matikin9/civic-tech-project-workflow

civic-tech-project-workflow

Background

Hack for LA has been running weekly hack nights for over two years, and through the many project ideas that have passed through our doors we've seen what works and what doesn't. The issues our groups face over and over again aren't new - you see the same issues in the open source software community as well as in tech startups.

Here are some of the underlying issues that drove us to create this guide:

1. The person pitching an idea may not be the person best suited to lead a volunteer-driven project group. Learning how to successfully run a project and manage the people contributing to it is a skillset built through practice, much like programming or design skills. Not all of us have had the opportunities to build up that skillset and most people have no idea where to start even if they've worked their entire careers as part of these project groups.

2. When hacking, we're inclined to start coding as soon as possible. However, if the problem and the solution haven't been well thought out we end up wasting our volunteers' time as well as the time of those we're trying to help. How do you maintain the momentum of your volunteers while ensuring their efforts are effective? How do you make sure you're building a product that is something people actually want?

3. Sometimes a project gets stuck. They attract volunteers because the problem and solution are appealing, but the project execution is just not there. They don't feel like their efforts are contributing. How do we turn this project around in a constructive way that doesn't alienate the existing project leads and volunteers?

4. We get a lot of great ideas, and sometimes the leads disappear. Maybe life got busy or they moved away. We don't want to lose the project just because that happens, but how do we keep the project going or get someone else to pick it up if none of the work was documented and the project repository is on someone's personal account? Without a way for Hack for LA to centrally access the project work and documentation, project ideas are subject to the lives of individuals to the detriment of all the other contributors.

Overview

The ideas in this guide are a mixture of feedback from project group members, strategies from other brigades, and Agile/Lean principles. In the book, The Lean Product Playbook, the "Lean Product Process" is defined as the following 6 steps:

1. Determine your target customers.
2. Identify underserved cusomter needs.
3. Define your value proposition.
4. Specify your minimum viable product (MVP) feature set.
5. Create your MVP prototype.
6. Test yoru MVP with customers.

Our guide pretty much follows all these steps even though we're not creating a for-profit product. We still need to find a "product-market" fit to convince people to use our product, and to convince partner agencies that our product is worth the investment of their time and support.

The basic phases as currently defined are:

1. Discovery
2. Research
3. Prototype
4. Pre-MVP
5. MVP/Development
6. Testing

After the MVP has been launched, the group continues to iterate through the Prototype, MVP/Development, and Testing phases.

Further Development

Here are some areas this guide still needs to improve on:

• Account better for group dynamics.
• Account for potentially splitting up a large group into separate teams working in parallel, instead of having such a linear model.
• Account for data-related projects that involve: data cleaning, data gathering, data analysis, data visualizations.
• Account for design/marketing-oriented projects that involve graphics, marketing campaigns, outreach strategies.
• Account for educational and interactive workshop type projects.
• Highlight what the milestones are.
• Have a high level outline of the process on the initial page.
• Define at what points in the progress a project group gains access to certain Hack for LA resources (money, communication, etc.).
• Having a "Pre-MVP" phase is a little awkward. Maybe we should separate out these phases into an initial set that leads to an MVP, and a separate set for the iterations after the MVP?
• Make sure the early phases are still practical and keep the momementum moving in a group. Maybe create a repo they should clone that has templates for each step they need to fill out, and a "reward" for thinking through the questions - like being posted to the Hack for LA website and announced on Twitter?