Instance Managers Circle Meeting: Q4 2024 (Combined Agenda and Minutes)

Instance Managers
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# Facilitator/s:

# Note taker/s:

# Meeting time:

# Notes from last meeting: (Instance Managers Circle Meeting: Q3 2023 (Combined Agenda and Minutes) )*

# Participants:

  • Australia - Amida & Sophia
  • Brazil -
  • Belgium
  • Canada
  • France - Berengere
  • Germany -
  • Greece
  • India
  • Ireland -
  • Italy
  • Iberian peninsular (Catalonia, Spain, Portugal)
  • New Zealand - Bernie
  • South Africa
  • Switzerland -
  • UK - Garethe
  • USA - Kent

# Meeting recording:

**# AGENDA AND MINUTES **

#INSTANCE UPDATES
Please see global update doc for news from instances

# DISCUSSIONS
Communication within the IM Circle - What do you need from this Circle, what would be most useful for your needs as an IM? (@amida)

  • USA - Kent: User support. Finance/invoicing/membership passed on to Laurie. Partnerships & fundraising - Laurie
  • UK - Bethan: User support, Garethe - Server admin, Nick, Jo & Fransico - fundraising, partnerships & global support, Aaron - Global finance. Sociocratic model.
  • France - 4 staff currently - 2 people @1.5 days per week for customer support. Onboarding - half a day every week demo. Translation is also a large piece of work. Global liaison - Rachel. Little space left for marketing.

Garethe: there seems to be a splitting of the role similarly across instances. Should the different functions have a global circle rather than one all together.
We don’t have visibility of what’s happening with the dev pipeline, so that feels like an important function that could be a useful focus for this meeting - other instances agree that this is an issue.
Kent: would be good for the support role to know what is coming up.
Bernie: product updates - there was an intention that these should come to this circle - it would be good for someone to be able to do this update somewhere.
Can look to the IM spreadsheet for prompts as to needs of IM circle.
Berengere - The global slack support is really valuable.

Is it worth breaking out the functions as individual roles rather than one ‘Instance Manager’ role which is rarely sustainable at a larger scale?

Smaller instancces - e.g. Bernie would not be able to go to all the circles for the functions. So Bernie only attends global catchup and circle IMs.

Berengere: one of the shared needs we have discuss is product information/changes for user support. Is there more than a meeting, rather a role to summarise software updates e.g. monthly or fortnightly. Shared document to link better with dev team and other customer support

Bernie: shift to 6 monthly? Is IM Circle actually needed for decision making

Global Fundraising - propose to remove from this agenda

Customer support/platform technical support - is a global discussion with devs and other IMs on bugs/wishlist/pipeline useful to IMs? - Kent feels this would be helpful for sharing user experience. It would helpful sometimes to have a smoother route to communicate priorities and ux with devs.

Berengere: feels that the democratic process for fixing bugs and new features is democratically decided, so do not need to change that, but more ‘translation’ of pipeline and updates is very valuable.

Be careful not to hijack functions of other meetings e.g. we can’t take too much of delivery circle. Live meetings will be tricky to organise, and we have other tools. A loom might be much accessible than release notes.

Integrations and automations for managing instance more proactively: using the N8N workflows documented in the API Handbook and adding more (@amida) - tabled

Review of IM spreadsheet here - need to update annually; inclusion of instance url & consideration of ‘in kind’ contributions to OFN Global (@Evonne )

# PROPOSALS and DECISIONS:

# NEXT MEETING: TBC
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