Our goal with CorrelAid is to democratize the potential of Data Science. In practice, we achieve this by supporting a network of over many data enthusiasts in Germany, by giving them the opportunity to grow, and by organizing pro-bono data science projects for civil society. But how do we work internally? This is an overview of how we organize ourselves at CorrelAid, how we work and which principles we follow.

Our principles

The way we work together in the Core Team is strongly influenced by principles. We did not establish these at some point, but they developed over time and are the result of almost seven years of experience. Here are the three most important ones, in my opinion:

1. Flexibility: We are almost exclusively - except for three employees - a team of volunteers. We do the work on CorrelAid alongside our studies, our job and our other commitments: Someone has to write their final thesis for a few months, goes on a semester abroad, or generally has a lot on their mind. No problem. We want everyone to be able to get involved, whether it's a small internal project for a week, a pro bono project that lasts 2 months or a blog post every half year.

2. Entrepreneurship: For us, innovation means developing many ideas, making many plans. And then we think about what can actually be implemented and what will be implemented. Doing is more important than planning. We support every internal initiative in which committed people can apply their skills, have fun, and grow at the same time. Flexible commitment also means that it's okay if these internal projects are temporarily put on hold or abandoned because of a lack of time resources or a change of plans.

3. Diversity: Data science is a field with many structural and hidden diversity problems. We want to be a community for everyone: No matter if you have years of experience or just attended a statistics course at university. No matter what background. And no matter in which part of Germany (or Europe) you are. For many of our internal projects you don't have to know 3 programming languages, you just have to share an interest in statistics and data science with us. One of the things I am very proud of at CorrelAid is that we are such an attentive and open-minded team, open to all interested people and their ideas.

Our organization

We are formed as an association ("Verein" in German). In practice, however, the official organs of the association only have a secondary role. Instead, most of the structures we work in are informal, always potentially changing and ad-hoc. In the following, I will briefly explain our most important structures. You can also find an overview of our CorrelUniverse in this dashboard:

Structure

The Network

Our network consists of all analysts who have registered on our mailing list and would like to get involved in projects for civil society organisations. If someone has registered with us in the network, they will get all the project call for applications but also additional information on how they can become active with us beyond individual data4good projects. Currently there are about 1000 people registered in our network. Once a year we organize a Data-for-Good-Summit, where our whole network is invited to come together, to organize workshops, and to network ( see Data-for-Good Summit ).

The CorrelAid Teams

In order to structure our work and keep decision making processes short, our internal work happens in teams. Examples of teams are: #projects, #education, #fundraising, #infrastructure, #lc-team. The teams are the first point of contact for people who want to get involved in the organisational side of CorrelAid. The teams and their responsibilities are re-defined every year at the strategy meeting (see Strategy Meeting).

The Core Team

The Core Team consists of all people who are involved in the organization of CorrelAid by being an active part of a team. The Core Team is not a defined team with a fixed size, but is constantly and organically changing. Everyone who takes or wants to take responsibility in any form (whether for a temporary internal project or over a longer period of time) is part of the Core Team. At the moment we have about 20 people working with us at different intensity. The most important communication channels for the Core Team are the biweekly Core Team Call ( see Calls ), our Slack Workspace ( see Slack Workspace ) and the annual Strategy Meeting ( see Strategy Meeting ).

The Project Teams

Our Core Team does not carry out projects. Our project teams do that. When we have defined a good data project together with an organization, we send a call for applications for it to our network. We then staff the project with a diverse a team as possible, bringing together all the skills needed for the project. Then we provide training on project flow and data security and provide the project team and the organization with the space and time to meet in person at a kick-off workshop. The structure of our projects is a topic for its own blog post. So far, we have announced and carried out about 5-10 projects every year. In the future, we aim to increase this number even further in order to do even more good with data science.

The Board

Every year at our Data-for-Good Conference ( see Data-for-Good Conference ) we have the official general meeting of our association. There, we elect the association's board of seven members, at least four of them women. The board consists of people who are especially interested in the direction and development of CorrelAid and who want to initiate and accompany future projects. Our board members also help to structure our work and keep an eye on the ongoing work.

Routine Standards

Routine Standards include recurring work packages from work areas within CorrelAid. These are publicly available, but reside as protected documents in our drive. The respective board members are responsible for updating the routine standards. The goal is to document experiences and procedures transparently, to allow new volunteers an easy introduction to CorrelAid and to ensure and increase the quality of our work in the long term.

• Projects

• Education

• Community

• PR

• Cross-Area

Communication

The Slack Workspace

All our online communication takes place in our Slack Workspace. We have a channel for all important topics in which we organize our work. In addition, there are channels for technical questions and a channel for interesting links and projects. Our work takes place almost exclusively in public Slack channels.

The Calls

The most important organ in our ongoing work are the conference calls. We different calls every Monday evening at 8pm (UTC + 1):

• first Monday of every month: General Call

  On the first Monday of the month there is a big call where all teams, but also all interested people from the CorrelAid community can participate. We give updates from our work and onboarding information for "newbies".

• 3rd Monday of the month: Local Chapter Call

  On the third Monday of each month, the local chapters exchange views on current topics, challenges and projects.

In the calls we discuss and debate all decisions and decide on the further steps. As we are scattered all over Europe, those virtual in-person updates are important to bring everyone up to date. But of course, in line with our principles, participation is not mandatory at all.

Meetings and strategic planning

The Data-for-Good Summit

Once a year we invite our network ( see network ) to a weekend to exchange ideas, learn new things and plan future projects for CorrelAid. The structure is usually as follows: a public event on Friday evening, a day full of Data Science Workshops on Saturday, and workshops on the development of CorrelAid on Sunday. Everybody can participate regardless of how long they have been with us in the network, how much experience they have in data science or how they want to get involved - data4good projects and/or organizational work. The Data-for-Good Summit is usually held in autumn.

The Retreat

Also once a year our Core Team ( see Core Team ) meets to review the year and plan internal projects for the upcoming months. This personal exchange is very important to us, because otherwise we communicate exclusively online.

Roles and decision making

So how does cooperation work without fixed departments and hierarchies? How are decisions made? This is perhaps the most important point of our cooperation, which we do not communicate sufficiently: The most important concept is that of self-management. This replaces the concept of hierarchy in our company. In our team, different people take on different roles which they fill out in an independent, self-sufficient way. Some of those roles are formally developed at the Data-for-Good Summit or at the Strategy Meeting. However, more often, internal projects and ideas developed organically upon the initiative of individual Core Team members. The implementation and decisions related to their ideas are primarily the responsibility of the individual persons - with the support and advice of the other members of the Core Team.

A few examples of great internal initiatives: Our Regina in Bamberg takes care of our local group concept. Arndt in Berlin has in the past developed the way we do our projects, and Manuel has brought numerous projects from initial contact with the organization to the call for applications. Jasmin in Konstanz organizes our education sector and is the host of our CorrelAid podcast. Leo in Karlsruhe had the idea to write an R-Package with a small project team and thus introduce people to the topic of R package development. Jan programmed our website and organized hackathons with partners from industry and academia. Thanks to Lena in Frankfurt, we have a unified design guide and you can order cool, hand-embroidered CorrelAid shirt! Thomas has been our source of advice for everything GDPR and data protection. Rahel has organized several events and worked on grant applications. Hendrik, Andre, Andrew, Joel, Fabian, and Liubov have successfullly started CorrelAidX chapters all over Europe. And so the list goes on...

Some (also annoying) tasks have to be taken care of regularly in an association. Konstantin in Mannheim (and before him, Jan K.) submits our tax return every year and manages our finances. Rahel in Berlin curates and sends out our newsletter. Yannik in Stuttgart maintains our blog. Without this continuous and conscientious commitment, our work would not be possible.

The bottom-line is: If you have a cool idea you want to implement at/with CorrelAid, we will support you with resources to realize your idea. You are free in the design and in your decisions - a team of 20 people will be there in calls and on Slack to support you.

We use Slack for to coordinate the local chapters as well as for the organization of the activities of "central" CorrelAid, e.g. the organization of projects, meetups, etc. For example:

• During the week, we work on the different CorrelAid topics in the channels. Channels are either designated to a certain topic (e.g. #projects for projects, #education for eductation, #fundraising for collaborating on grant proposals) or are focused on local chapters (#lc-bremen, #lc-berlin, #lc-mannheim, ...). If you are interested in a certain topic and/or local chapter, you can join the corresponding channel(s) to see what's already going on. Or even better: share your ideas!

• If you need help with anything related to CorrelAid or data science or coding, feel free to ask away in the** #help **channel.

• found a funny Meme or Gif and need to share with someone? Stumbled across a very useful tutorial for something? Post it to #random!

• Have a new idea that doesn't fit in any channel? Need people to join you for something exciting? Post it in #general!

FAQ

I want to get access to Slack. How do I get it?

I dont really get this Slack thing? Who can help me?

Hi! Welcome to the CorrelAid docs. Here, we have collected information about how we work internally. All the content is continuously evolving and changing as we grow as an organization. We hope to document the status quo here but sometimes things might change.

There are four main sections:

Wiki

How does CorrelAid internally work? Who do I need to talk to if I need xyz?

CorrelAidX Manual

All about how local chapters work, how you can start your own, what you can do in a local chapter, different possible formats etc.

Project Manual

A manual for coordinators and leads of CorrelAid projects. But might be interesting to everyone else as well! This is still a work-in-progress.

Everything seems to be on Slack! How do I get on there?

Who do I ask when about what?

Do you also have email?

GitHub

I can't push to the Git repository ("access rights" error). What's up there?

Cloud

I need a virtual machine / server for our CorrelAid project. Who can help me?

Jonas or Leo can maybe set up something for you on our Azure Cloud or Digital Ocean.

I need a subdomain / DNS record set up

Jonas or Leo or can set this up for you. Please send a justification why you need this & relevant documentation along via Slack.

Gmail

I need my own @correlaid.org email address. How do I get it?

How can I change my password?

What is a personal email vs. a group email?

I don't get the emails of my local chapter (e.g. berlin@correlaid.org) in my personal inbox (e.g. leo.p@correlaid.org)?

This is intentional. While this might be annoying at first - having to switch between accounts - it has advantages:

• Transparency: when you answer an email from the shared inbox, other people with access can see the conversations. In contrast, if you answered an email to info@ or berlin@ from your personal inbox, the others could not see that.

• Clear lines: it's clear what is your personal business and what is business of the LC/group. For example, having a distinct personal inbox enables you to get personal invitations to events/meetings.

How can I access the emails of my local chapter (e.g. lc-jena@correlaid.org)?

You need to be logged into your personal Workspace account in order to see the group mail. Also try:

• logging out and back in of your account

• reloading gmail

Google Workspace

What is a Google group and why is this important?

What is a personal account vs a group account?

Both are normal Google Workspace user accounts. The distinction is conceptual and specific to CorrelAid:

• personal account: your own account in the CorrelAid Google Workspace. For example, phil.b@correlaid.org. Only you have access to this account. You can have a Google calendar for your CorrelAid volunteering, send/receive emails in your function as a CorrelAid volunteer (e.g. to communicate with project partners), collaborate on Google Drive, ...

• group account: an account which is mainly there for the purpose of collaboratively managing emails, i.e. collaborative inbox. For example, each chapter has a group account / email, e.g. konstanz@correlaid.org. The respective local chapter heads (e.g. members of group-lc-konstanz-heads Google Group) have access to the credentials of this account so that they can collaboratively manage the inbox of this email address.

