Dazed and Confused

tansaku
tansaku
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

I did not manage to catch up on my sleep yesterday and I was up late fixing some coding mistakes, but somehow I don’t feel quite as washed out as yesterday. I still feel like I’m chess boxing. Which of the many different things on my list should I be trying to knock off next? I think my body is fighting off assaults from different winter bugs. There’s no way to avoid coming into contact given kids in two different schools. I am also beginning to feel an elation at having got our main AgileVentures Slack instance upgraded to the standard tier, now that we have been recognized by Slack as a NonProfit organisation.

This was a plan that I’d almost forgotten about making, buried so deep in the layers of yak-shaving needed to achieve the actual goal. We’d been talking about it during Xmas 2015. In Jan/Feb last year I’d started pushing towards making AgileVentures an official charity, because that seemed like the only way we’d be able to afford the Slack standard tier. Slack wouldn’t recognise us a charity until the whole process with the UK government had completed. By April we had a charity constitution, application proposal and a board of trustees set up. The UK charity commission replied in July with a series of questions requiring clarification. We responded swiftly, but still hadn’t heard anything back in November. Actually we did get automated emails explaining how terribly busy they were. At the beginning of December I filed a follow up through their website feedback forms, and just before the Xmas break I got an email apologising that they had accidentally closed our case!

They re-opened it and said they would expedite things going forward if we could re-submit the constitution with a few minor changes, and have it ratified by the trustees. I was anticipating another month or two before we would be ratified, but almost as soon as I had emailed an updated version of the constitution (cc’d to the trustees) I got a slew of automated emails indicating the charity was created. Great stuff, but not enough for Slack! Apparently we also needed to be ratified by a 3rd party called TechSoup.

During the course of last year as the Slack instance hotted up we became more and more constrained by the limits on history and app integration in the free tier. Also I was hearing that the NonProfit version was limited to 250 members and beyond that, we’d be paying 85% of the standard Slack fees. Something we would not be able to afford given over 1500 folks in our Slack instance. I started the application process with TechSoup without particularly high hopes. They required a projection of our annual income, which I pieced together, and actually we were approved in short order. So at the beginning of this week Slack approved our NonProfit status and moved our main Slack instance to the standard tier.

Now the wrinkle is that the 250 user limit for Slack’s free NonProfit access to the standard tier is that it applies to active users, not total users. According to my Slack contact we are at 130 or so active users, and to my delight I can now see the entire history of all the DM’s, private groups, etc.; in fact everything we’ve ever typed into our Slack instance. We might start incurring charges at 250 users, but then again if we can get to 250 active users perhaps we’ll be at the stage to be able to afford Slack’s rates? Certainly we’ve got some breathing room before then.

We’re in a little of a quandry about what to do with the separate Slack instances we created for Premium members and Mentors. I created those in the course of last year to provide a place where the history wasn’t disappearing so fast. Slack’s upgrade for a NonProfit will only apply to one instance. Should we move the upgrade to the Premium or Mentor instance? On the other hand having multiple instances has probably been slightly confusing and may actually have been a dissipative force for those groups, even if it has allowed a space where we can create multiple Premium channels for jobs, tech tests and paid projects etc. for Premiums to browse.

Still, getting Slack NonProfit status is a major step forward. Whatever happens from hereon in, I think we’ve gotten AgileVentures to a major milestone. I’m behind on my station-keeping tasks such as blogging, social media-ing, preparing my DevOps talk, project management on WebSiteOne, LocalSupport and AsyncVoter. Not to mention trying to write this book on Open Source Agile Project Management …! That said I feel like I have renewed vigor to take this fight to the next level! Just trying to ride that and not feel too dazed and confused by the twists and turns on the journey …!

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p.s. this blog took 18 minutes to write

p.p.s. Originally published at: http://nonprofits.agileventures.org/2017/01/11/dazed-and-confused/

AgileVentures

IT solutions for NonProfits and professional development for Agile software developers

tansaku

Written by

tansaku

Technology Researcher

AgileVentures

IT solutions for NonProfits and professional development for Agile software developers

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