Friends Of CNM newsletter, 2019 January-April
Ladies and Gentlemen ... Greetings from CNM Digital Services team ... Significant developments on several initiatives ... Please review thoroughly and, as always, if more is needed just let us know and we'll shift fires accordingly ...
CNM IT is waiting for you
If you take a look at the illustration published on <a href="https://wiki.friendsofcnm.org/en/File:Cnm-cloud.png" target="_blank">wiki.friendsofcnm.org/en/File:Cnm-cloud.png</a>, you can find that our technology has more launched parts than under development or projected ones. As of now, the main project is to put our technology to work.
Would you like to take a part in making it real?
Join the team
You are welcome to join the team, or, to be more exact, any part of the team:
- The software development part features Romanof and myself, who concentrate on the back-end development, as well as Natly and Paul, who focus on the front-end development. Members of this sub-team are geographically distributed. To work virtually, we utilize our own methodology that we call CNM Agile and which is an adaptation of Agile Scrum to our needs. However, you are invited to start face-to-face effort and/or add another style if you are interested in;
- The administrative part is clearly understaffed. Loredana C. plays a business analyst role. In addition to my development roles, I occasionally perform all the other functions. Alphabetically listed, they are an administrative assistant, business administrator, business buyer, configuration manager, content manager, contracts administrator, event organizer, functional manager, HR generalist, information architect, marketing fellow, partner liaison, procurement manager, product owner, project manager, project sponsor, recruiter, Scrum master, team lead, technical writer, trainer, and usability analyst.
To expedite the project, I would love to share some of my roles and/or functions with you.
How you can help
If you are willing to take a part, please consider two basic options:
- If you can specify your role, please send me its description. Let say, you would like to build particular competencies, get into some particular occupation, and/or fill in particular gaps. In your interview, be prepared to explain how your involvement can help you in achieving your career goals.
- If you cannot specify your role, -- and this option is completely new -- consider joining the CNM Tech Taskforce. In this case, you would be asked to select one particular software such CNM Videos or CNM Labs that you would oversee. Indeed, we envision that the taskforce will consist of several units.
What CNM IT is
The CNM information technology, tentatively called CNM Cloud, is designed to support services beyond regular CNM meetings in Vienna, VA that usually occur on Tuesday nights. As of now, we can accommodate the following services:
- Learning, including our internal learning management system;
- Marketing, including our private customer relationship management system, any types of public websites, and private email engine;
- Collaboration, including our version control, social network, project management systems. All the systems come in two forms; one is public and another is private. For instance, our public collaborative knowledge system is available at <a href="https://wiki.friendsofcnm.org" target="_blank">wiki.friendsofcnm.org</a>. Not to confuse you again, I don't include links to our private systems in this message.
Here, I need to state that CNM Cloud is an experiment. Based on previous communications, we even need to design the intake process for CNM patrons even in those parts like learning and knowledge management systems where a good deal of content has been developed.
At this moment, we can pray and try our best, but we don't know what this endeavor exactly leads to. What we know is that we will never know unless we try.
I will present one or two pieces a week starting today with our video-sharing platform called CNM Videos and finishing with my favorite software, CNM Nets, that can accommodate our private social network, event organizing, and user management.
CNM Videos
When you visit <a href="https://video.friendsofcnm.org/" target="_blank" style="font-weight:bold;">video.friendsofcnm.org</a>, you are getting to the site of our future services called CNM Videos. With regard to technology, it can be called "CNM Youtube." Indeed, our software is very similar with the one that Youtube uses. The difference is that we are responsible for UX design and content of our service. That particularly means that have the fullest control over what videos are posted and how those videos can be viewed. We can also assign categories and sequences to adapt them better to our patrons' needs.
Imagine what we together can do with CNM Videos. We can post there the CNM orientation, seminar presentations, and event previews, streamline our events, etc. Currently, just a couple of test videos are published, but the technology is ready to be used and our video-sharing service is waiting for your help. Would you like to be a part of that change?
Our team is able to implement pretty much any requirement, but someone like you should envision how this service should look like. Who should be given rights to upload the videos? Comment on them? Should we need any adds? If so, what types of those adds be? Who would edit the videos? Oversee the content? Decide whether the videos should ever retire? Who should be able to delete or flag the videos? Is the current CNM Videos' logo good? If not, what should the logo be? How intellectual property issues shall be resolved? Should we ban anyone from commenting or posting? If so, how this ban should look like? Should any metrics like visits, views, clicks, etc. be collected? If so, which ones? Who and how would used them? And ... who shall formulate new questions to be addressed?
As a member of our future CNM Videos Taskforce, you are invited to get involved. And, by the way, you are invited to suggest a change of that tentative name for this body too.
How to get started
Here are a couple of scenarios for how to get started:
- If you don't have time or interest to help with development, stay tuned and get back when the service is up and running;
- If you have a description of your desired role, reply to this email and attach it;
- If you are interested in joining our taskforce, RSVP for the taskforce meeting (for instance, the one for May 7th is published on <a href="https://www.meetup.com/mbc-cnm/events/260915652/" target="_blank">meetup.com/mbc-cnm/events/260915652</a> ) or just show up in Vienna VA on Tuesday nights and find me. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am rarely available to meet you at any other place and/or any other time.
Blessings, peace, thanks! --Gary, Natly, Romanof, and Paul at CNM Digital Services