How do I migrate Google Docs/Sheet/Slides from my personal account?

How do I migrate a CodiMD pad to Google Docs?

The blog is something like a big playground. Of course, for CorrelAid, it also has a purely practical function: we publish reports about our meetings, events, etc., and then share them on social media -- classic public relations work. So if you want to share something from your local chapter (like a report about a hackathon or the like), just join the slack channel #pr-blog!

At the same time, the blog also offers CorrelAid members the opportunity to share their ideas or analyses. This can start very small with a small evaluation/visualization or an explanation of a statistical phenomenon. But it can also lead to a large, comprehensive analysis with various interactive graphics. If you have ideas, just write to slack #pr-blog.

Finally, if it turns out, we are always happy to have guest posts or cross posts on our blog. So if you know someone outside of CorrelAid (scientists, activists etc.) who we should collaborate with, please shout it out in Slack.

Google Meet

Through Google for Nonprofits, CorrelAid has access to premium Google Meet features. Those include up to 100 participants, breakout rooms, whiteboards, and many more. See here for an overview. If you need to record a meeting (e.g. a meetup), you need to use Zoom instead.

If you have a Google Workspace account, you can create Meets by going to https://meet.google.com. Alternatively, you can directly add Google Meets to calendar events you create in your personal CorrelAid calendar.

Zoom

CorrelAid has two Zoom pro licenses. If you want to have a link for an event, please contact our community manager on Slack.

Recording a Zoom event

Sometimes, you might want to record a Zoom event. Here are our recommendations to keep the identities of the participants out of the recording:

• the speaker should share their screen

• host: switch to speaker view (not gallery)

• host: use the spotlight feature to spotlight the speaker and the moderator (typically the host functions as the moderator)

• with this setup...

  • participants can ask questions without appearing in the recording

  • the host can have the chat open overlaying the zoom recording -> this is independent of the recording feature

Groups and segments

MailerLite does not have separate "Audiences" like Mailchimp. All subscribers are part of the same table/database.

MailerLite differentiates between groups and segments. Segments are dynamic based on subscriber information, e.g. based on when the subscriber last openend an email. Groups are static, i.e. users have to be added to them, either manually or through a signup form. Learn more here.

Groups

Groups are most like our old "Audiences". Hence, they are the primary way how we group subscribers and send emails to specific people.

Currently, we have groups for the following:

• Volunteer Newsletter: the "main" big newsletter. Subscribers are added through the signup form embedded on our website (see "Forms")

• one group per (active) CorrelAidX chapter: subscribers are added to this group through the signup form for the volunteer newsletter if they tick the corresponding checkbox for the local chapter.

• Nonprofit Newsletter: the newsletter for nonprofits. Subscribers are added through the signup form embedded/linked to on our website (see "Forms")

• Mitglieder: Members of CorrelAid e.V. Subscribers are added and managed manually by the Board of CorrelAid e.V.

It is important to note, that people can be part of multiple groups. For example, a person might subscribe to the volunteer newsletter and one CorrelAidX chapter. In addition, they're also member of the CorrelAid e.V.. Despite this, there would only be one entry for this person in the overall subscriber database (except if they gave a different email in the "become member" form).

Segments

In addition, we also use segments.

GDPR segments

Segments that are based on consent (according to GDPR) given by the subscriber in the signup forms.

• Volunteer Analysis: all subscribers of the volunteer newsletter who have consented to their personal data (gender, year of birth, country of residence, city of residence) being used for anonymous statistics. This segment should be exported/used when doing analytics.

• Volunteer Contact New Chapters: all subscribers of the volunteer newsletter who have consented to their personal data (city of residence, country of residence) being used when a new chapter opens or is reactivated in their area.

  • This segment should be subset further and then used whenever we want to reach out to people for starting a new chapter.

  • Once a new chapter is established in the area and we have created a group (see above), we can transfer the affected users to the group.

Sending a newsletter

In general, sending a newsletter (a "campaign" in MailerLite terms) is easy:

1. Go to Campaigns and click "Create Campaign"

2. Follow the wizard

KeePass vaults

If you are (co-)head of a local chapters and/or another team within CorrelAid (such as podcast, mentoring, ethics committee), you will get access to a password-protected KeePass database file (.kdbx). This file is shared with only you and your collaborators via Google Drive. It will contain the login credentials for your shared Google account, e.g. konstanz@correlaid.org or podcast@correlaid.org as well as other relevant credentials.

What is KeePass?

KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can store all your passwords in one database, which is locked with a master key. So you only have to remember one single master key to unlock the whole database. Database files are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES-256, ChaCha20 and Twofish).

(Source: https://keepass.info/index.html)

How can I access the password(s)?

1. You get the master password for the database file from either Isabel (local chapters) or Frie (other teams) via a secure channel. Please store this password safely, e.g. in your personal password manager (bitwarden is free!).

2. Download one of the KeePass clients

3. Download the database file - you can find it in the Shared Drive 08_vaults.

4. Open the file in your KeePass client. It will ask you for the master password. Once you have unlocked the database, you will be able to access the password(s) stored in there.

How do I add a new password/change a password?

Prerequesites: KeePass client (see above), master password (see above)

Optional but recommended: Sync Google Drive (Windows, Mac, Linux) to your personal laptop so that you have access to your Google Drive files via your file explorer.

1. Download the database file - you can find it in the Shared Drive 08_vaults. Or find it in the synced folder if you have synced the Google Drive to your machine.

2. Open the file in your KeePass client. It will ask you for the master password. Once you have unlocked the database, you will be able to access the password(s) stored in there.

3. Edit the entry you want to edit or add a new entry. Lock the database/save it (depending on client).

4. Upload the database file back to Google Drive or let sync do this for you.

Admin

How do I add a new vault?

1. make sure you have a keepass client downloaded (Recommended MacPass for MacOS)

2. create a new vault and create the items inside it. how you do that depends on your client.

3. secure the vault with a password, ideally a passphrase

4. share the vault file with your teammates, e.g. in your Google Drive Workspace. This is ok - the vault can only be decrypted with the password.

5. transmit the passphrase via a secure, encrypted communication channel (not Slack or telegram). For example, signal, whatsapp or via voice.

Request an account

fill in this Google Form to request a Google Workspace account.

Get started

1. Set up 2-factor authentification if it is a personal account such as frie.p@correlaid.org.

2. check out which Google Groups you're in. This determines which Google Drive Shared Drives / folders you have access to.

3. Read the Google Drive "Get started".

4. Read the Google Mail "Get started".

Accounts

Personal accounts vs. group accounts

personal email: frie.p@correlaid.org

group email:

• info@correlaid.org

• berlin@correlaid.org

• education@correlaid.org

• ...

Gmail

Starting July 2022, we use Gmail through our Google Workspace for Nonprofits for emails.

With your Google Workspace account, you get a personal email address that you can use for your CorrelAid activities, e.g. reaching out to Nonprofits.

Get started

1. Log into your Google account

2. Head to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox. Make sure you're still logged into your CorrelAid account by checking top right.

3. If you need access to group email (e.g. local chapter or another team address), read below.

4. send a test email, e.g. to your personal email address.

5. optional: set up your favorite email client

6. optional: Set up labels/folders to stay organized. Check out the keyboard shortcuts to get more productive in gmail.

Accessing personal mails

You can access your personal emails via one of the following ways:

1. Gmail browser client: Just log into your Google workspace account and go to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/ . You might need to switch from your personal gmail account if that's set up as default.

2. All email clients such as Thunderbird or Outlook should support Gmail. Googling around - "set up gmail in [client]" - should give answers. If you need help or run into problems or want to set up something more complicated, ask Frie.

3. on smartphone: similarly, it should be easy to set up the google mail on your mobile phone.

• Android

• iPhone

Delegated Mail Access

It is possible to grant other accounts or groups access to a Gmail mailbox through delegation settings. Once configured, delegates can access a mailbox by clicking their account button in the top-right corner of the Gmail interface. Note that new delegation settings may take up to 24 hours to become active.

For detailed instructions on setting up email delegation, visit the Gmail Help Center.

Local chapter/group emails

You get access to the emails of a group such as a local chapter or the podcast team, if you are member of the corresponding heads google group. You can check whether you're member of this group by going to https://groups.google.com/my-groups.

There are two ways you have access to this email/account:

1. access to emails is delegated to you because you are part of the heads Google group: Delegated access is a tool from Google that is typically used in a boss/assistant scenario, e.g. the assistant needs access to their boss' emails why the boss is on holiday. You can watch this short video if you want to understand the background. CorrelAid uses this tool to delegate access to group emails to the respective heads Google group. For example, access to berlin@correlaid.org is delegated to the Google group group-lc-berlin-heads.

2. access to account credentials through Keepass file: Unfortunately, delegated access only works in the browser in Gmail directly. If you want to access the emails on your mobile phone or through an email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird, you need the credentials. You get access to the credentials of your group account through a Keepass database file that is shared with the members of the heads group. For example, all members of the Google group group-lc-berlin-heads have access to the berlin.kdbx keepass file which contains the credentials for the Google account berlin@correlaid.org. Members can use those credentials to set up email access on their phone or in their favorite email client.

Accessing LC/group emails

1. Gmail browser interface

Log into your personal account in the browser and go to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/. Go to the account dropdown on the top right and click on it. The group account should show up with a little key next to it. Switch to it to access the group account emails.

Check FAQ for troubleshooting.

2. Mobile

1. Follow the instructions to get the credentials for the group account

2. Sign into Gmail (google around if you are using the built-in mail app)

3. Outlook, Thunderbird etc.

1. Follow the instructions to get the credentials for the group account

2. Set up your favorite email client (Googling around - "set up gmail in [client]" - should give answers). If you need help or run into problems, ask Frie.

Tips to work together on emails

1. Use labels to assign conversations to each other: you can use Gmail labels to "assign" conversations to each other. This way, the other person/people know(s) that you're on this and that they don't have to take it on.

FAQ

See FAQ.

Google Groups/Users

What is a Google Group?

Groups such as project teams, departments, or classmates can communicate and collaborate using Google Groups. If you want to invite a group to an event, or share documents with a group, you can send a single email to everyone in the group. (Source)

How do we use Google groups?

We use Google groups to arrange our volunteers into different groups, according to their interest and level of involvement and responsibility in CorrelAid. For example, each local chapter has two groups:

• lc-konstanz: all people involved in the local chapter. They get access to the CorrelAidX shared drive where they can work on documents.

• lc-konstanz-heads: the heads of the local chapter. They can manage members of the lc-konstanz group, and get access to the konstanz@correlaid.org email address/account.

Which groups am I in?

You can see your group membership(s) at https://groups.google.com/my-groups. Each group has a description which describes what members of this group can do/what they get access to.

Where can I see all groups?

You can find an overview of all groups at https://groups.google.com/all-groups. Each group has a description which describes what members of this group can do/what they get access to.

User Management/Admin

If you are manager of a Google Group, you can add/remove members by going to https://groups.google.com/my-groups and then clicking on the group you want to manage. In the sidebar on the left hand side, you'll find "People". There you can add/remove members.

