The yunity heartbeat - what has each team done, what are they doing and what do they need help with.

Wh-y-unity meetings Harzgerode.

Over the course of last week a small number of yuniteers finally managed to meet up in person to discuss the deeper questions of our endeavor and organization, namely:

• Why are we doing what we are doing?
• How does this relate to yunity?
• What is yunity?
• What do we want it to be?

The people meeting in Harzgerode were Paul Free, Janina Abels, Laurina, Matthias Larisch and Bodhi Neiser, partly accompanied by fr4nk 0nf1r3 and Lisa, and joined by Douglas Webb, Philip Engelbutzeder and Rosina Klotz for the very last day. Also, Nick Sellen and Tilmann followed the process remotely and sometimes supported it with comments.

The initial idea was to approach the topics going from the abstract to the conctete, meaning that the personal level is addressed first, to get clarity on one's own driving forces, goals and values, to then come to a shared group perspective almost naturally. However, this turned out to be a very lenghty and sometimes unsatisfying procedure, so that we decided to reverse the process midweek. Janina Abels took on the responsibility to document the talks and wrote many wiki pages, which are mostly unfinished up to now, but she's positive to finish them in the coming days.

Outcomes:

• The self-realization, that yunity is a network rather than a project or a community.
• The general opinion, that this is not a bad thing.
• A proposal for a set of group values, to serve as an addition to the vision and mission of yunity.
• The realization that this process has just started and will probably never be finished completely.

Documentation:

Day One, Sunday 2017-03-12

• Communication needs
• Identity

Day Two, Monday 2017-03-13

• Personal motivations

Day Three, Tuesday 2017-03-14

• Personal motivations

Day Four, Wednesday 2017-03-15

• Personal needs
• Change of direction: from the concrete to the abstract

Day Five, Thursday 2017-03-16

• Change of direction: from the concrete to the abstract

Day Six, Friday 2017-03-17

• Personal values
• Proposed group values

Day Seven, Saturday 2017-03-18

• Where to go from here

Day Eight, Sunday 2017-03-19

• Review, feedback and closing

Foodsaving Tool.

Visit on foodsaving.world

So many new contributors! Since we gained a lot of womanpower during the last weeks (and some guys joined as well... ), we are now in a phase where everybody works to find their place in the project and figures out how to work together most productively and pleasantly. More words are written in #foodsaving-tool on Slack than code is committed on github, but that is completely fine and necessary for people to turn into an actual team. The mood in the chat is great and now we even had our very first gif posted in the channel, because tomi was so thrilled by the discussion about admin privileges:

Tilmann  - who is on a bike trip since November last year - just reached the southern coast of Spain and didn't have much time, electricity or wifi during the last week, so his capacities to act as a team leader were limited. In the coming days he's going to cross the Straight of Gibraltar - probably by boat, this time...^^ - and who knows how much time, electricity and wifi he'll find in Morocco. This is the perfect moment for the new contributors to self-organize and bring the project forward as they see fit, by relying on peer-reviews and open communication. Go foodsaving-tool team!

Foodsharing.de Development.

Stuff is happening again with regards to foodsharing.de development! Raphael Wintrich came back and is ready and motivated to progress open sourcing. It still is unclear how the old mastermind and the newer contributors will work together, but Nick Sellen is managing communications and after some calls and in-person meetings on the upcoming 'foodsharing goes open source' hackathon - where it is planned to really get down to business with a few focused devs - it should be possible to work together productively.

Foodsaving Worldwide.

In Progress

• Janina Abels and Joachim Thome are planning their trip to Bilbao in April, to support Unai in starting a local foodsaving and -sharing initiative.
• The foodsavers of Göteborg are starting to really use the foodsaving tool and with Nicolas Sahlqvist a developer out of their group joined the foodsaving tool team.

Challenges/help needed

• Do you happen to have contacts in Bilbao? Please let us know!

About the heartbeat.

The heartbeat is a biweekly summary of what happens in yunity. It is meant to give an overview over our currents actions and topics.

