Request for Feedback - Google Suite Revamp (Calendar + Drives)

Community Operations
1

Authors: @Hammad1412, @StepvhenH
Project: GSuite Revamp [Community Nest, Ops Pod]

Background

A key project for the Community Nest in season 1 is undertaking a revamp of our Google Drive and Calendars. This project aligns with the nests objective of ‘enabling contributors to work effectively together’.

The Index Coop currently has no organized structure to our google suite tools, there is no clear document management or permissioning access, and we currently only have a single google calendar with owners spread across the coop. It is becoming increasingly difficult to manage as the Coop grows and experiences turnover. Permissions, recording files, and scheduling across multiple personal and organizational google accounts has become an issue on a daily basis. Google account permissions are complex and interrelated across their applications. We use a paid google workspace account (we will be carrying out an audit of all accounts across our tools alongside this), which allows us some greater control over permissions, but we still are beholden to the sharing rights of the original creator of most elements, whether a document, meeting invite, recording, host abilities, etc.

To solve this paired with the solidification of active contributors in Season 1 Nest proposals; we propose starting fresh and building our google drive and calendars with the functionality and accessibility that best supports collaboration across the DAO. The aim of the restructuring is to improve coordination among Index Coop contributors while providing a consistent structure across the tools. This will make things easier to navigate and find relevant information, while increasing transparency and overall operational efficiency.

This post is intended to gather feedback from the wider contributing community to further understand any needs or requirements we may have overlooked. The post will be broken down as follows:

  1. Current challenges - why the need for change?
  2. Calendar redesign
  3. Drive redesign

Current Challenges

The Ops team carried out an internal review of both the google calendar and drives and below we breakdown the key challenges identified:

Google Drive:

  • No centralized database for document management for Index Coop
  • No standard structure to the google drive i.e where does a certain type of document belong
  • Too many folders - making it hard to navigate
  • Permissioning - Access is granted by the owner of a document rather than the document being created or ‘living’ in the correct drive/folder with the right permissioning

Google Calendar:

  • Single google calendar with multiple owners spread across the Coop
  • Permissioning and recording files issues
  • Scheduling across multiple personal and organizational google accounts

Common examples of the issues we have encounter:

  • In the leadership forum this week (9 Feb) we were not able to initiate breakout sessions due to the host rights being an individual not on the call.
  • In an attempt to support world-wide time zones we are attempting to record the recurring weekly Coop calls. However, regardless of who initiates the recording and receives the file, the original calendar event creator must change the share settings to allow others to view, independent of who has edit/ownership of the event now.
  • Event time zones being incorrect or changing with daylight savings based on the time zone of the original creator.

In a hypothetical scenario where Pep Joe leaves Index Coop as a full time contributor; currently we would be forced to manually recreate most of the recurring contributor weekly events because he is the original creator.

Proposed End States

Google Calendar:

We would like to ultimately create 2 google calendars for Index Coop: one for contributor weekly calls that will remain fairly static from week to week; and another more ‘public facing’ calendar that has all of our live events, conference meet-ups, community calls, product launches etc, that any supporter of Index Coop would like to be aware of and participate in. Both of these accounts will be managed from organizational Index Coop google accounts, allowing access by multiple members of the DAO and eliminating turnover risk as people transition between roles or out of the DAO altogether. This will enable us to automate posting recordings, have hosting permissions across multiple time zones, and maintain flexibility as members transition in and out of roles.

"IC - Contributor Public" Calendar

  • This calendar will be a fresh start owned by the cooper@indexcoop.com account
  • We will replicate all of the recurring standing calls on the current IC - Contributor cal (old) and give full “make change and manage sharing” rights to the current owners or anyone identified by the respect Nest as owning that event
  • Everyone identified on the S1 Nest proposals will be compiled into a new google Group of contributors and added to the calendar which will give those individuals rights to add themselves to events
    • (This compiled list of S1 Nest contributors will be used as the basis for several role/permission cleanup projects occurring in S1)
    • This google group will be open to join by the public so anyone interested in joining the recurring DAO contributor calls will be able to do so
  • We will end all recurring meetings on IC - Contributor cal (old) following the next event after this goes into effect. All of those events titles will be changed to show they are no longer occurring and to migrate to the new calendar with a CNest contact email in the details for questions
  • **This process should not require any action by current, active DAO contributors to be migrated over to the new IC - Contributor Public calendar.
  • After a 2 week cool down period (no legacy recurring events on the week left) the IC - Contributor cal (old) will be deleted