Google Drive

Get started

1. Go to https://drive.google.com and make sure you are logged into your CorrelAid Google Workspace account.

2. This will redirect you to your "My Drive". There are three ways to interact with Google Drive which are accessible via the sidebar on the left:
3. Go to Shared Drives and explore. You should have access to the 00_assets drive where you can find template slides, the CorrelAid logo and other useful templates and documents.

4. If you have CorrelAid files/content somewhere else/on your personal laptop: Read the "What (not) to store on Google Drive" subsection below. Then, migrate any files you have on your personal laptop / your personal Google account. For the latter, see the FAQ.

5. Setting up a local chapter? There is a suggestion for how to structure your local chapter folder in the 99_example_chapter. Copy-paste that to your own chapter folder to get going!

6. Check out this article to learn more about how you can optimize your personal drive setup / find things faster! :)

What (not) to store on Google Drive

• store project data from NPO partners if it is GDPR relevant

• store any other project data from NPO partners

• don't store/write down special characteristics (ethnicity, religion, political beliefs...) of other people (also incl. Google Docs/Google Sheets) -> for those cases, please use NextCloud or a private CodiMD.

• for meetings/information concerning/including external partners: ask them beforehand whether it is OK if you use Google Docs to write meeting minutes/plan things including them. Some organizations/partners might not want information about them on US servers. Respect that and use NextCloud or a CodiMD instead.

• avoid storing personal data from CorrelAiders on Google Drive. Names and CorrelAid email addresses should be ok, but for instance, if you need to collect postal addresses, use a Kobo form instead of Google Forms.

• you can use Google Drive to transfer/store non-GDPR relevant data from the partner organization under the condition that the project partner consented to this in written form.

• meeting minutes for internal purposes, e.g. discussing the planning of an internal event

• additional material such as certificates of attendance or data privacy agreements

• use Google Drive to transfer/store Open Data

Guidelines & Best Practices

Avoid link sharing when possible

• • Click the "Share" button

  • Click on "Get Link"

  • Change "Restricted" to "Anyone with the link" (for outside people) or "CorrelAid e.V." (e.g. for internal memos)

Use Shared Drives instead of My Drive

Files in MyDrive are not shared in the Shared Drive system, so other people won't be able to access them. This hinders collaboration. Hence, make sure to always create new documents from a Shared Drive location/folder.

Template slides & documents

We have added templates and will add more in the future, e.g. the Slide Master.

How to use a template:

The "proper way"

Choose an option:

• From the Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, or Sites home screen, at the top, select one of the featured templates. Click Template gallery to see additional templates. Note: If you can't find Template gallery, go to Display or hide Template gallery.

Source: https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9308885?hl=en

Make a copy

Go to the template, click on "File" and then "make a copy". Make sure to store in the Shared Drive.

Migration

See the Migration pad for questions & answers related to the Migration from Nextcloud / personal Google docs to Google Drive.

How do I migrate Google Docs/Sheet/Slides from my personal account?

1. Go to MyDrive of your personal Google Drive

2. Select the files you want to transfer to your CorrelAid Workspace account (you can select multiple files by holding Cmd respectively CTRL).

3. Right-click and download. This will download a zip file. Unzip it.

4. Delete the files from your personal Google account (right click > Move to bin) to avoid confusion with multiple files floating around.

6. Go to the Shared Drive location where you want to dump your files. Right-click > folder upload. Select your unzipped folder in your Downloads folder.

7. After the upload has completed, move the files by right-clicking > "Move to". Alternatively, download Drive for Desktop to move files more quickly using your file explorer.

8. Update links to files, e.g. pinned in Slack channels.

How do I migrate a CodiMD pad?

1. In your CodiMD, click on the "eye" to only show the formatted text.

2. Use CMD (mac) / Ctrl + A to select all the text

3. Copy (ctrl/cmd + c)

4. Create new Google Doc

5. Paste (ctrl/cmd + v)

6. Delete the Pad from CodiMD via the permission dropdown

FAQ

See Google Drive FAQ in the overall FAQ.

Google Forms

Events / Signup and Feedback forms

Due to GDPR concerns, please avoid using Google Forms for anything requiring a sign up/personal data. Instead use:

• Pretix for events -> Frie or Isabel can give you access

• KoboToolbox for forms such as feedback surveys or signup for internal events (e.g. a summer party) -> Frie or Isabel can give you access

Google Calendar

Personal calendar

You have your personal CorrelAid calendar(s) which you can find at calendar.google.com.

Visibility of your calendar / sharing of your personal calendar

By default, your personal CorrelAid calendar can be seen by other CorrelAiders as well - they can't see the details of the event(s), just when you're busy. You can change this setting in the sharing & permissions settings of your calendar(s). See this page for the how-to and other things you can do (e.g share with specific person or group)

Add CorrelAid calendar to personal Google calendar

Optional: If you use Google calendar to manage your personal life outside of CorrelAid, you can add the CorrelAid calendar to it - this way you don't have to switch accounts in calendar.google.com. To do this, share your CorrelAid calendar with your personal Gmail address. Google around whether this is also possible for other calendar solutions (Outlook, Posteo, ...)

Arrange a meeting

You can arrange a meeting with someone else by using the "Meet with" box.

Displaying calendars from others

Example use case:

• you want to see the calendar of one of the CorrelAid employees to send them a meeting invite*

You can find and display calendars of individual people by clicking the plus next to “Other calendars”, then “subscribe to new calendar” and then typing the name of the person

*don’t just send people meeting invites out of the blue - that’s rude. Always ask first, e.g. via Slack DM :)

Group calendar

Create shared / group calendars

Example use cases:

• CorrelAidX chapter calendar

• global CorrelAid event calendar

• Calendar for Mentoring Program

You can create a group calendar and share it with individuals or group(s) within the workspace as described here. You can find the list of all groups here. You can give different groups different permissions, e.g. the lc-heads group editing rights and the lc group reading rights.

You can also share the calendar with the public.

Displaying group calendars

Example use case:

• you want to display a group calendar, e.g. the calendar of your local chapter

1. Ask one of the group admins (e.g. the local chapter head) to send you the calendar ID, as described here.

CorrelAid Events Calendar

Different teams might have different calendars to organize themselves (e.g. the remote office has a team calendar). For the whole of CorrelAid, there exists an events calendar which provides an overview over events organized by the remote office, the association, local chapters, participation of CorrelAid at external events etc.

To add the calendar to your CorrelAid Google account:

1. make sure you're logged into calendar.google.com with your CorrelAid account

2. Click on this link. This should open a pop-up in your browser.

Everyone can add events to the calendar. Please use this responsibly and make sure not to add personal events to it. Use a very distinctive color for the calendar (e.g. black, brown) to make sure that this doesn't happen.

Google Meet

See page on Video conferences.

Admin

Set up a new chapter/team with email address

use case: new chapter or new team that might need:

• a shared email account (collaborative inbox)

• a digital workspace, i.e. a shared drive in Google Drive

• ...

Create the Google user

First we have to create the google user.

1. Go to the user management console

2. Create a new user. The first name should be "CorrelAid(X)", the last name indicative of the group's purpose, e.g. "Community Team" or the city name if it's a CorrelAidX account.

3. Take note of the password but don't send it via plain text / Slack to anyone.

Optional: Then we create the corresponding groups. This is necessary if we want a group of people to be able to access the emails or give them a shared drive

Create google groups

explanation. for team accounts there are:

• group-[teamname]. members of the team/chapter. They typically get access to the shared drive, but not to group email.

• optional for larger groups or local chapters: group-[teamname]-heads. this group will only contain the leading people of the team/chapter who'll get access to the mails etc.

1. go to the group management console

2. create the group for the team/chapter. all but a few groups start with group prefix. Check existing groups for the naming conventions. The description should clearly state what access rights are associated with the group. For example: "Podcast. Gives access to shared drive(s)/folders: 04_podcast, 05_pr." or for a heads group: "Heads of Podcast Team. Access to Google Workspace User podcast@correlaid.org (via password database file in 08_vaults).access to password to Soundcloud, managers of Google Group group-podcast"

3. add members to the group(s).

Create vault

The password from step 1 can be shared with the team or its heads. You can do so with a keepass vault. Check out the documentation over on the page. Specific instructions:

• for step 2: give the file a short name. see the files in this drive for inspiration

• for step 3: in Bitwarden, there is a secret note "keepass" which contains instructions how to generate a password.

• for step 4: upload to this drive and share the file (not the drive!) with the heads group you created earlier (right-click -> share). if you didn't create a heads group, then with the normal group.

Delegate email access

Finally, you need to give the "heads" (or everyone if a small group) access to the emails. They can either use the credentials from the vault or use the delegated access in the browser (read here for more information and instructions for users).

To delegate email access:

• log in to the group account (e.g. cologne@correlaid.org) with the credentials in the vault

• go to gmail.com and then to settings -> all settings -> accounts

• under "Grant access to your account:" click on "add another account". an old-school looking window with yellow background will open. there you have to enter the groupname + @correlaid.org, .e.g group-lc-cologne-heads@correlaid.org. then click on invite.

• send the people the instructions on how to access the mail.

Optional: Set up shared drive

if they also need a shared drive, you can create a new one for them.

1. go to https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/shared-drives

2. click the big "new" button

3. name the drive. then share it with the group-office and the group(s) you created earlier. give them the content manager role.

4. done. :)

• To request an account, join the slack channel #infrastructure-kobo-toolbox and ask there

• The above-mentioned slack channel also serves as a communication channel for announcing maintenance periods and for asking general questions about the service

User management

Here, admins can create and delete users and manage other settings of the Kobo instance (but most of which should be just left alone).

Adding a User

1. Add user

Click on "Add" next to "Users" and you can set a user name and password for the new user.

Important: User names should follow the {firstname}_{first letter of surname} format. Using dots (".") in user names definetly causes some weird problems, so this should be avoided at all cost. The password should obviously follow good password principles.

Once you click on "Save", you'll be redirected to the settings page for this user. Leave the default settings and click "Save" again.

1. Associate Email address to user

Since an update to a newer version, we have to associate an email address to the user, otherwise the login will not work. To do that:

2. top right, click add email address.

4. A pop up will appear where you can select the target user by clicking on their name

5. the pop up should close. The displayed number is the numeric ID for the user you selected.

6. enter the email address and check both tick boxes (Verified and Primary)

1. Share the password with the user

CorrelAid collection

Subscribe to the collection

2. In the dropdown at the bottom, select "CorrelAid" if it is not already selected.

3. Click "POST"

Use the template surveys

When creating a new project, you can use the template surveys by selecting "Use a template" in the "Create project" dialogue. This will copy the template survey into your project.

API

Kobo has an API you can use.

Documentation

You can find the documentation here:

Getting your token

FAQ

I want to contribute a small section or propose a small change to the docs.

I want to write a longer section.

Please ask in #infrastructure for the signup link. Then you'll be able to join our Gitbook space and add your content using the Gitbook editor.

I heard that the CorrelAidX Berlin chapter maintains their meeting minutes and projects on Gitbook. How can I read them?

Please ask in #lc-berlin for the link that'll give you read or write access to the Berlin Gitbook team.

Azure

Admin

Azure has to be renewed every year (around February). We will receive instructions one month before expiry to info@correlaid.org (see FAQs).

DNS management

DNS records are managed through Hetzner. Jonas or Leo can help you when you need to have a subdomain such as obs.correlaid.org pointing at your project / site or other DNS records (A, MX, CNAME, ...).

