Project management

We're running this as an agile project.

People:

• The New York team meets at a codejam every monday night at the Global Pulse offices - the sign-up sheet and instructions for how to find the office are here.
• Anyone's welcome to work on the codebase in-between codejams, by forking the code and leaving a copy in github for us to merge back in.
• The Global Pulse tech team are working on Hunchworks during the week; once everything's evened out, they're about 2 people's full-time effort on this, and are available for questions by email or Skype anytime, and on IRC monday evenings and when they remember to lurk on it.

Project management style:

• This is an agile project, but we're not precious about it - we'll do whatever works for the team.
• Code releases are tied to significant events in UN Global Pulse's year. The first release is timed for demonstration to the UN General Assembly. Other releases are timed to events like the next G20 meeting. We don't do low-publicity around here :-).
• Releases are made up of 8-week iterations. We think that's a good time period - long enough to get something done, short enough to not drag out, but we're happy to adjust that as we learn what works in the codejams and what doesn't.
• We've got a free copy of Thoughtwork's Mingle tool here - we're working out how to make this available to everyone in the team.
• Whilst we do that, we're using this spreadsheet to hold all the stories for this project, listed by release, iteration, group and gummibear estimate.
• We're measuring story lengths in gummibears. This is an imaginary unit for coder effort, and just tells us how much effort stories are likely to take relative to each other.
• But we've estimated that each 8-week iteration will take roughly 13 gummibears to finish. We'll revisit that estimate as the codebase grows over time.