ecovillage delivery and management toolkit - Part 1

We're always seeing interesting deployment scenarios for the tools we implement and support from Atlassian as part of our Atlassian Expert services. Whilst positioned as a set of tools for supporting the Software Development LifeCycle (SDLC), in practice they are capable of much more flexible business process management and project delivery patterns. 

In this post, we're going to examine a deployment scenario of JIRA as a project delivery tool for the creation and management of an EcoVillage, since we've got access to a living, breathing project locally that we've offered to help out with. It's an information management challenge that appeals to our core focus of creating Humane Systems, Spaces+Places. This also acts as a good information discovery project for modelling purposes and provides us with a useful test site. The project involves the efforts of a dispersed group of stakeholders across sites where they can't easily meet face to face, so its a distributed collaboration. We'll be using Confluence as well, for handling some of the co-authoring of content for key project documentation. For ease, we'll do it in a 10user OnDemand instance, as it's insanely good value for a low monthly fee of $10 for 10users. Perfect for a StartUp focus.

For definitional purposes, we're going to use the Context Institutes definition of an EcoVillage as a

• human-scale
• full-featured settlement
• in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world
• in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.

To help make a start on some of the information modelling, we've turned to previous work done at http://www.gaiavillages.org where they've segmented 5 main domains of activity that correspond well to JIRA Components. See the detail in the figure below for what is covered in the 5 information domains (source: http://www.gaiavillages.org/how-will-it-work/how-it-works). 

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The patterns that need to be supported in this domain include:

1. Project Components that align with the 5 main information domains (Coordination, Social, Political, Ecology, Economy);
2. Issue Identification and Management (with customisable workflow and entry forms);
3. Issue Linking (as some issues raised will have (potentially multiple) dependencies between them);
4. Extension of the standard Issue Type scheme to include a new Issuetype (Risk), with a new subtask (Mitigation) that can be associated with it;
5. Issue Watching and Voting (to help triage and moderate the prioritisation of work, democratisation of perspectives);
6. Issue Reporting (to help stay on top of a backlog and keep things moving, managed in an orderly way)
7. Delegated responsibility to guild leaders (think of them as Component Leads) for actioning issues raised through to resolution, or assigning to interested community members/volunteers

These are all well accommodated with the flexible customisation potential of JIRA, so we're looking forward to setting up the information management platform and project reporting dashboard to see if this plays out OK with the project stakeholders. Whilst it's a small project, it builds nicely on our history of tweaking JIRA for Capital Project delivery (including large scale suburban development).

With a series of upcoming initiatives at Laughing Mind that deal with urban revitalisation, renewal and community development, we think this should be a good living lab for some of the chats we're likely to have at DIGFestival, with the focus on Design-Interactive-GreenTech and an overarching theme of 'Adapt or Die'. More to come in our next writeup, as we start to knit together some geospatial layering into the mix..