FAQ

NextCloud / Storage Share

• Starting April 2023, we have a so called Storage Share at Hetzner. This is the NextCloud offering of Hetzner.

• Ask for support in the Slack channel #infrastructure-nextcloud

Groups

Group administrators have the rights to create, edit and delete users in their assigned groups. Group administrators cannot access system settings, or add or modify users in the groups that they are not Group Administrators for.

Manage people to the group you're admin of

2. Using the left sidebar, navigate to

Admin

• We use this instance for creating monitoring dashboards for infrastructure and for internal and external reporting on various metrics related to CorrelAids work

• Should you need access to any dashboards or would like to use Metabase in a project, ask in the slack channel #infrastructure-correlbase

• This channel also serves as a communication channel to announce maintenance for this service and to ask general questions

Call schedule

Open / Onboarding Call: 1st Monday

What: Open / onboarding call. This call is open to anyone who is interested in our work. We share important updates from the CorrelAid world, answer questions and provide some onboarding information for CorrelAid "newbies".

When: 1st Monday of each month, 7pm (Berlin time).

CorrelAidX / Local Chapter Call: 3rd Monday

When: 3rd Monday of each month, 7pm (Berlin time).

GitHub

There are different levels of permissions:

1. Members of the CorrelAid Core Team are members of the GitHub organization. Through the GitHub Team coreteam , they have access to a lot of repositories (except of project repositories).

3. Everyone else - project team members, "temporary" core team members, external collaborators are added as collaborators with read/write access to the relevant repositories they need access to. They are not added to the GitHub organization. From the GitHub help:

GitHub Actions

CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) is an important cornerstone of today's software development best practices. This is why, in general, we encourage CorrelAid teams to use GitHub Actions, e.g. for testing pipelines etc.

Public Repositories

We need to add your repositories to the list of repos for which GitHub Actions is available. To request this, please contact Frie (@frie) on Slack.

Private Repositories

• make repositories public whenever possible: GitHub Actions is free for public repositories because GitHub is committed to supporting open source. Hence, the easiest solution is to make your repo open-source whenever it's possible. There is no shame in developing code in public, your code doesn't need to be perfect during development! Examples:
• do you really need GitHub Actions or is it a nice add-on? Maybe your repo is more of a fun analysis than something that needs to be stable for the long-term. In this case, maybe you don't really need automated testing?!

• if your repository needs to stay private and you really do need GitHub Actions, consider:

  • how often do you need to run the GitHub Action? Does it have to be run on open PRs with every commit triggering a new run? Suggestion:

    • have a main branch where you run on every commit. you never commit on main directly, except for hot fixes

    • have a dev branch. this is the branch you open your PR against. You run your tests on every commit on the dev branch.

    • you work on feature branches that branch off dev. You don't run GitHub Actions on the Pull Requests. Instead, you test locally and merge to dev to see whether the tests pass for all platforms.

    • You could also investigate running your feature branch / PR tests on Ubuntu only, with MacOS and Windows only run on dev.

Once you have considered and thought through all those points, please write a message to Frie (@frie) on Slack, explaining the reasoning for a) why your repo needs to be private, b) why you need GitHub Actions and c) your branch and usage concept. If you're unsure about any of the points, Frie can discuss them with you.

Once we have come to an agreement, Frie can add your repo to the list of repositories for which GitHub Actions is available and you can start using it.

GitLab

FAQ

See our general FAQ for answers.

Gendering (German)

• CorrelAid empfiehlt in der deutschen Sprache primär eine genderumschreibende Schreibweise zu verwenden. Zum Beispiel die Mitarbeitenden im Remote Office, statt die Mitarbeiter im Remote Office oder Teilnehmende anstatt „Teilnehmer“.

• Wenn keine Genderumschreibung möglich ist, kann alternativ der Asterisk – das sogenannte Gendersternchen * – verwendet werden, zum Beispiel Referent*in. Hier gibt es einen weitergehenden Guide zum Gendersternchen.

Pretix Tutorial: How to add zoom and calendar invitations to events (in German)

Certificates of attendance

Certificates of attendance can be created for each course. The item can be found at the bottom left of the menu.

If you click on “Print certificates of attendance”, the template that is selected as the default will be used and the certificates for all participants will be created in a pdf file.

There is also the option of creating one for individual participants if you call up the participant's mask (there is a corresponding button there).

To create a layout for a certificate of attendance, you upload the pdf as a background (RLernen here, Data Literacy here) and then insert blocks for the name and the course date.

Stickers

Details coming soon. In the meantime, please ask in the Slack channel #pr-team for help.

Details coming soon. In the meantime, please ask in the Slack channel #pr-team for help.

Details coming soon. In the meantime, please ask in the Slack channel #pr-team for help.

As of end of 2019, we have a cooperation with dezent.me, a small German company who embroider t-shirts with our logo. You can purchase a shirt from the dezent.me shop.

General

The purpose of this short design guideline is to explain the use of our CorrelAid-specific corporate design and to reinforce the consistent use of visual elements in all communication. This includes publications, presentations and all other marketing materials both online and offline. Our Corporate Identity was developed by Das Gute Ruft - Agentur für öko-soziale Unternehmen und Vereine - the information listed here is based on the Design Guide from June 2018.

The Design Guide is available in our Google Workspace. You can find all logos / existing designs in the Google Workspace as well as in the Canva-Team:

• access to our Google Workspace

• access to our Canva-Team

Logos

The CorrelAid main logo is the central element of the brand's visual identity. It is a word-image brand - this makes the logo flexible and usable for a wide range of applications.

Main Logo

Main Logo

There are three variations of this main logo which can be used on dark and light ground, with slogan or without. The files are stored as .png and .svg in the Google Workspace.

Local Chapter Logos

The CorrelAidX logos are an adaptation of the main logos. In addition to the "C", the logo also shows the suffix "X" which expresses that CorrelAid is available in various cities. Instead of the claim the city name is inserted in line 2. If you want to customize a logo specifically for your city, please contact Isabel or the #pr-team. The logos are stored as .png and .svg in the Google Workspace.

Here's an example:

CorrelAidX Label

Additional Logos

For some events we need more specific logos that can be easily and quickly designed with Canva. Please check the PR-folder in the Google Workspace or the Canva-Team folder for more designs.

If you need a special CorrelAid logo version, just contact contact Isabel or the #pr-team. To avoid brand confusion, please do not create your own logo versions.

Color Concepts

Looking at the previous two logos, it becomes clear that there are two different colour concepts for the CorrelAid and CorrelAidX main brands. These are briefly explained here.

Color Segments CorrelAid

The colors for easier copy+paste:

• green: 96c342

• blue: 3863a2

• red: f04451

• grey: 3c3c3b

The CorrelAid logo picks up the colour spectrum from green to blue. The color red is primarily used in the logo design of CorrelAid X (cities / regional organizations). In addition, dark grey is used as a contrast color. Please adhere to the given color values in future designs and representations in order to keep our products combinable.

Color Segements CorrelAidX

The CorrelAidX logo picks up the colour spectrum from red to blue. Besides the X, the color red is a main differentiator between CorrelAid and CorrelAid X and should therefore be used uniformly. Dark grey is again used as contrast colour.

Font

The font family "Roboto" was chosen for the corporate design of CorrelAid. In detail we use Roboto Regular, Light and Bold - please do not use any other fonts for the sake of uniformity. "Roboto Regular" is usually used for text body and headings are in "Roboto Light" (optionally capitalized). On top of that, "Londrina Solid Regular" can be used for highlighted text (mainly on Social Media).

Canva

CorrelAid has a Canva Pro-Account, on which certain basic rules, such as club colors, logos, fonts, etc. are already maintained. There are a lot of templates for flyers, social media posts etc. in the layout folder of the team. If you want to design a product (flyer, poster, FB banner...) for your local group / information event, please contact Isabel or the #pr-team to get access to the CorrelAid-Team in Canva.

Getting started with your local chapter might seem daunting at first. We hope that the material in this chapter will help you get your chapter up and running. If you have any questions that are not covered in this chapter, please report back to Isabel or Frie (see Contact) - those docs are a work in progress.

Intro

This guide is for you, if you want to create a new CorrelAid Event for the first time and don't know the steps involved yet or if you just want to check that you don't forget any steps in between.

The general phases in creating a CorrelAid event are the following:

Tools

The tools used in the event creation are:

• Nextcloud Event deck for task tracking

• GoogleDoc for saving the event description

• Canva for creating beautiful social media posts

• Zoom for creating the video call and invitation link (login info is saved in Bitwarden)

• Pretix for participant management (they can register for the event and unregister from it and will receive an e-mail with the Zoom Link and a calendar invite, login info is saved in Bitwarden)

• Kobo for creating feedback forms

In the following sections you can find all the ToDos during each of the phases. These ToDos are also available in the event template card in the Events Nextcloud Deck.

An overview of all events and their descriptions can be found in this Google Doc

Planning

• Card created in deck & checklist copied

• Clarification of

  • Appointment

  • Speaker

  • Title

  • Teaser

  • Short description

• Add that info to the GDoc here such that we have an overview of all events

• (Create extra card on separate board if necessary: Create content for the event)

• Think about how to collect feedback for your event!

  • Is there a kobo form that you can resuse?

End result: complete description of the event -> one document with all short descriptions here

Publication

• Create Zoom link (see instructions)

• Create Pretix event (see instructions)

• Create an entry in the PR Posting calendar (one week before the event)

• Write PR date as deadline in the title of the card

• Add event to CorrelAid event calendar

• Create an entry in public calendars:

  • D64
• (Tag person who is to advertise on card - we don't have that person yet so you are responsible for advertising)

End result: Entry in the CorrelAid event calendar (and others)

Advertising

• Create content

  • Image: Templates can be found here

  • Text: Get creative.

  • Optional: Reel (Easily convert your image with the magic switch function in Canva)

• Post article

  • LinkedIn

  • Mastodon

  • Instagram

  • Slack channels that apply

End result: Published posts on all social media channels

During the Event

• Document participants (screenshot)

• Share feedback link with participants

End result: successful workshop 🚀 , list of participants, materials

Follow-up

• Send materials and feedback link to participants (template in Education Mail)

• For education events:

  • Upload materials to GDrive educational resources and change permissions to "everyone can view"

  • Add materials (non-editable) to "Bildungsressourccen" in CMS

  • Fill out list of participants in Nextcloud

• (Forward feedback to external speakers)

CorrelAid is a network of young data analysts who use their knowledge acquired from study and career to help non-profit organizations to better understand and analyze their data. CorrelAid is based on three pillars:

1. Consultancy: In Germany - and more and more in Europe - , we play a pioneering role in data analysis consulting for organizations with a social mandate.

2. Networking: We connect young and dedicated data scientists and provide them with a platform to apply and expand their knowledge.

3. Dialogue: We also initiate dialogues on the value and benefits of data and data analysis for civil society.

Official CorrelAid info email blurb:

CorrelAid Bremen

CorrelAid Nederland

• If you are in a university context, you could register your chapter as a university group / club or associate it with a department student council or another existing university group / club. University clubs / groups can most often book university rooms for free, they can be part of student fairs etc. Student councils can help you with reaching your target audience via email lists, room booking and general communication. Local chaupters that went this route are

• If you are not in a university context, try to find organizations to collaborate with. Maybe you can give a talk at a local R / Python user group meetup about data-for-good. Maybe there are open data or civic tech groups in your area. Another perk of connecting with them: Existing meetup groups most likely will know where to find rooms / locations for your own meetups.

