schedule co-working
check-out
2. Actions/Outcomes
co-working on Thursday 3 pm, and potentially more spontaneous dates
everybody go through previous roadmap meeting: Roadmap meeting
3. Next
Next meeting: 2020-08-23 11:00 (UTC+2), followed by roadmap
Next facilitator: Bruno
Where: Jitsi Meet
image upload is live, Bruno immediately informed the bike kitchen people
they asked about the limits of picture size
Nick wants to improve that at some point because the square crop really doesn’t work for graphics with text and/or detailed information. This may take a while though.
PWA, offline features and quasar cli
Tilmann went on a bit of a journey:
first he wanted to build something that would let you open the camera from within the app to directly take a photo and not only have the option to choose one from the gallery
he found that it would be cool to progress in the direction of PWA instead of having an extra app, because than we could also use more things from libraries of the webapp
quasar cli bundles all the fancy features from the webapp
Bruno asks if having a PWA would make the app superfluous, Tilmann says yes
Nick points out that PWAs can’t go in the play store but TWAs can - it’s a different kind of wrapper, this time from google
is the app even used to much? Bruno has the impression that people use Karrot more in the browser anyways
iphone
the topic just came up when talking about the previous one
grafana shows that the most used os are iphone and android comined
Janina says that we should maybe finally ask in the community if someone wants to gift us their older iphone in case they plan on getting a new one so that we can do testing with it
Bruno thinks it’s a great idea even though he didn’t get any complainty anymore
Tilmann would just hope that safari improves and that all the iphone problems go away magically because he’s really tired of fixing frontend bugs
playground and signing up
people are often confused to end up in the playground group after signing up, Bruno had recent examples again
the plan is to make playground a closed group, there are already prs in the pipeline
newly signed up users would then not be added to the playground group anymore but directed to the group gallery
it would be cool to guide them more to groups which might be interesting to them, maybe based of geolocation?
the tab in which the signup happens often already knows the group people want to apply to, but after signup a new tab opens and that doesn’t have the information anymore - this might be the main flaw in the signup flow
Tilmann suggests that it might be time for some kind of backend store
Nick likes the idea of using geolocation to show likely relevant groups more prominently
sorting in the group gallery divided in the two categories ‘nearby’ and ‘rest of the world’
it’s a local buying and selling thing, so it might explain the people looking for car offers in the playground group
name conflict? trademark? who knows!
Foodsharing groups in Sweden
other groups using places in more general purpose ways (meetings, drop-offs, fridge cleaning), like other groups have been doing
bought foodsharing.se! what to do with it? maybe run karrot on it and migrate all the swedish groups to it?
a simple info page seems a good idea for now
open questions: do we want to split the swedish groups by topic and have them on different domains? do we want to isolate sweden in the way that it’s on their own instance and not really connected to foodsharing groups in other countries?
More on governance
very nice call, but was expecting a few more groups to participate
was hopefully going to lead into design process
challenge to get people comitted, how to get people to participate in a whole design process then?
how to motivate more connections/exchanges between foodsharing groups? foodsharing.de groups have been talking about some of it!
possiblity to create “foodsharing sweden exchange” (for example)
but perhaps having more open/public communication outreach
within Gothenburg group, wondering how to avoid hierarchies, and maybe with more specific roles, working on defining store co-ordinator role but concerned how to avoid creating power roles, but important to create a contact person for the store, or guidance for doing pickups
seems important to make it really clear what this role is: rights and duties, and things you cannot do (so people can complain about those things)
Date: 2020-09-20 12:00 (UTC+2)
Facilitator: Bruno
Participants: Bruno, Tilmann, Janina, Nick
1. Agenda
check-in
NordiCHI new channel + money stuff
October 26th
we’re quite unclear exactly what is involved
fees are a big barrier to participation as we don’t have income
custom activity types, name for “pickup”, recap?
type names would not be translatable
issue of templates + existing groups
idea to keep translations for common names, when you create a group you can choose one of those “suggested” names, which then gets copied in as the name
idea to detirmine the language of the group (manually, by checking the wall, or automatically by looking at the most common language of the users in that group)
the concept is we’re relaxing the concept of all groups having a centralized concept of a “pickup”, but now we’re moving to custom names, so the complexity comes with the transition
idea to maintain a standard set of activity types in the translation system that can be used if they want, OR they can use a free text field for the type
lingering question on how to implement these predefined-types, just in translation files, or more deeply in code, or something, and how it relates to how the group templates would be defined
thinking of groups that might benefit from this work to get involved more, toy library would be a candidate, slowly moving towards possibly adopting an organising tool
existing uses for custom activities are meetings, distributing events
another idea, the predefined names are only used for the purpose of migrating existing groups, new groups would have to define them
production deployment
most of the special handling of the playground group removed
otherwise not many noticeable changes
hold off to fix small issue with app relating to migrating to quasar app
need a bit more testing of dev PWA app, in particular push notifications
TWA stuff
way from google to get the PWA into the play store to replace the cordova app
tool available for apk building (bubble wrap), but seems a bit heavy/confusing
the web part and app part need to declare things about how they relate to each other, so need to be built together (currently we build seperately), or somehow solve it otherwise
initial POC TWA was created, but still WIP FYI YMMV IIRC, (USB cable missing from SOFA)
we don’t currently have older android devices, but maybe some people around kanthaus do
tilmann has some motivation to continue on this!
