The Agora of Athens was, during Antiquity, the main square of the city of Athens, a meeting place for strollers and the great marketplace: it was used for commerce and encounters. Strollers and the great marketplace, doesn’t that remind you of anything? It does me. Our internal social communication tool (slack to name it), in the organization, or at our clients’. We stroll, we chat, we observe, we make things known, we learn, we question, we have fun, but also we don’t understand each other or we argue, sometimes. It seems that it’s alive, you know.
And nonetheless: even though I’m a defender of interaction and co-location, we must indeed invent communication spaces, social spaces that meet the needs of our modern world.
A permanent question is: How to initiate them? How to keep them alive (meaningfully)? How to make them useful? Alexandre is a Slack enthusiast. He spreads it everywhere. It’s his way of weaving his web. Of building this Agora. In the middle of supporting an organization on two continents, I looked for how to build conversations like on the Greek square. Another one of my interests is revealing unspoken questions. In this engagement we have quietly over the past few months built an agile FAQ.
Oh yes FAQ is in English Frequently asked questions and in French Foire aux questions.
An agile FAQ.
Done a thousand times? Who cares. It’s built with the people who are there. It allows asynchronous reading, at one’s leisure, at a different pace. And it allows reading on one’s own, without having to be accountable. It allows hearing multiple voices. Realizing that “coaches” won’t respond in the same way. A reality about the complexity of our contexts. Questions come from the field, with their dog-eared corners, they wriggle like fish out of water. It’s what’s being whispered, there, right now.
It seems very important to me:
- Guarantee the anonymity of those asking questions
- Date the answers (and indicate who’s responding) to contextualize the answer (things evolve, yes).
- Regularly supplement and inform people about updates to the FAQ. Clearly mark that it’s a living document Alexandre tells me.
- Answers have the right to be tentative. They’re surely not perfect.
This is part of those (small) unpretentious things that work well, that help the conversation: a slack, a FAQ, a community.
the FAQ (as of today): faq-agile.pdf
The FAQ on GitLab
I don’t know, maybe it needs to spread, open up to other questioners, to other providers of answers? I also want it to keep its meaning. If this initiative interests you, if you think you might be interested, for now the best thing is to contact me and I’ll gradually open up write access to the git if you’d like. And if you have other ideas I’m open to them.
It’s written in markdown (so simple, readable, efficient, and especially editable directly in gitlab) with a bit of latex.
The **sources and pdf on GITLAB**:https://gitlab.com/pablopernot/areyouagile/tree/master/areyouagile-hugo/static/FAQ
The pandoc command (in case):
pandoc faq.markdown --latex-engine=xelatex --template=faq-template.tex -o faq-$(date +%Y-%m-%d).pdf