Room booking

University context

As already mentioned, it is worthwhile to register your CorrelAidX chapter as an university group in order to be able to book rooms yourself at the university. Alternatively, a cooperation with a student council or with academic staff / professors at the university is an opportunity. Each of these groups should be able to book rooms via the university room booking system. Since large seminar rooms / lecture halls can be booked out over months, make sure to inquire about a room at an early stage. A realistic period is about 3 months in advance. Even if the event does not have to be completely planned at the time, you are safe regarding the location and can give other participants / helpers an exact date and place.

Outside university

Also, after a successful event, remember to select people to be responsible for cleaning up the room unless you have agreed otherwise with the organization that will provide you with the space. A good event ends only when the last visitors have left.

Catering

University context

Likewise, already existing university structures can be helpful organizing the catering. One of the most effective ways to promote an event at an university is continually mentioning free food. These can be pizza as well as pretzels, slices or biscuits. The size and type of food you offer depends on the size and nature of your events as well as your personal preferences.

Further examples from our practice

• Foodsharing University / Local Group

• Order pizza

• Lubricate rolls / bake cake

Outside of university

If you are collaborating with a company or another meetup group, chances are good that they'll be able to provide a sponser for the food / drinks. Another option is to go to sponsors in the area. If, for example, a beverage manufacturer / trader is in the area, it is worthwhile to inquire there. If this is not the case, we can support you as well. See next section.

CorrelAid financial support

Examples

Netherlands

The Netherlands chapter has chosen to become its own Stichting (Foundation) instead of working under the umbrella of the German Verein. The main reason for this choice is partially legal, and partially monetary:

It is difficult to do charitable work across borders unless it is developmental work in an underdeveloped country. It is difficult for the German entity to sign project start agreements with Dutch NGOs, and they are not allowed to move funds outside of Germany. It is also difficult to find any type of funding from Dutch institutions or funds when you are a German Verein.

The legal form that we chose is more suited for a charitable organization than the Dutch version of a Verein (Vereniging). It is also needed for us to be recognized by the Dutch government as a charitable organization, which helps us attract funding.

The aim of workshops is to increase the professional and content-related competence of CorrelAidX members. This includes both the basic introduction to R and Python, as well as the learning of specific knowledge and packages within both programming languages. Depending on the demand, workshops should always be thought through at the beginning of the semester. This decision should include the level of input of the members and the skills of the teachers.

If there is a basic idea of the upcoming workshops, the planning for the first workshop should be started. Based on this example all following workshops can be planned. Basically one should assume that after 90 minutes learners are hardly able to process new information. Therefore, the planning should be created for about 90 minutes. A workshop session includes a brief conceptual introduction to the current session, collaborative editing of an R or Python script, and self-paced learning by learners.

The R or Python scripts do not have to be developed completely on your own. CorrelAid Germany offers teachers a basic set of R and Python scripts which can be used as a basis to plan your own workshop. If there is no template available already, it is up to the teacher to provide the script to CorrelAid Germany.

Workshops are most easily held in seminar rooms at the university. In this case, student councils can be asked for their support, as they are generally allowed to book seminar rooms. For the individual workshops invitations should be sent via social media posts at least two weeks in advance. Here the basic topic of the workshop should be explained already. In addition to the invitation, at least two reminders should be sent around so that the number of potential participants and people reached is as high as possible.

At the beginning of the workshop, the teacher explains the concrete content of the workshop and structures the lessons in accordance with their own teaching concept. Both the teacher and the students should feel comfortable in the workshop and not feel overwhelmed. At the end of the workshop, the teacher should announce to the topic of the next upcoming workshop, if applicable.

Should a relatively large number of workshops be offered, it is possible for CorrelAidX units to issue a certificate to learners about learning the basics in R or Python. In this case a attendance list must be maintained. In the best case, tasks are provided to the learners which must be solved on their own.

• Timeframe

• Responsibility

• Work step

The CorrelAid Content Management System (CMS) is a tool built with Directus that serves content to the CorrelAid website. All the content on the CorrelAid website, including blog posts, events, and projects, originates from the CMS. This documentation provides an overview of how to use the CMS and explains the process of managing and publishing content on the website.

Accessing the CMS

To access the CorrelAid CMS, visit cms.correlaid.org in your web browser.

If you need an account to contribute to correlaid.org, please reach out to the "infrastructure-website-directus" channel on the CorrelAid Slack.

Roles

Currently, there are two Roles: Admin and Mentoring Team

Mentoring Team

• can update the mentoring page in the Pages collection

• users in this role can update their own person entry in the Person collection (the person has to be created by an admin and connected to a Directus user beforehand)

Important Info

• Do not upload sensitive files to directus!

General Contribution Process

To manage and publish content on the CorrelAid website, follow these general steps:

1. Login: Visit cms.correlaid.org and log in using your account credentials.

4. Publish an entry: When you're ready to make an entry live on the website, ensure that the entry is set to "published" if this field existst.

6. Preview your changes: Visit correlaid.pages.dev and enter your correlaid.org email address. You will then be sent a link containing a code that you can use to access the preview website. If you don't have a correlaid.org email, request a Google Workspace account. Please note that the automatic update process may take some time, and the changes may not be immediately visible on the website.

The CorrelAid website (correlaid.org) is automatically updated at 1 am, using all content from Directus that is set to published (if this field exists).

Tips and Tricks

Draft process on Google Docs / other text editors and formatting

Most often, you might draft your content on google docs or other editors of your choice, e.g. to collaborate with others. This is a good process!

However, one problem is that Google docs and other editors (Word, VS Code) assign their own formatting to text. This means when you copy your text to the text editor within Directus, it might still carry this additional formatting with it. There are three things you can do for it:

1. Clear formatting button: highlight all the text you copied in and click the clear formatting button (looks like the italic button "I" but with a little x). This will remove styles from the text.

Sometimes this is not sufficient, e.g. for bullet point lists, Google docs creates an extra <p> tags for each bullet point causing the spacing between bullet points to be quite large. You can see this in the code view of the editor (accessible via the <> button). In this case:

1. Remove extra tags manually in the code view. This works well for smaller texts.

2. Install the Docs to Markdown extension and use it to export your google docs text to HTML directly (Extensions -> Docs to Markdown -> Convert, then HTML button). This will create raw HTML which you can copy into the code view in Directus. For larger texts, this is recommended.

Add a Video to WYSIWYG

1. Log in at vimeo.com

2. Open the video you want to embed

3. Copy the html code you see when you click on "Embed" and on "Fixed", but remove the height and width attributes and add the "dnt=1" url parameter (do not track). This is an example for what the resulting html code should look like:

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/827419927?h=7cc5391f99&amp&dnt=1" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>

1. In the WYSIWYS field in directus, click on "Edit Source Code" (the <> icon) and paste the html code at the place where you want the video to appear. The video wont be displayed when you switch back to the normal edit view, but it should be displayed on the website.

Removing empty translations

Some content allows for translations, but recognizes that not all languages (currently English and German) might be provided. In such cases the website has logic build into it that will use the language with existing content independent of what the user has currently selected. For instance the German version of the website will show blog posts that are only available in English. Currently this behavior is used for blog posts and jobs.

In Directus, it can unfortunately happen that a translation ends up existing without any content. So the system for instance thinks there is a German version of a blog post but its actually empty. This can, for instance, happen when content is added to a particular language/translation by accident and is removed again afterwards. Ideally these empty unneeded translations are then removed manually. Since this is not straight forward the concrete steps follow. As an example we consider posts but it works similarly in other collections.

1. Identify the ID of the blog post with the empty translation. This should be in the posts collection table. If its not there it can be added as a column with the + sign in the upper right corner.

2. Right click in the menu on the left, that is listing the collections. From the context menu choose "Show Hidden Collections". Make sure you right click in the menu, but not on a particular collection. Otherwise a different context menu containing "Edit Collection" will show up.

3. Choose the collection "Posts Translations"

4. Find the Translation that has as Posts ID the ID identified in step 1.

5. Select that row and hit the delete button in the top right.

6. Right click in the menu on the left to "Hide Hidden Collections" again.

FAQ

What different Website links are there?

• live version: https://correlaid.org

• preview version: https://correlaid.pages.dev

• pull request previews for pull requests in the GitHub Repository: those have the form https://[random string].correlaid.pages.dev. You also need a CorrelAid email to access them via a code.

The formatting of my blog post/content looks weird on the website

See above for tips how to manage formatting.

Admin

Directus Deployment

Directus is set up with Terraform and Ansible. Find the repo here. It runs on Azure on a VPS connected to a managed Postgres Database. The terraform currently only exists locally, but we plan to migrate this to the cloud in the future.

Frequent Bug Fixes

ID not unique

It has happened multiple times that suddenly, when someone wanted to create a new entry in a collection, they were shown the error message "ID not unique". This seems to be a bug with Directus. The cause is that the automatic increment of ids in the corresponding Postgres table was somehow reset, so that entries are being created with ids that already exist. Fix this in the following way:

1. Connect to the server Directus is running on (the ip of this server is the only one that can connect to the database). Ask on Slack for your ssh key to be added to the server.

2. Use psql to connect to the Database like this:

   Copy

   psql "host=hostname port=5432 dbname=main user=user password=password sslmode=require"

   Find the credentials on bitwarden.

3. Identify the collection causing the error. Sometimes it is not the collection you tried to create an entry in, but some other collection related to it, for example translations.

4. Execute the following SQL code (insert the name of the collection):

   Copy

   SELECT SETVAL('public."<Collection>_id_seq"', (SELECT max(id) FROM public."<Collection>")); 
   ALTER TABLE public."<Collection>" ALTER COLUMN id SET DEFAULT nextval('"<Collection>_id_seq"'::regclass);

Every now and then there is the possibility to present CorrelAid as an organization at the university or also at conferences / meetings / MeetUps. The format is completely free at this point as long as you and the organizers feel that CorrelAid can make a contribution and / or is interesting for the participants. Of course, in addition to presenting at external events, you may also like to take the initiative: Fore example, you can send a mail to your university mailing list to make them aware of your group. This may also combined with a (founding) event.

Various events in which CorrelAid could contribute or present themselves would be, for example, student councils or university mailing lists, student initiative fairs, similar organization events (Code for Germany, Open Knowledge Foundation) or panel discussions and conferences in the field of data analysis / civil society engagement.

In order to make your presentation a little easier, we have put together presentations and information materials that you are welcome to use. We can already prepare for you:

• Sticker & flyer (still in the old design, currently redesign in progress)

• Poster (general and project schedule)

• Presentation texts in different lengths or verbosities

• Powerpoint presentations for different addressees

• Reusable stock photos

• Standard cover letter separated by addressee for hosting various events

At the local level, it makes sense to name contact persons for different tasks. Roughly, the tasks of the local groups can be divided into two areas: community and projects. The following two profiles are designed to help you create clearer responsibilities. It is of course still possible and useful that individual tasks are taken over by other group members or that formats, such as the data dialogue, are organized in close cooperation.

Community management

The Community Magager is the contact for both interested data scientists from the area as well as for the CorrelAid team on a nationwide level. Among the tasks of the community managers are the fields of network and communication. Possible formats would be the organization of (regular) meet-ups, workshops, kaggle-challanges and / or communication with other local organizations in the field of data science.