some confusion around the connection between the web browser version, installed PWA, and TWA based on the PWA… some handling seems available if level-10 PWA master level is achieved
query about how google-dependent we become? some support from apple for PWAs
“pwabuilder” can make an xcode project, wondering if we can use this, then build the project in circleci? (as we got access to apple ci containers previously iirc)
topic: people grow chili plants together, join a telegram group and start communicating
takeaway: creating this connection leads to a much wider interaction between the people involved, they start sharing other stuff and tips and form a bond which can lead to a major shift in society as a whole if done in many places
takeaway for karrot: how to lower the threshold for people to participate?
old tradeoff between common/widespread platforms (people already have them) and specialized platforms (much more refined features)
really motivated core-type people will go for the specialized thing, but how to lure in the more peripheral people who only want to participate casually? could a somewhat related telegram group help?
vague ponderings relating to the “one straw revolution” book I just read
check-out
2. Actions/Outcomes
Tilmann will continue with TWA
3. Next
Next meeting: 2020-09-27 12:00 (UTC+2)
Next facilitator: Nick
Where: Jitsi Meet
Janina won’t join in because another weekly call would be too much for her. She would still be interested to follow the process occasionally.
what’s still to be done to get the release ready?
some more bugs to fix, especially in the app
Tilmann hopes to get around to it in the following days
More coworking?
Nick and Tais might arrive in Kanthaus middle of next week, then more co-working might be happening
Toy library in Gothenburg as potential new group
they are interested but also not decided
Bruno is lobbying hard…^^
so far he didn’t go into the anti-proprietary software topic but he probably will in the future if they want to go for facebook groups
small side discussion about ‘The social dilemma’ (summary: good documentary, but very American. Still worth showing/recommending to people who are not in the topic at all.)
Governance features vs. generalization
Tilmann points out that it’s a competition in terms of developer time
should be discussed in the group where more motivation lies
does it make sense to jump from topic to topic or is it better to stick to one?
personal ways of working differ, maybe both can be done - but then slower
it’s mostly about Nick since Tilmann can’t find the time to tackle big tasks right now
Bruno feels that the much more structured way of moving forward with the governance topic gives it a head-start
check-out
2. Actions/Outcomes
3. Next
Next meeting: 2020-10-11 12:00 (UTC+2)
Next facilitator: Bruno
Where: Jitsi Meet
idea to put a poll in the forum and ping the groups:
pick top 3 or 4
options:
Pickup
Meeting
Task
Event
Distribution
Sharing
Dropoff
Shift
vote for any (“approval vote”)
Problem of how to go about a pickup that requires people to go to two different places?
for now it’s probably best to simply create it as one pickup in one place and write a big comment
the other possibility would be to make two places and two pickups and then write a big comment that you should always sign up for both but that’s probably more complicated
in the future there could be events that are independent of locations, but that requires bigger refactoring and rearchitecturing
… been playing with frontend data stuff
Nick aiming to at least write up assessment of existing architecture
could include a link to a forum post to explain it and provide a place for discussion
could do with a name filter
is actually part of governance, as the idea is instead implementing complex rules we present information to be used in human processes
making places more friendly for discussion
more like a channel on slack/rocketchat
multiple channels?
how to make it easier to find important conversations
chat vs forums…
rocketchat has channels, discussions, threads, but generally is a bit confusing!
also relates to governance topics, as it’s where governance discussions happen, working groups…
maybe could be worth a whole community design process for it
balance of small fixes vs bigger questions
playground group is now closed
need to keep an eye on the applications for it
not sure whether people get removed from inactivity
question about who gets which notifications under which conditions for applications
seems to be designed for small groups to make sure no application gets forgotten, but for bigger groups it’s a bit weird if everyone gets notified by default
Bruno might write an issue
check-out
2. Actions/Outcomes
Write about interviews for the governance design process (Bruno)
Do some interviews with closer people if desired (Nick, anyone)
was a very clear gender split between who mentioned feeling bad for not doing enough stuff! (you can guess in which direction…)
not feeling bad for not doing enough stuff
hard to get started if it feels like it’s too big topic for a short time, leading to not opening chat/etc as it’ll lead to feeling bad
a lot of desire to work on karrot, even if lots of stuff going on, joining social bit is good for stimulating motivation, welcoming culture to not feel pressured makes it feel pleasant
how to motivate people without risking being pushy? asking people can be useful! but where to draw line
requests to look at a focused specific issue can help with the issue of topics being too big or overwhelming, clear tasks
nick tried mention little tasks tilmann might be able to do whilst baby sleeping (~2h)
sometimes having a smaller task leads to a big topic, hard to achieve anything
should be clear there is never a need to do the whole big thing
karrot months were great before for adding major features, focused time in person, were historically the times when major new features were added
hopefully the design process is something like that, but a spread out version
NordiCHI impressions
didn’t feel so productive, but not just because of conference
too structured and rushed, not enough space for free conversations in smaller groups
technical issues caused Bruno to have to leave
connected with interesting person who had some nice relevant research (asked for paper, and invited to meeting, they also joined karrot)
good thing is to create some specific actions from the conference
+1 for quite rushed
can have nice interesting discussions, but easy to not do something afterwards
+1 for the same nice interesting person (Philip also contacted them I think)
person = Vasileios
connections with Oliver Bates, interested in getting back to food related projects
some focus more on for-profit co-operatives, which is a bit less aligned with us
+2 to overly structured and rushed! maybe would have read papers beforehand if knew that, also had to take notes…
confused what the aim was, concrete outcomes? (didn’t really happen) networking? (not enough time/space for that). clearer intentions would have helped. ended up not doing so much of either. felt a bit of waste of time, even though interesting.
