Using GitHub for managing the 1000 Cities Challenge?

[carlhiggs]

Our project currently has a GitHub page (https://github.com/global-healthy-liveable-cities; I'll refer to this as the 'organisation'), and this provides a number of organisational tools which can help us manage the project as we scale up for the 1000 cities challenge. These are not just tools for people involved with code, but for helping teams of people to work together to achieve goals and collectively manage a project.

I think these could potentially be useful, so in this post I describe some of the features we could use -- just so we all know that these are options we currently have to-hand and are ready to use without much of a learning curve.

Teams

We can create 'teams' within our organisation, which people can join as 'members'. These support team members within the organisation to participate in discussions on their topics of interest, and allow users to see who else is in that team.

I created a 'study executive' team for us, but we can also create other teams , e.g. region- or project specific sub-groups and so on.

I created an example hierarchy of teams which could be of use for the 1000 Cities Challenge ---for example, each world region could have a team (see Oceania), within which could be nested cities with participating members (e.g. Port Moresby, PNG )

You can read more about teams and how they could be useful for managing a growing network here.

Discussions, links and notifications

Within teams, discussion posts can be created on relevant topics which team members can choose to participate in. This could document a city's engagement in the 1000 cities challenge. Discussion items can be private (visible only to members of the team in which they occur;), or shared within the overall organisation (eg our collaboration network).

Project boards for tracking decision making

Project boards, can be used alongside discussions to formalise and track progress on decision making. These are lists of tasks, optionally tagged with a priority (low/medium/high), a person responsible, and a status (to do / in progress / done).

Collaboration, networking and devolving responsibility

Perhaps this could also meet some of the 'networking' needs that were raised in the 1000 Cities Challenge document Melanie shared? A city-specific team (e.g. for Port Moresby, PNG) could be nested within a broader regional team (e.g. Oceania), which in turn is nested within the 1000 Cities Challenge team. People who request to join the 1000 cities challenge could be added to that team within the organisation, and then could request to join a region-specific team lead by a regional champion (WHO regional office?), and so forth. This could be one way that the executive could devolve city- and sub-group responsibilities: discussions could take place nested within the broader project, be they related to geographical locations, or theoretical concepts and their implementation.