Project management

The project manager is the contact person for local organizations who would like to carry out a project with your local group. They are also responsible for the initiation and administration of current projects. The tasks include contacting, managing the ideation process with the NPOs and consulting the project administrators in the CorrelAid team. It is of course also possible to carry out "internal" projects within the local group. More precise steps for the tendering and implementation of a project at the local level can be found in the project manual.

Specific task forces

In addition, some local groups have formed other task forces. For example, there are sub-teams that take care of project acquisition, marketing and education. Some chapter defined a CorrelAidX ambassador as well: one person who joins the monthly CorrelAidX calls (every third Monday of the month) and reports back to the chapter.

Goal: Offer NPOs that do not yet have a concrete project idea a format to define their data challenge with dedicated data scienctist volunteers.

Key Takeaways:

• NPO:

  1) Learn how to think about data challenges (through onboarding and scoping)

  2) Identify potential of data science for organizational challenges

  3) Gather possible solutions for data challenges that can lead to an implementation project

• Data Scientists:

  1) Learn how to scope projects (project managers)

  2) Ideate on how to solve social challenges with data science

  3) Win the pitch and join the project team - if they wish to do so

Commitment

• NPO (4h):

  • Preparation of needed material (1h)

  • Preparation call and contact survey (1h)

  • Ideation session (1h)

  • Pitch night (1h)

• Data Scientist(4-8h)

  • Preparation of ideation session (1h)

  • Ideation session (1h)

  • Pitch creation phase (1-4h over one week)

  • Pitch night (1h)

Roles

• Project managers: Coordinate onboarding, guide NPOs, train data scientists, launch projects

• Main moderator: welcome of guests, introduction of the orga team and of CorrelAid, guidance through the event

• Main host: intro to the meeting tool, technical support, set up of breakout sessions, taking screenshots, keep track of time

• Co-hosts: Support main hosts in break-out sessions

• Orga team: Organizes meeting rooms, sets agenda, , photographs the event

• Participant: Take part in event

Timeline

Find partners

• Use public registrees or network associations or research NPOs in your region

• Contact NPOs using our e-mail template

• Assess whether interested NPOs have the same thematic topic and can join the same data dialogue

Set time and date

• Set the time and date of the data dialogue (ideation session and pitch night) according to how NPOs may attend

• For offline events: Book possible locations

• For online events: Ask Frie Preu to set up a zoom environment

• Create/distribute marketing material (Hint: PR [PR ] (mailto:pr@correlaid.org) can help!) or take a look in this CorrelCloud file

Organize

• Choose the following responsibilties: Moderator (2P), technical staff (1P)

• Train moderators using our internal guidances, for example with this presentation

• Set an agenda, create a presentation and gather necessary surveys

Prepare partners

• Schedule a 1h preparation call

• Clarify whether the process and goals of the open data dialogue are understood

Prepare participants

• Transcribe the data to a call for application format to share with volunteers (Hint:[Frie ](mailto:frie.p@correlaid.org) can help!)

• Share invitation in the networks using this form

  • CorrelAid distributor

  • Student distribution boards

• Monitor registrations (we have a 50% attendance rate)

• Assess abilities and prepare matching

• Send reminder e-mail one week before

Ideation session (1h)

• Ideally, offer an onboarding session from project managers to volunteers in an hour

• Ideate on data challenges and solutions with broad focus (collect as many ideas as possible)

• Gather ideas on post-its or similar digital tools

• Let the NPO select up to 3 ideas that they want pitches on

• Form pitch teams using a zoom survey

Pitch working phase (1-4h over a week)

• Pitch teams work on their pitch, incl. a technical proposal, value-add and ressource-time allocation

• Pitch teams create 5 slides for pitch deck and send those to organiztational team

Pitch night (1h)

• Pitch teams present their data challenges + possible solutions followed by Q&A (5+ 5min)

• NPO representatives and project managers consult on which ideas can be selected (10min)

• Final decision and allocation of groups (10min)

• Feedback: Interviews with NPOs and sending out of surveys (10min)

  • for NPOs

  • for volunteers

Follow-up

• Send reminder for feedback surveys and thank you notes

• Launch projects

• Gather lessons learned

• Present your open data dialogue on our blog and the lc call! Example

Field reports from past data dialogues

What does it look like in practice? Here you can find reports of past data dialogues:

• Remote data dialogue 2020

• In person data dialogue 2019 at CityLab Berlin

• In person data dialogue 2018 in Berlin

Panel discussions are a good way to start a kick-off event for a new local group. Together with experts, the relevance of the topics "Data4Good" or "Data analysis for civil society" and the associated need to found a new local group can be discussed. Panel discussions often revolve around a provocatively formulated question that can possibly stimulate a diverse debate.

The planning of a panel discussion should start 3 months before the date of the panel discussion at best. At the beginning it should be defined which main topic the podium discussion basically should have (partly also depending on the objective of the local group (see three columns above)). Then you have to decide how many perspectives on this topic can be raised and define a corresponding number of discussants. Building on this, potential discussants must be addressed and contacted. It makes sense to first refer to the contacts of CorrelAid Germany. Johannes or Arndt can give you the best feedback. In addition to these "celebrities" you should ensure that at least 1-2 discussants come from your region, so that the interested can see a familiar face. It is best to contact a method professor. However, also pay attention to maintaining a balanced gender mix for the panel discussion. When contacting the discussants, be sure to formulate the most concrete invitation email - it should be clear when the event will take place, who else will be invited, what questions you will ask, and why you have contacted exactly this person. It should also be clear at this time who should act as moderator for the panel discussion. At best, this is a member of the CorrelAidX group with a bit of experience in speaking to larger groups. The moderator should start thinking up questions early on and distinguishing between questions for all discussants and special questions for individual participants.

After the discussants have agreed, you must ensure that you book a sufficiently large room. For this purpose, it is advisable to work together with a student council of the university. They may normally reserve rooms from universities free of charge. Offer the student council that this can be a joint event so that they can also benefit from it and provide you with a little more WoMen-power. The room should have at least 50 seats; depending on the size of the university, the room may be larger.

Three weeks before your event takes place you should start promoting the event with flyers and social media postings. For flyers, ask your student council. If you organize the event together, it should not be a problem to provide 100€ for flyers. When promoting the event, make sure to choose the most appealing title and ask the discussants how they would like to be promoted. Often, discussants have more than one position. It is important to clarify the function in which they come to your event. Make sure that there is a bit of activity in the social media posting for the event - once a week, remind the participants that the event is about to start.

The room should be booked at least one week in advance to give you an overview of the premises. Furthermore, consider whether you want to organize a bit of catering. At least for the discussants it is necessary to offer water and glasses. Check several days in advance to see if you have access to the electronic infrastructure and if it works. If that is not the case, the university administration can certainly help out.

On the day of the panel discussion, make sure that the room is free and tidy at least one hour before the start of the event. Ensure that especially the external discussants are picked up and taken to the room and hang a few (direction) signs for interested and potential visitors. Please make sure that the discussants can be seen well from anywhere and adjust the seating accordingly. Furthermore, a photographer should be present who can take pictures from both discussants and guests well.

At the beginning of the event the moderator welcomes the guests, explains the topic of the panel discussion and introduces the discussants. Here, the discussants can already articulate input statements on the subject of the discussion. Afterwards the discussion should develop relatively fluently between moderation and discussants. At the end of the panel discussion, also the guests should be invited to participate and a conclusive statement should be made by each discussant.

If financial reasonable, the presenters may recieve small gifts. Sometimes, chocolate, flowers or CorrelAid-specific souvenirs should be fine.

Following the podium discussion, attention must again be given to social media. The best photos and a short text about the success of the panel discussion should be published. Furthermore, you can send the information to the press office of the university, so that the range is further increased.

• Timeframe

• Work steps

• Responsible

The concept of the hackathon comes originally from the hardware and software development and designates events in which complex problems are to be solved in the best possible way in a relatively short time (usually in the range of about half to about three days). The participants of a hackathon ideally form interdisciplinary teams, in which they work together on the task. The competitive situation and the time pressure should promote the development of new and creative solutions. Depending on the size and type of hackathon, the solutions developed at the end of the event will be judged by a jury and, if applicable, awarded. For the context of the CorrelAid Local Chapter, hackathons are a great way to give data science-interested students first-hand insights into practical data analysis.

The first step in planning a hackathon is the question of the scope and format of the event:

• Should there be a standard task for all participants, or should several projects be available in different difficulty stages?

• How long should the hackathon last and when should it take place? Are there any university events to which the hackathon can be attached?

• How many participants * are expected?

Once you have answered these basic questions, you can get into the specific organization: As always, a room should be booked early for the hackathon. This should ideally have a free seating and a large number of sockets. For larger events, it is advisable to book two rooms, otherwise the noise level can become too high. In hackathons, it is customary that the organizers provide a certain basic set of drinks (coke, mate, water, beer ..) and food (pizza). At multi-day events, the workrooms are usually open around the clock and full catering is available. For examples regarding catering see section (Structure of the Local Group - Catering).

The most important success criterion of a hackathon is the selection of a good task. Ideally, it is a "real life" problem, so the solutions found may even be put to practical use later. For example, potential issues may arise during a data dialogue or may be based on other, freely available data (open government, etc.). However, it is important that no sensitive / personal data is used on a hackathon. Examples of tasks of successful hackathons:

• Analysis of data of the Bundesfernstraßengesellschaft on the impact of the blockage of the Rheintalbahn on the truck traffic.

• Analysis of a data dump from FlightRadar to identify violations of the no-fly ban at German airports.

• Identification of hacker attacks in network logs.

In addition, it would be helpful if contact persons familiar with the data are constantly available during the hackathon and can help with questions and problems.

• Responsible

• Timeframe

• Work steps

1. General

1.1 The local group is supervised by CorrelAid's organization team throughout Germany (hereafter referred to as CorrelAid Germany).

1.2 The local group is represented by a community manager.

1.3 The purpose of the local group is to implement the mission of CorrelAid. The CorrelAid Ethics Codex must always be followed (see Appendix 1).

1.4 The local group is aware that their activities will be perceived as representative of the entire CorrelAid community.

2. Relations between local group and CorrelAid Germany

2.1 CorrelAidX insert city name is part of CorrelAid e.V. and does not exist as a standalone organization. Exceptions are possible, but must be clarified individually with CorrelAid Germany.

2.2 If projects are planned with local social organizations, this should be discussed with the Core Team. A possible project is subsequently not mediated and project members are not chosen by the local group but by CorrelAid Germany (in cooperation with the local group).

2.3 Contact persons at local level are authorized to communicate on behalf of CorrelAid e.V. for the purpose of project acquisition and the acquisition of interested persons. However, you should use the addition CorrelAidX insert city name .

2.4 The local group communicates all events and local initiatives to CorrelAid Germany.

3. Cooperations and sponsoring

3.1 Cooperations with university groups, student councils, local organizations and companies are desired. But these have to be discussed in advance with the local group coordinator at CorrelAid Germany.