"Index Coop Community Events" Calendar

  • This calendar will be a fresh start owned by the tools@indexcoop.com account
  • This calendar will focus on events that anyone in the Index coop community-at-large would be interested in; ie. AMAs, twitter spaces, conference panels, product launches, anniversary parties, etc
  • This calendar will be the source of truth for two other locations through automation:
    • Public notion page
    • indexcoop.com/events (this will start as a redirect to the notion calendar page, eventually built out via design/website)
  • The events on this calendar will be a cooperation between Growth and Community Nests

Proposed Next Steps

  1. Gather feedback and potential blockers from forum discussion.
  2. If no strong pushback, duplicate events from IC - Contributor cal (old) into new Calendar over weekend of 17-20 Feb.
  3. Create google Group - “DAO Members” - add all @indexcoop.com emails to the group
  4. Add DAO Members group to all recurring contributor meetings
  5. Identify and give “make change and manage sharing” rights to all current owners of recurring contributor meetings
  6. Create new Index Coop Community Events calendar and 2-way connect to Notion events calendar
  7. Create shared process between GNest & CNest for adding events to Community calendar with correct hosting rights, links, etc
  8. Work with Website Pod to create & redirect indexcoop.com/events to notion events calendar page

Google Drives

The new google drive structure will reflect the Index Coop’s new organizational structure featuring Nests/Pods with well defined drives and folders within providing a suitable ‘home’ for different types of documents. Furthermore, improving permissioning and security of our documentation.

Each nest will have their own google drive with the pods having their own folders within their respective nests. Permissioning will be granted to the ‘core contributors’ listed in the nest proposals. To gain access to a document in another nest you will need to ask a core contributor from that nest to give you access.

The diagram below provides a holistic view of the new proposed Google layout. ( Please note we will update the ‘old files’ section once we have transitioned over all files from the old Index Coop drive to their respective new place)

1600×891 157 KB

Proposed Next Steps

  • Create separate drives for each of the nests and folders for each pods (In progress)
  • Move old files from previous Index Coop drive to their new folders (In progress)
  • Update permissioning for each of the drives from Nest proposals
  • Provide update to contributors on the final changes and who has access to what drive and where old files are placed within the new structure

If you made it this far, we applaud you! :fire:
Please share any comments, questions, or concerns below so the Ops Pod can make this a seamless transition

6 Likes
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Nice one @StepvhenH , glad we are tackling this now. Thanks for creating the roadmap.

With the shared Drive situation - does this mean we need a separate unique email for each Nest to have their own drive? And how to we provide Nest contributors the ability to store documents in their Nest folders? Will this be a manual process?

Will also ping you in Discord.

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Since we have a paid Google Workspace account we should be able to create multiple drives (1 for each nest etc) with whatever sub-folder structure we want to use and even provision the permissions accordingly based on user group. ie - Finance could have a drive and then a subset of folders that are visible/accessible only to a certain user group of core individuals that have access to sensitive information. The drives are separate from email, rather part of the xxx@indexcoop.com organizational account and not required to be attached to a unique google account.

1 Like
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This makes sense and is good to have one space where all Coop documents are saved and shared. Will the nest Coordinators own the drives for their nests? i.e there’s no overarching admin account?

For finance please could we set up a separate call to run through this as I would like to make sure all the information is ported over correctly and securely.

Great work Ops pod :rocket:

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The whole file structure is under a single organizational account so there will be a few accounts with ‘god’ rights. @Hammad1412 can share more on this and how those accounts will be chosen and handled.
But we are auditing the roles & permissions across all of our tools as part of this project to ensure we do not have 1) excess or inactive members using paid accounts 2) ensure the right people have the access they need with a goal of limiting the overarching access to a few as possible.
We are taking both an access and security perspective as we do this (ie fewest admins as possible, and those with admin accounts should have 2FA and recovery emails etc)

Our goal from CNest/Ops pod is to pair one of our project members with 1-2 people core members in each nest to ensure they have the correct GSuite setup and correct Nest channels in the new contributor discord. (separate projects, but I imagine the same people are likely suited to shepard their nest through both of those projects in the near term)
To start with, I will likely pair with GovNest and I would imagine (but not confirmed) that @Hammad1412 would probably pair with FNest.

1 Like