One Community’s Project Management Software Online Journey (Part 3 of 3)

Continued from Part 2…

After the implementation of the Welcome Teams, Project Teams, and the P.E.A.C.E. Agreement, everything was running fairly smooth. We had gained more clarity, more of the infrastructure for handling logistics and administration was sorted out, and productivity was increasing.

However, there was still one aspect of the One Community project that wasn’t that user-friendly and efficient: how One Community members were logging their contributions and their progress for each Project Team. Since we were using the Google Spreadsheet to keep track of what we were contributing, what should we do with older data? Every week, the contributions would take up the entire screen. Do we copy and paste the previous weeks down below, paste it into another tab, or create an archive Google Spreadsheet to archive past contributions?

The Google Docs were so filled with data that they were starting to lose their functionality. We started having problems with them loading slowly and they would occasionally freeze. Additionally, as the documents became bigger and bigger they also became more difficult to sort through past data to get the information that we needed. It was becoming more and more of an ongoing series of problems for members to log their contributions.

THEN JUSTEN PALMER JOINED ONE COMMUNITY

Justen (click here for his full bio) is a systems engineer and programmer who came to the team with over 6 years of experience as the founder and CTO of Webceleb Inc, partner and lead developer for Tiny Factory, and Director of Operations for It Factor LLC. His specialty is as a web application designer and programmer using cutting edge real-time technology (Node.js, Socket.io, and Mongo DB) to build applications that span traditional web to mobile and tablet platforms. Using these skills, Justen built the One Community A.C.E. (Accountability Celebration and Expansion) App.

Software Project Management Tools – The ACE App

The ACE App is a web-based application that makes it easier and quicker to log each member’s contribution, provides a chat feature, personal profile page, and even a reports page where we can export and view total team contributions for any given week or month. The best part of this is that the interface is very intuitive, very minimalistic, extremely smooth and responsive, and easy for new members to learn regardless of their technological background.

If you’d like to see what other members are up to for any given week, you can just click on their name and you’ll see everything they’re doing such as: what project category they were working on, how many hours they spent on that particular task, and even the links of documents they were working on.

As a member fills in the hours, you will actually see the color of your productivity bar change. It goes from red, green, blue and if you’re really hardcore for the week and do somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-50+ hours, then the bar will go purple!

Not only can you view the total hours contributed for each week, but you can see the breakdown of the hours contributed to each project team as well, which is located under the “Reports” tab.

In the Reports section, you can select a date range to see past weeks, contributions, and also the breakdown of how many hours were put into each project team. This is extremely beneficial because it allows us to:

1. Review the progression and growth of One Community and all its components
2. See exactly how much time and energy is being put towards each individual project
3. Track and improve our efficiency and effectiveness using #1 and #2

Here’s an example of what one of the ACE app monthly reports looks like:

Global Goals for this Project Management Software

As we build One Community as part of a global collaborative of self-sufficient and self-replicating teacher/demonstration communities, villages and cities, we will also be using this application to objectively log, evaluate, share, and collaborate with other communities, villages, and cities interested in working together for The Highest Good of All too. Combining the data of others with our data, we will further the evolution of all project-launch blueprints as open source and free-shared contributions to a global village construction database objectively evaluating and sharing the results of everything from creating a culture of fulfilled living practices to construction times for each component of our infrastructure and more.

This will ultimately mean other teacher/demonstration villages interested in working together with us and each other for The Highest Good of All will be able to use this application in whole or partial collaboration with us on:

● Improving sustainable city efficiency
● Logging community participation and contribution
● Welcome Team and Project Team organization and coordination
● Gathering data and running reports on infrastructure build times
● Gathering data and running reports on complete city social and recreation time
● Improving efficiency and communication during large-scale consensus implementation
● Logging and tracking education components of the Education for Life program
● Logging specific work experience and skills data for individual resume use
● Sharing and collaborating on all the above data to make everything easier for others

Open Sourcing the Project Management Software Online

The A.C.E. App is already an open source application available for the public to utilize, customize, and even contribute ideas to make this app better. If the suggestions are accepted, they will become an addition to the open source application foundation. For those interested in working with the application code and/or modifying the application, the following are the necessary pre-requisites:

• Runs on node js: navigate to root directory in terminal and run “node jin.js”
• Built with the Jin framework (documentation forthcoming)
• Uses mongodb – make sure you have mongo installed before running

PROJECT MANAGEMENT JOURNEY RELATED PAGES

GET THE CODE AND TRY IT    ●    JOURNEY BLOG PART 1    ●    JOURNEY BLOG PART 2

ONE COMMUNITY OPEN SOURCE ACE APP PORTAL

CLICK HERE FOR THE ONE COMMUNITY OPEN SOURCE ACE APP PORTAL