3.2 Should a budget be required for events or initiatives, this may be requested from CorrelAid Germany.

4. Communication

4.1 For general publicity work, the CorrelAid Style Guide must be followed (see note B). General:

4.2 The local group will be provided with an individual logo which is to be used.

4.3 For the public relations work the social media channels of CorrelAid Germany are to be used (Facebook and Twitter). It is not intended that local groups set up their own channels. Exceptions are possible, but to clarify with CorrelAid Germany individually. Upon request, the community manager can get write access to the social media channels.

Social Media - Instagram, LinkedIn & Mastodon

• Title

• short description

• if possible a picture

• if applicable twitter handles of speakers / organisations.

Our PR team will then share your content on Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Facebook!

Newsletter

General CorrelAidX contact

Finances

Local chapters

It is also possible to carry out projects at the local level via CorrelAid. However, it is important to us that the projects meet the criteria we set for our own projects. Hence, please make sure to check this guide when deciding on whether to do a project with a potential partner organisation:

Our Data4Good projects are at the core of our work. In our skilled volunteering projects, we connect data scientist volunteers from our network network of over 2000 volunteers with nonprofit organisations. Through the projects, our volunteers have the opportunity to apply their existing skills and gain new knowledge. At the same time, they support nonprofit organisations with solving their data-related challenges. Over 2-8 months and in teams from 2-7 data scientists, CorrelAid volunteers have tackled diverse data challenges of nonprofits: from data collection, data visualization and exploratory data analysis to automation, reporting and advanced statistical analyses using machine learning and deep learning techniques.

Learn more about our projects so far here:

• past projects on our website

• Project examples slide deck

Actors

Several actors are involved in a CorrelAid Data4Good project. Here is a small overview with the most important terminology.

Project phases

A typical CorrelAid project goes through 6 stages. Those are sketched out here to give a high-level overview. More detailed content can be found in the rest of the manual.

First contact / Project acquisition

CorrelAid has come in contact with a potential partner organization / NPO:

• they've contacted us over email

• we have met them at an event

• we have approached them

• someone else put us into contact with them

Scoping/Ideation

The project coordinator has established communication with the organization. Together with the contact person(s) from the NPO, they figure out whether and if so, how CorrelAid volunteers could support the NPO with their data challenge. Based on this information, the project coordinator develops the project call for applications in close coordination with the contact person(s) of the NPO.

Team selection

The project coordinator sends out the call for applications via the newsletter and collects the applications. Once the application deadline has passed, the project coordinator looks for a selection committee who then select a team.

Onboarding

The project lead together with the project coordinator and the support of the relevant tool administrators sets up the project tooling and communication channels. The project coordinator together with the project lead and the NPO starts planning the kickoff.

Kickoff

The kickoff marks the official start of the project. Here, the NPO, the project coordinator, the project lead and the project team come together for a weekend (or an online event) to get to know each other, learn more about the background of the project and plan the project.

Project work

The project team works on the project, with regular feedback loops with the organization. The project team leader leads the team as primus inter pares and is responsible for keeping the project running. From time to time, the team gives an update to the project coordinator to ensure that no problems exist and that the project is running smoothly.

Handover

The project team hands over the finished analysis / visualization / .. to the NPO.

Follow-up

Feedback is collected by the project coordinator from both the NPO and the project team members.

Actors in project phases

✅: involved

🟨: optional / in reduced capacity

FAQ

I am applying for a project through the form and I am unsure which role to choose. Help!?

Team Lead: As a team lead, you lead the implementation of the project as part and primus inter pares of the project team. In addition, you have some organizational tasks: Together with your team mates, you agree on an internal organization of your team, e.g. how often you have check-ins, how to organize the repository, how to keep track of progress, how often to talk to the NPO partner organization etc. Of course, you are not solely responsible for implementing those decisions but organize the team to be able to do so. Note: you do not need to be a technical expert to be a team lead, it is more about organizing a team and facilitating and following up on discussions.

Team member: You are able to structure your own work and learn new technologies and tools (mostly) on your own. This doesn't mean that you can't have questions for your team mates or prefer learning/working together with someone else - especially when dealing with technologies/techniques that are new to you. But in contrast to a team trainee, you are confident in finding resources that will help you and acquiring knowledge on your own.

Team trainee: As a team trainee, you do not have much experience with most of the technical tools that are used in the project and/or you only have very little experience with data analysis projects. You'll probably need a lot of support from your fellow team members, e.g. in setting up the project on your laptop or finding tasks that fit your skills (e.g. small data cleaning tasks). Note: you are not automatically a team trainee if this is your first CorrelAid project.

If you are still unsure which role to choose, choose the one which feels most appropriate and write a sentence in one of the open text fields that you were unsure.

I am applying for a project through the form and don't understand the experience scale. Help?!

Beginner = I have never done this before / I have never written a single line of code. User = I have gained some first experience in this field / I have written code on my own. Advanced = I have gained some experience / I have written complex scripts Expert = I know my way around very well / I write my own functions and packages.

How does CorrelAid select team members? What are the criteria? How can I increase the chances of being selected?

You can review the criteria for team selection here.

Here are some practical tips:

• Your motivation matters and it is an important component in the score but also in the qualitative assessments committee members make when deciding between equally qualified applicants. An application without any or a very meaningful "why" will probably be discarded, regardless of whether you have unsuccessfully applied in the past. Hence, please write about what motivates you for the project. Also, if you have a personal connection to the topic or the work the NPO is doing, please write it in the motivation. If you do not have experience expressing your motivation in a small paragraph of sentences, you can write bullet points instead. Here are some questions that can help you come up with something:

  • Why do you want to participate in a Data4Good project in general? Why do you want to spend 2-4 additional hours per week in front of the computer?

  • What motivates you about the organization? Have a look at their website. Why do you think their work is important?

  • Do you personally relate to the work of the partner organization? If so, how?

• If you are new to data science but have job experience from a different field, please include soft skills and project management experience. Skills are not restricted to technical skills!

• If you are part of a marginalized group, don't undersell yourself! :) Take a look at the experience scale and role descriptions above and when in doubt, take the more advanced category/role.

I have found the form to become a project mentor / reviewer. What does this entail?

As a project mentor / reviewer, you might join a team (temporarily) to consult them so that they can improve the quality of their work by following best practices, hereby ensuring the long-term impact and sustainability of the project. This might include but is not limited to:

• input and advice on appropriate analytical methods and models, e.g. which time series model would fit best the problem

• recommending tools like packages, linter, code styler, documentation helpers, ...

• give feedback on quality of documentation and how to improve it

• review code and give tips to improve code quality, e.g. how to better structure code into functions or following better programming patterns

• advice on how to set up the project, e.g. how code and/or data can be better structured

Time commitment: depends on your availability and the project's needs. Typically a one-time review / support is enough which should be a couple of hours (3-4 hours incl. reviewing the project, a meeting with the team and a follow up). In certain circumstances and if you want, you might join a team as a mentor for a longer period of time.

Background and your role: With our projects we want to do two things: support the partner NPO with their data challenges and provide learning opportunities for our volunteers. Learning about and implementing best practices is definitely a good learning that volunteers can take away from our projects. Plus, best practices will improve the quality of the output for our partner NPO. However, given the limited time resources in the context of volunteering, it's sometimes hard to do everything right. So whenever making recommendations, you should heavily prioritize what really will help the project in the long run: Maybe the inconsistent code styling really annoys your "clean code" heart but you know good documentation will have a higher impact on the overall quality and sustainability of the project.

In addition, as a team mentor, it is important that you consider that not all team members are as experienced, knowledgeable and skilled as you. Please a) have empathy with your fellow volunteers who are working on the project, especially those with less experience/skills, b) appreciate what they have done so far and the effort they put in and c) properly explain why things are important - it might not be obvious to less experienced folks. Have empathy - always remember that you also started out as a beginner once!

Finally, if your recommendations are not accepted / implemented, talk to the project coordinator to see what can be done so that the long-term sustainability and quality of the project are ensured.

Goals

1. find a diverse, capable team

Team selection criteria

Score

We try to rank applicants on the following dimensions using a score that we generate using qualitative coding of open ended and closed ended answers. See below for details.

• interest in topic / motivation for the project

  • can the person learn something on the project?

  • is the sole motivation the technical challenge or learning new technologies? Ideally, project members should also be intrinsically motivated to help the NPO

• technical and non-technical skills and fit to project requirements

• whether they had already the chance to participate in a CorrelAid project or not

  • people who have unsuccessfully applied to a project in the past should be preferably considered whenever possible

  • people who apply for the first time should be preferably considered compared to people who have already participated in a project

Additional guidelines

The score is not the definite selection criterium though. It is a helper to support team selection committee members to make decisions that follow the following additional guidelines:

• Overall, at least 50% of team seats are filled with applicants with genders currently underrepresented in tech (currently everyone who's not a cisgender man; cisgender = people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth)

• applicants belonging to groups currently underrepresented in tech should be given priority, especially when the project affects is relevant to their community/ies (e.g. in the motivation text it becomes apparent that a Black person is applying for a project working on anti-discrimination)

• All team role seats ("lead", "member", "trainee" ) are filled. Typically, one spot in the team is reserved for a beginner ("trainee" role).

• unofficial roles: When making a selection, the selection committee should aim to select people who have different areas of expertise so that they can help out each other. Here are some unofficial team "roles" that can be useful to think about when selecting team members beyond the "lead", "member", "trainee" distinction:

  • methods specialist: this is someone who has a high (theoretical) expertise in statistical and machine learning methods that are relevant to the project. They can give input when deciding on which model to use for specific use case.

  • programmer: they are quite experienced in the programming language used for the project and know different tooling and best practices that will help with code quality (e.g. how to setup a Python project). Ideally, this person is also quite good at git and can help other team members with merge conflicts and other git problems.

  • domain specialist: this person already knows a lot about the domain of the project (e.g. they've worked a lot with environmental data). They can give valuable input about the intricacies of the problem at hand.

  • project manager: this person has experience managing (data) project. They can help the team be as productive as possible. Ideally, this coincides with the team lead but also team members or even team trainees can be good "project managers"

  • data wrangler: this person is quite good at and enjoys cleaning and wrangling all sorts of data. They can speed up the process in the beginning of the project to get to a state where analysis / modelling / visualization can be done.

Process

Find a selection committee

After the call for applications is sent out to the network, you can start looking for a team selection committee. Usually a team selection committee consists of 2-3 members:

• the project coordinator(s)

• optional: 1-2 people from the CorrelAid core or crew (e.g. board or ethics committee or other teams)

• if available: the future team lead

The selection committee should be comprised so that gender parity is respected. In addition, it makes sense to include people with differing levels of experience. At least 1-2 of the members should be able to judge applications with regards to technical skills. People who have applied to the project cannot be part of the team selection committee.

You can find members for your committee by posting on Slack in #crew-directory or #project-coordination. Best include some information about the project. For example:

Do you want to be part of the team selection committee for [PROJECT NAME]? The project will be about training a model to do XX. It will be in Python.

Create Slack channel

Create a Slack Channel on the CorrelAid slack for the project. Give it a meaningful name that team members can remember.

The visibility of the channel should be private by default to give team members a sense of team-internal privacy. If the project is an open source project, you can also discuss with the team later whether they want to create a public channel.

Prepare team selection

Set up Google Sheet

We have a google sheet template that - together with the HTML report (see below) facilitates the team selection process. This google sheet contains only pseudo-anonymized data (numeric ID, gender, role the person applied for, whether the person participated in a project before) of the applicants to keep the selection process as anonymized as possible.

