Instance Managers Circle Meeting: Q2 2023 (Combined Agenda and Minutes)

Instance Managers
1

# Facilitator/s:

# Note taker/s:

# Meeting time:

# Notes from last meeting: [Instance Managers Circle Meeting: Q1 2023 (Instance Managers Circle Meeting: Q1 2023 (Combined Agenda and Minutes))

# Participants:

  • Australia - Amida
  • Brazil -
  • Belgium
  • Canada
  • France
  • Germany
  • Greece
  • India
  • Ireland - Evonne
  • Italy
  • Iberian peninsular (Catalonia, Spain, Portugal)
  • New Zealand - Bernie
  • South Africa
  • UK - Nick
  • USA - Kent Lorentzen

# Meeting recording: [Playback]

**# AGENDA AND MINUTES **

Global Roles:
@dthomas explains his strategic role in this 8 minute video
@Petros_OFN_GR
@lauriewayne1 explains the Community Weaver role in this 2.5 minute video

#INSTANCE UPDATES

# DISCUSSIONS

Integrations and automations for managing instance more proactively: Evonne
What are Instances doing now & what can be shared? What’s the best way to share?

Communication within the IM Circle - is the Slack channel useful? What do you need from this Circle, what would be most useful for your needs as an IM?

# PROPOSALS and DECISIONS:

Proposed Skillshares -
N8N Overview

N8N Integrations - opportunities and process for managing the wishlist pipeline

Self-care for Instance Managers

# NEXT MEETING: TBC

2 Likes
2

Hi! This is from Slack! :slight_smile:

From Aaron H:
What came up in IM call this week was re purpose of this channel / group, there seemed to be 3:

  1. Ask tech/platform related questions (support)
  2. Share / explore ways of running instances (business)
  3. Make decisions on how we run OFN (governance)

There was talk of splitting off (1) into a separate channel as this is most of the chat on this channel, and for larger instances who don’t have one person covering multiple roles (like UK), we end up having multiple people in this channel as it covers lots of different things. Not sure how useful / relevant this is but thought I’d share!

Response from @lauriewayne1 in Slack:
Hey @Aaron Hirtenstein haha don’t we all want just what is relevant! :slightly_smiling_face: Really most people do not use the group tagging function so realistically being in or not in the group won’t materially change the noise level, I don’t think. Darn, I wish I had seen that topic in the agenda for the IM meeting (as you might expect, I have opinions haha!).

I would have shared a couple of possibly-helpful links from previous incarnations of this conversation on Discourse: an explanation of the IM category, and a description of the original idea of the IM circle and there are a few other items of interest in that corner of the Discourse world.

One of the conclusions to note that came out of those early conversations is that Slack is one of several tools we have at hand to support the IM role. It’s really good for some things (quick conversations/questions in text or real time via a huddle and answers/announcements) and horrible at other things (searchability, document versioning). We don’t have to use Slack for everything, and we don’t have to use tools in isolation. Our idea is that for non-urgent/non-quick topics where conversations and the evolution of ideas takes place over months or years, Discourse or Gitbook offer serious advantages over Slack. For attention-getting and day to day things that don’t need to be persistent or ongoing, Slack is a superstar (including for pointing out that specific discourse posts are in need of reading or response).

So for me, I might suggest that Instance Managers - Open Food Network Community would be a good place to discuss business, funding, business models, and legal/organizational challenges and solutions. In fact, I am at the point of being a big hypocrite right now, because I am using Slack to make a looooong post that should really be in Discourse.

I am interested in the third item too - I’ll watch the recording (haha so hard to attend a meeting after the fact) to understand who the “we” are and what “run” means.

And in the meantime I think I will copy this whole response over to discourse. Maybe see you there?

1 Like