Whiteboard is an app which aims to increase the effectiveness of office wide standups, and increase communication with the technical community by sharing what we learn with the outside world. It does this by making two things easy - emailing a summary of standup to everyone in the company and by creating a blog post of the items which are deemed of public interest.
At Pivotal Labs we have an office wide standup every morning at 9:06 (right after breakfast). The current format is new faces (who's new in the office), helps (things people are stuck on) and interestings (things that might be of interest to the office).
Before Whiteboard, one person madly scribbled notes, and one person ran standup using a physical whiteboard as a guide to things people wanted to remember to talk about. Whiteboard provides an easy interface for people to add items they want to talk about, and then a way to take those items and assemble them into a blog post and an email with as little effort as possible. The idea is to shift the writing to the person who knows about the item, and reduce the role of the person running standup to an editor.
- Add New Faces, Helps and Interesting
- Summarize into posts
- Two click email sending (the second click is for safety)
- Two click Posts to Wordpress (untransformed markdown at the moment)
- Allow authorized IP addresses to access the board without restriction
- Allow users to sign in with Google Apps SSO if outside authorized IPs
Deploy to Heroku. Tell people in the office to use it. At standup, go over the board, then add a title and click 'create post'. The board is then cleared for the next day, and you can edit the post at your leisure and deliver it when ready.
There are no promises as to what's actually coming soon. Things I might get to are styling and UX improvements to make it clearer how to use the app. Pull requests which move Pivotal specific config to ENV variables are welcome. One communication problem I'd like to solve is somehow linking the email threads which inevitably develop to the blog comments which today to live in parallel universe.
Whiteboard is a Rails 3 app. It uses rspec with capybara for request specs. Please add tests if you are adding code.
heroku apps:create sf-whiteboard --stack cedar
heroku addons:add sendgrid:starter
heroku config:add WORDPRESS_USER=username WORDPRESS_PASSWORD=password WORDPRESS_BLOG=blogname.wordpress.com
heroku config:add EMAIL_DELIVERY_ADDRESS=all+standup@pivotallabs.com
heroku config:add AUTHORIZED_IP_ADDRESSES='{ :sf => [ IPAddr.new("10.0.0.1/24") ] }'
git push heroku
Whiteboard was written by Matthew Kocher.
Whiteboard is MIT Licensed. See MIT-LICENSE for details.