hopefully inspired by us and more will come out of through contacts, hope! we’ll see
was a nice peaceful time with baby-boo
in academic world nothing is specific about networking, but everything is… social component not acknowleged enough
biggest debate was about when/where to spend to break … maybe everything should have been the break
with in person conference, the social bit would have been much more valuable, coffee/dinner to go more into depth, hard to replicate in online setting
+1 to redicuoulous break time debate
curiosity about academic stuff
nice connection with academia <-> karrot <-> grassroots projects
feedback bit inside workshop didn’t work … asking for feedback, but no space to give it!
maybe we can give some feedback?
found runup to the NordiCHI confusing, not quite aligned for non-academics
can we reuse the workshop paper for something? maybe Philip would develop it further into a paper (normal process is to start with workshop paper, get feedback then work it into a real one…)
Tilmann would put our workshop paper in forum, and link it on mastodon
idea to organise a workshop about foodsharing/saving specific, connected with ? <— I missed the name (link coming!) deadline in February (for proposing a workshop, thing itself in july or something)
CHI is so broad, hard to get proposal accepted
Communities and Technologies: https://2021.comtech.community/ (C&T’s 2021 theme “Wicked Problems in the Age of Tech”, invites participants to examine the positive and negative implications of new trends in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) impacting communities, civil society and the common good.)
governance process updates
almost done with stage 1! (define the challenge), should be done by next meeting
stage 2 is sketching/investigating solutions
feeling it is going really well! felt like it had opened up a lot, but came together last week
each done interviews, felt really productive
next part is merging the maps/challenges
interesting how “might it be” parts
opening it up to more people to get clear statements, and more concrete way forward
up to this point it’s been quite abstract, but from here should be more straightward for others to contribute
outcome of it should hopefully have a clear focus, but also some subsequent tasks we can focus on
screencast updates
Taïs has started on them! 2 of them are done, posting into Screencast discussion in rocketchat
happy for feedback on scripts + finished videos, feedback is most useful at script level before having made it
open for people writing scripts to be read out, quite important to make sure it’s how karrot actually works!
where to publish them? should be very user friendly (as target is people possibly daunted by computers), hopefully have a playlist, and be able to jump to specific sections of the video
maybe actually find a landing page one, or something directly integrated, should feel part of the platform… or community forum?
embeddable could be nice, so we can put it in various places?
idea about landing page video for more general context, more PR than tutorial video though, nice little drawings, etc…
important to get the videos online as soon as possible for feedback, just on community forum is fine for now
in Stockholm, new people come via facebook, would be nice to share with members
need to think about the different channels people arrive into karrot
new category in community forum for tutorial videos, one thread per video
how to get it into other languages? multiple levels of difficulties (whether karrot needs to be in the other language too, or if it’s a barrier), in Stockholm it’s a lot of international people, both maybe in Gothenburg more in Swedish
subtitle options? maybe support community to make translations
French people get very scared and need everything in French (oooh lala)
scripts could be uploaded as file to community forum, or in github? main goal is not too technical, just a way to few content clearly
maybe having the video project files themselves somewhere?
maybe someone wants their little face in the corner? more different faces would be nice! make it feel more accessible to participate
frontend is still in review, mostly about translation topics, this change is also changing pickup → activity for the generic cases, it’s a time we can choose to simplify/rationalize the text, maybe people will be confused about the word “activity”
confusing to have “Activity” as a general type (although that’s only used for non-foodsaving groups, so maybe not needed to address now?), another name, maybe Bruno can suggest if needed, as bikekitchen is needed
2nd year of PhD, interested in grassroots sharing economy initiatives that use physical spaces while using digital tools to facilitate that real world activity
conceptual approach in how things are designed
follows participatory action research, would like to also take part in a foodsharing initiative
… asking for feedback, but no space to give it!