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Volunteer flows

Welcome organizers, this page is for the flows different crews of volunteers go through at different stages of their participation. For everyone else, we'd love to have you on board too, so come sign up!


All

Group intro sessions​

  1. Schedule 2 intro sessions at different times of the week/day.
  2. Send email to new participants with:
    • an invitation to Microsoft Teams
    • a form to fill out their availability for those 2 intro session options (or neither)
  3. Run the intro sessions.
    1. Introduce organizers and volunteers.
    2. Describe the current program and goals with visuals:
    3. Link to the community agreement doc.
    4. Describe expectations.
    5. Give venues for check-in.
    6. Give schedule for meetings and office hours.
    7. Ideally guide interested folks while they log onto Teams and join the #Volunteers channel.
    8. Arrange for the next point of contact.
    9. Answer questions.
  4. Follow up with those who missed both sessions.
  5. Update the volunteer tracker.
Organizers

Organizers start​

Join the Microsoft Teams #Volunteer Ops channel.

Builders

Builders start​

  1. Register for a LIT Lab Docassemble server account on the development server. You will then be a regular user. Use your registration email address to email us a request for a developer account. Remember to include some context about yourself.
  2. If you have a GitHub account, log into your GitHub account. If you lack a GitHub account, make one:
  3. Choose a GitHub username. If you want more privacy, choose a name that is unrelated to you and unrelated to anyone and anything in your life.
  4. Make the GitHub account.
  5. If you want to increase privacy, set your GitHub account's email settings to keep your email private and choose to block pushes that expose your email.
  6. Go to your GitHub integration page on the LIT Lab Docassemble server and authorize your GitHub account.
  7. Attend training sessions. Builder training session resources are here.
  8. Complete the final project.
  9. Ask an organizer to add you to the LIT Lab GitHub organization volunteer team.

Builders first issue​

You will do one starter issue as an introduction to LIT Lab's GitHub workflow.

When you are first starting to learn to build forms, it is often hard to judge the level of difficulty of an issue. The DAL crew tries to identify good issues for people new to the project, but we are sometimes wrong.

  1. Search for a starter issue in LIT Lab's GitHub repositories. The DAL crew tries to pick out good starter issues, but sometimes we miss the mark.
  2. Check if this issue looks like it is about a typo.
    1. If you think the issue is about a typo, definitely continue.
    2. If the issue is about something else, decide if it is a good match for your level of experience. If you are unsure, ask a more experienced member of the Builder crew. Michelle is good resource for this. If you decide to take on the issue, continue. Otherwise, look for another issue.
  3. Check if the issue is still up to date. Some may have been fixed without being closed or irrelevant for some other reason. If the issue should be closed, write a comment about why it can be closed and close the issue. Look for a different issue.
  4. Assign yourself to the issue.
  5. If the issue is comfortable, here is a summary of the GitHub workflow. It is very similar to the process that training module 3 describes.
    1. Make a new Project on the docassemble server.
    2. Pull the code from GitHub into your new Project.
    3. Make the changes necessary to resolve the issue and no more.
    4. Run the form.
    5. If there is a problem, edit and run the form again. Repeat until complete.
    6. Go to the Project's Packages page.
    7. Press the "GitHub" button, choose to make a new branch, add a commit message that is a good reminder of what you did, and press "Commit".
    8. On GitHub, make a pull request with that branch.
    9. In the main comment of the pull request, write Closes # and then the issue number. For example, Closes #42.
    10. Still in the main comment, describe the changes you made in your code and why.
    11. Request a review from @SuffolkLITLab/dal-reviewers