When and how does it happen?

Every other weekend we collect information on a wiki page and publish it on Sunday or the following Monday as a wiki blog article.

Afterwards we add a nice abstract and share it on facebook.

How to contribute?

• You need to have a wiki account and editor rights. Ask us in #confluence on Slack if you need help with that.
• Talk to us in #heartbeat on Slack about the content, the layout or any other heartbeat related issues and ideas!

Other heartbeats

The yunity heartbeat - what has each team done, what are they doing and what do they need help with.

Foodsaving Tool.

Visit on foodsaving.world

We are happy to receive much attention from teams of the Rails Girls Summer of Code. It's an amazing project to get more women into open source projects. It was heartily recommended to us (thanks Thea Amanda!). Despite the name, which is referencing the Ruby on Rails web framework, it's actually open for all kinds of programming languages, as long as the projects are open source and have a welcoming culture. So far, 5 teams have expressed interest in our application, which puts us in the third topmost position, just behind the well-known projects scikit-image and Nextcloud . Even though we are just getting started, there's already a lot of knowledge in our project to learn from, and hopefully this will increase manifold in the next months!

New features and developments:

• Landing page with a map of all groups, new title font (Cabin Sketch)
• User action history for groups
• Store management page with overview of all pickup date settings, incl. editing of pickup dates and series
• Updated languages: German, Esperanto, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian
• We do daily off-site backups now!
• Store editing with markdown preview
• Store create now uses the same form as store editing, incl. nice address input
• Minimum group & store name length (5 resp. 3 characters)
• Group names have to be unique, and store names have to be unique within their group
• Changes to group and store name will do immediate updates throughout the page

Foodsaving Worldwide.

• Foodsharing Poland held a big meeting in Torun, Poland, to connect the emerging foodsharing communities of the different Polish cities.
• Foodsharing Copenhagen is as active as ever! They are doing lots of great actions and they tell about it in English as well!
• Joachim Thome already held the 8th online meeting with Unai from Bilbao and now the preparations and plannings lead to more concrete ideas of going down there to help him really get started with foodsharing Bilbao! Any experienced foodsavers and/or -sharers who want to join in? Write us a mail!
• Kristijan Miklobusec shared the inspiring annual report of foodsharing Mainz, Janina Abels translated it and now it's on our wiki, so that everyone can see what foodsharing communities can make possible!

Wh-y-unity.

Since Paul Free put emphasis on the why from the very beginning and the dedicated Slack channel is also called why-y-unity, this seems to have become the name of the topic. The deeper question of why we do what we do in yunity, which has been raised again due to the Wurzen issue, is treated now inidivually by people. Bigger gatherings of many people are still preferred by some to initiate a creative group process, but so far the scheduling turned out to be quite difficult.

In the meantime a new section on the wiki was created to give a home to the personal statements and meeting notes from smaller groups, which already took place in different locations. Feel free to ask yourself why you are with yunity, what you want to achieve with yunity and what that name actually means to you and then share what you come up with!

WuppHaus Bad Dürrenberg.

• The winter was hard and draining, so we will take a break from this project until spring.
• Even though we received lots of attention and support, the Badue locals mostly are not very proactive yet
• The house will not be open for the next weeks, but we still have the keys and as soon as the sun will make the plants grow again we'll be back!
• Nothing is lost, what has been achieved is still there, but for now we need to press pause.

About the heartbeat.

The heartbeat is a biweekly summary of what happens in yunity. It is meant to give an overview over our currents actions and topics.

When and how does it happen?

Every other weekend we collect information on a wiki page and publish it on Sunday or the following Monday as a wiki blog article.

Afterwards we add a nice abstract and share it on facebook.

How to contribute?

• You need to have a wiki account and editor rights. Ask us in #confluence on Slack if you need help with that.
• Talk to us in #heartbeat on Slack about the content, the layout or any other heartbeat related issues and ideas!

Other heartbeats