Introducing Replicate, Resolve Philly’s Documentation Diary
Yup, we’re bloggin’.
The Resolve Philly team is full of sharers. (See: our Zoom show-and-tells featuring paintings of boiled eggs, photos of ourselves as teens, rare bobblehead dolls and crows legs.)
Sharing, of course, is part of collaboration, which is at the heart of everything we do, from Broke in Philly to Reframe to our COVID-19 information campaign. As an organization, we strive to share power, knowledge, and capacity between journalists and the communities they serve.
Our mission and our strategic plan include sharing what we’ve learned from our work — the highs, the lows, the everything-in-betweens — with others so that they, too, can learn from it and perhaps even replicate it. It’s part of our theory of change. We want to revolutionize how news is reported and ignite change within historically misrepresented communities themselves. And we certainly can’t do that alone. If the impact of our work and the work of our partners and collaborators is to be amplified, then we must show up and be a visible ally. If we want to change our communities, we have to be active members in them.
We’ve led workshops and spoke at conferences, we’ve created guides, we’ve talked to the press, we’ve even recorded entire podcasts about our strategic plan. (Honestly, we’ll talk to anyone who will listen. We love talking about our work, because we love our work!) But as that work expands in this ever-shifting industry, we decided keeping a public record of it all would not only help us better understand our successes and grapple with our challenges, but it might help others working towards the same things.
So, welcome to Replicate, our Medium home where we’ll share updates, behind-the-scenes notes, case studies, and more. Team members will take turns writing about how they’re doing what they’re doing, sharing resources and answering questions. We’ll certainly be asking questions along the way, too, existential, rhetorical, and literal alike. Consider this our diary — if a diary was left open on the internet with the hopes others will try to reenact it, that is.
To kick it all off, we’re starting with a peek at a few other ways we’re documenting our work, and why.
Like many other teams around the world, we’ve recently had to go totally remote. We were already a partially-remote team, with most of us dividing the week between our homes and our Philadelphia office. But we really valued the days we’d all spend together. We have an open-plan office (that is also super cozy and welcoming and we miss it) so conversations traveled easily, and purposefully. Open eavesdropping allowed us all to stay up to date on each others’ work, put our two-cents in, and get inspired.
Once we were all remote it was pretty obvious that we were all missing the eavesdropping — for social conversations and for knowing what the hell was going on. But having Zoom open all day wasn’t exactly an option, either.
So, we made a spreadsheet. Using AirTable, we created a table called Meeting Notes that helps us keep track of important conversations. At meetings specific to our COVID-19 project a volunteer fills out a short form listing the participants, the main takeaways from the chat, and any action items that came out of it. Within a week or so of using it, project manager Ruby George added the cherry on top, a field for tagging in other people who might want to see that meeting summary. Voila: digital eavesdropping.
Here’s a peek at that table structure, if you’d like to try it out yourself.
Of course, this is very useful on a day-to-day basis for project management and keeping up with our work as a group. But it’s also a way to look back on what we’re working on right now, so that we can learn from it in the future.
Because we’re AirTable fanatics, we created a second table to expand on these documentation efforts, called the Weekly Log. The idea is simple: every Friday, each member of our team fills out a quick form about their week. It asks for a vibe check — was it super stressful? Kind of confusing? Chill?— as well as any major highlights and challenges. There’s also a space for team members to link to our project management timeline and list major tasks they completed or ones they want to tackle next. Here’s a peek at what it looks like:
This serves a few purposes. The first: allowing each of us to slow down and take in what we’ve accomplished, and reorient ourselves to the tasks at hand. Secondly, it surfaces ideas for projects like this blog — you’ll soon be hearing from my teammates with stories inspired by their logs.
Finally and most importantly, it creates a bird’s eye view of how the team is doing. If everyone is logging high stress levels or expressing confusion over next steps, that’s something we need to address. Without a designated space for that check-in, we might just “Yeah, I’m fine.” each other to death in every Zoom call.
Both the Meeting Notes and the Weekly Log forms are techniques we’re trying to a) aid our productivity during a strange and stressful time and b) allow us to build a cohesive narrative of it all later. Those narratives are great for sharing in places like this for transparency and replication and, potentially, with third parties as we seek partnerships or funding.
But, if they don’t work out, we’ll try something new. And you’ll hear about it right here.
