I love documentation and am alerted when information is created and not captured. It’s probably because I grew up on the internet and learned so much from things that were documented by others. I’ve had many experiences where some random bit of information—something seemingly small and insignificant—has had great impact on me. That goodness someone thought to upload (and organize) that information. Because of this I have a reputation for being the “documentation guy” in the ALC network which is why I’ve been asked to document ALF Summer 2016. So in an effort to go full meta I’m going to document how I set this whole thing up.
It starts with a website
The first order of business is to create a website where the documentation will live. While social media is great for real time conversations and updates it’s terrible for capturing and storing things. No sense relying on services that could vanish tomorrow.
So I create a new group on the ALC website, which makes a new website: http://alfsummer2016.agilelearningcenters.org/
We’ll come back to the site and set it up once the other pieces are in place.
#hashtags!
All events have hashtags. It allows people to post to social media (or these very blogs) and have those posts flow into a conversation using key words, usually with a hash mark. I chose two hashtags, a general one and a specific one:
#ALFSummer &#ALFSummer16
I was sure to go on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to ensure that no one else was using the hashtag. Aside from 2 posts from the US Army in Africa for #ALFS16 it was all clear. Along with using the hashtags for all social media posts it will be good to share the ALC social media accounts with participants so they can mention them, so I’ve collected them:
- https://www.facebook.com/ALCnetwork
- https://twitter.com/ALCnetwork
- https://google.com/+AlcNetwork
- https://www.youtube.com/alcnetwork
- https://www.instagram.com/alc_network/
Shared Documents
People will be taking notes and snapping pictures. I need a place to store those documents. So I’m going to create a folder within the existing ALF Summer 2016 organizing folder. It contains a folder for photos, notes, and resources. The resources folder contains links to documents and resources from around the Network drive. (You can put documents in two different places by “linking” it using Shift+Z).
Setting up the website
I’ve decided to create a single page site with all the basic information for people. I’ve started by going to Settings > Reading and selecting “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. I’d rather not have this page show up on Google (yet).
Next I customize the look of the site, just something simple…
That’s nice!
Now I’ve added some content. Resources, links, outlines of how to do documentation.
Day 1 Checklist
Finally I started drafting up checklists for what I’ll do when I get to camp on the first day. I think checklists are a really important tool so I try and incorporate them into my workflows.
That’s the basics of it. Hope you found this helpful.