[Dev-flock] work session Sunday! milestones, task management on the way

[Lucy Mendel]

 yo,

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again this Sunday at our next
ThoughtAndMemory work session.

5-7 with dinner afterwards. Let me know if you prefer a different time.

This one will be especially exciting as we'll be reviewing the task list.

In the next few days I'll send out the expected milestones. We have
milestones every 3 month. Each milestone is broken down by component,
eg, engine, UI, data collection. Each component has highlevel tasks
that, coordinated between components, fulfill the milestone's goal.

*** Please review what I send out and ADD any task I've left off,
especially if it is something you're interested in working on. ***

The task list is high level, so I don't expect surprises. Feel free to
add tasks if necessary (email me back).

Think about the actual steps you're going through to get things done.
We'll add them to the task manager on Sunday, and each of you will be
responsible for keeping the task manager up to date with
accomplishments and discovered tasks.

The goal is for the whole ThoughtAndMemory team to make WEEKLY
progress as we count down towards the milestones, and it will also
make mentoring more effective. In my own work I tend to dive into
tasks and not look up until I get things working. Knowing this I am
conscientious of getting external feedback about what I'm doing, since
an outside perspective is super helpful at keeping me on track and
moving. I'd like to make sure that kind of feedback, between any two
people, is possible within ThoughtAndMemory.

We'll be using XPlanner (xplanner.org) for task management, which provides:
  1. task organization into milestones (= iterations in xplanner) and
components (= stories within an iteration), plus task assignment (so
two people working on the same story don't overlap).
 2. a nice GUI, which will make it accessible to everyone working on
ThoughtAndMemory
 3. summarization of progress, which will help us stay on target and
help funders see that we're meeting our goals!!

Let me know if you have any questions, concerns or feedback. Also, if
you're still having trouble setting up the environment let me know and
we can meet sooner, either right before the Sunday meeting or some
other day.

Lucy.