1. Go to your project subfolder in the project coordination drive

2. Click New -> Google Sheets -> From template, then select the template team_selection_template_projectcycle

3. A new file will open. Give it a meaningful title, e.g "Team selection project cycle Q4 2023"

For each project that you want to do team selection for:

1. Duplicate the tab/sheet "Template"

2. important: name each project sheet with the project id, e.g 2022-04-LAU

3. important: in each project sheet, fill in the project id into cell B1 (will be highlighted in yellow), e.g 2022-04-LAU

The main work will happen in the project specific sheets, "Main table" is just for overview and later for exporting the results of the team selection.

Generate HTML report(s)

The HTML report gives the team selection committee a nicely structured, well navigable and readable format to go through the applications that we received for the project.

For each project that you want to do team selection for, follow the instructions here to create the HTML report and associated datasets.

You can send the HTML files to the respective team selection committee members via a Slack DM or in a small private channel.

Copy data to sheet

The script that has generated the HTML report(s) should also have generated several csv files (as described here). For each project that you want to do team selection for:

1. Open the google_sheets_main_table.csv in a text editor of your choice (e.g. VSCode). Copy all lines except the header row.

2. Append it to the Main Table sheet of the Google Sheet by pasting it into column A .

Once finished for all projects, go to Data -> Split text to columns. This should spread the text data into the columns A to E. F + G will be filled once we work on the individual tabs.

Reading applications and filling the Google Sheet

Members of the team selection committee should then read the applications asynchronously. How to approach this depends on the number of applications. If there are many, it helps to do a first filter based on the answers provided to the open questions regarding skills and motivation.

In the process, team members should take first notes and score applicants in the project-specific tab of the Google Sheet. This helps to maker decisions quicker in the call.

Columns of the project tab for ranking

Team selection call

Once you have found 2-4 people and have shared the tools (report and google sheet) with them, arrange with them for a video call. Depending on the number of applications

Notes for the process:

• unless in specific circumstances, interviews with applicants are not conducted

• the selection committee tries to come to a consensus decision. If a consensus cannot be reached, the majority decides. If there is no majority, the project coordinator decides.

• Roles can be adapted, i.e. when you feel a person is "overqualified" for their role, you can "upgrade" their role

• If you feel like two applications are really equally good, you can also increase the team size ad-hoc.

Confirming team members

Before you send out rejection emails to all those applicants who were not selected for the team you should make sure that everyone is still interested in participating in the project. After all, 1-3 weeks might have passed since they applied and they could've changed their minds. You can use the acceptance email templates to get the confirmation. You can use BCC to send the emails to all accepted applicants at once.

After everyone has confirmed their interest, you can send out the emails to the applicants who could not be considered. You can use the rejection email template to do this. If you want to send out multiple rejections at once, please make sure to use blind copy (BCC). You can find the templates here.

Confirming team lead

Promoting a team member/team trainee

Sometimes, no team lead applied. Then you can ask a qualified applicant to fill this role. You can find an email template here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13CBLKgnwY60fQ8qDCgRYESbsn6sm5KB94eSEiOXUup4/edit#heading=h.pzeh5l53r93l

Those pages contain information for project coordinators and project team leads.

Project coordinators are most important at the first stages of a project, from the first contact of the organization with CorrelAid up until a team has been formed and it has started working. During the project work phase, the project coordinator gets updates from the project team to ensure that the project is running smoothly. After the project has been successfully implemented, the project coordinator is responsible for the follow-up with the organization and the project team.

The project lead / team lead ideally gets involved from the team selection process onwards. They are part of the project team but also have some additonal responsibilities related to team coordination, communication with the NPO and other organizational tasks.

In the past, most CorrelAid projects did not require active project acquisition work: word of mouth and personal contacts have worked well in the past. That being said, especially in a CorrelAidX context, active project acquisition can be necessary and useful.

CorrelAidX

Cold calls vs. warm calls

In a "cold call" scenario, your first point of contact with the organization is via you contacting them directly. In contrast, "warm calls" are preceded by some previous form of contact, e.g. you met a representative of the NPO at a meetup. Warm calls typically work better.

Templates

Tools

General project coordination / project management

Phases

Project acquisition

• list of projects with linked resources such as podcast episodes, YouTube videos, repositories etc.

Scoping & Call for Applications

• • template_scoping: template for calls with NPO representatives with question collection

  • template_projektausschreibung_ : templates for call for applications in German

  • template_call_for_applications_ : templates for call for applications in English

• KoboToolbox form

Team selection

Onboarding

• • Data protection and security declaration / Verpflichtungserklärung zum Datenschutz und zur Datensicherheit

Project follow up

• • Template for Public Project Summary (for the website)

  • Template for summary slides

  • Template Certificate of Participation (optional)

What is the Ethics Questionnaire?

At some point, someone in the organization may ask you to fill in the Ethics Questionnaire or have a look at it. It lists the most relevant parameters of what may become a CorrelAid project—ethicality issues more narrowly, and privacy or data protection issues more broadly. By filling in the Questionnaire, you provide a structured set of information for people (especially the Ethics Board) to evaluate where your project may need some tweaking or some extra safeguards.

The Questionnaire is here:

https://ee.correlaid.org/x/r5U5hM57

When you fill it in, have a look at the Companion Document, which we present to you below.

The Companion Document

The Companion Document wants to help you to fill the questionnaire in the scoping process by directing your attention to issues that you might want to think about before they actually become issues. You are an ethical person. But the devil is in the details and nobody ever has all of them present at all times. Therefore, this document is a way to help you get an overview, so you don’t miss anything. Once you send off the filled-in questionnaire, we will learn a bunch about your project, and so will you. Also, feel free to talk to the Ethics Committee where it seems this questionnaire raises things you would like to discuss.

Introduction and the Preliminaries section

Who should fill out the questionnaire, and when?

The general idea and the Ethics Committee’s prior assumption about each project is that there is at least one CorrelAid member (from here on: the Project Lead) who is leading - or, if still in ideation phase, scoping the goals and strategy of the project together with one or several people from the Partner organization (including the Contact, often the person who got in touch with CorrelAid). While the Contact knows and communicates what the Partner organization would like from the project, it is the Project Lead's role to know and clarify what is compatible with the values and resources of CorrelAid. So it is rather early—before and during the project scoping phase—that the Project Lead should familiarize themselves with this questionnaire, so the project goals are viable.

The questions concern three main areas: (1) Is the Partner organization eligible to be aided by a pro bono CorrelAid project? (2) Are the project's goals and general strategy in line with CorrelAid guidelines and values? (3) Are the goals and implementation of the project in line with the relevant data protection laws, especially the GDPR? Since you can save the questionnaire as a work in progress, it is a good idea to already fill in the Preliminaries section at the top, to identify the Lead (who is filling this out), the Partner, the project title and to already add descriptions of the Partner organization. If scoping has already advanced, you can also outline the goals and general strategy of the project here.

The Partner and Project

Please give a brief description of what the project will be about

Give an abstract or executive summary of how you would describe the project. Around 250 words should be enough.

What is the cooperation Partner's legal form?

The legal form can already indicate whether we are dealing with a nonprofit. Some organizations are inherently nonprofit (for instance, e.V., gGmbH, gUG, eG), others are not (businesses for instance). It can also become important for several reasons if the Partner is located outside Germany.

When an organization is of the legally nonprofit type, this already means you have less justifying to do; when it is a corporation, a business or other type that does have the right to make a profit, you will have to justify in the comment box how it is still okay for a group of data enthusiasts to invest their time in this project pro bono.

Also, here is where you can elaborate if for some reason the Partner is not an organization, or not a single organization, or why else the assumption of them being an entity is beside the point.

Does the Partner have the funds to pay someone to do this or an equivalent project?

Free qualified work should be provided to those who need it. Potential Partner organizations, even nonprofits, should not be so large and/or well-funded as to make CorrelAid's help into a mere bump in this quarter's bottom line. Examples:

• The Partner organization is a large nonprofit that could provide funding for projects as the planned one.

• The Partner organization actually has funds earmarked for such activities as the one that the project focuses on.

Please verify that the organization in question could not do this project or a similar one on its own. For the comment box: If the Partner does have funding, how is the project justified nevertheless? Why does the Partner not bring up the funding to do this project themselves?

Is the Partner aligned with CorrelAid's values?

The condition is that the Partner organization should not state values or show behaviors that are incompatible with CorrelAid's. You can look those up at our Code of Conduct and Code of Ethics. If you check “Yes”, it means that you have read or are aware of the Code of Conduct and find the Partner overall in alignment.

For the comment box: Comment on any even minor qualifications. No judgment if they later turn out to be irrelevant. This may be the only opportunity for us to discuss alignment, as these things usually do not directly have a bearing on the ins and outs of a project. It is unlikely that any cooperation is off the table just on account of you bringing up nuances that you would like to highlight here.

Also, if the Partner's values do deviate from CorrelAid's, how is the project justified nevertheless?

What positive effects will this project have?

Think not just about the immediate benefit for the Partner organization, but about the greater scope: How does the project help make a positive contribution for the greater social good?

We collected some guiding questions that can help you to think of positive effects:

• What individuals, groups, demographics or organizations will be positively affected by this project? How?

• How are you measuring and communicating positive impact?

We also collected some examples of positive effects from previous CorrelAid projects. For instance: “Thanks to the project,

• … non-data experts can visualize the survey results in an automated and consistent manner.” [read about an example]

• … non-data experts can interact with the data collection tool’s API in a tailored and simplified manner.”

Note that the guiding questions and examples are meant to help you fill the questionnaire but are by no means exhaustive.

Can our volunteers learn something in the project?

CorrelAid also understands itself as having an educational purpose towards its members. Data4Good projects should bring benefits to all sides, Partners and project members. Therefore, it is important to point out what people can learn here. This aspect should not be hard to include and can be as trivial as project members learning how to use a particular tool or library with a particular type of data. For instance:

• Project members learn how to build a dashboard in R/python.

• They learn how to implement sentiment analysis.

• Project members are willing to present their implementation of an analysis pipeline at a local CorrelAid meetup.

Please examine if learning is truly involved in your project; not all activities lend themselves to meaningful learning experiences—for instance mere data entry.

Can the project potentially cause harm?

Harm can come about in many ways and at different points of the project. In this section we collected a range of different forms of harm that data-related projects can cause—not to demotivate or scare you, but to help you exclude any issues you may have been unaware of. In case of any doubt, you can get in touch with us.

Are you aware of any way in which your project could risk breaking the law? Note that we don’t expect you to know all of them or foresee the future but we would like you to share any doubts you do have by the moment you fill the questionnaire. Consider:

• Human rights, data protection, IP and database rights, anti-discrimination laws;

• Data sharing policies;

• Regulation and ethics codes/frameworks that are specific to sectors (e.g., health, employment, taxation).

Here we tried to collect the forms and examples of undesired consequences from an otherwise perfectly successful project. Note that the guiding questions and examples are meant to help you fill the questionnaire but are by no means exhaustive:

• Is there a risk that the collected data or analyses allow re-identification of individuals upon sharing, even after personal data had actually been anonymized?

• Are the data sources that are involved in any way limited so they could influence your project’s outcomes? Consider:

  • Possible bias in data collection, such as inclusion or exclusion of particular groups of people. Could analysis of these data discriminate against any of them?

  • Missing data and data quality: Sometimes data analysis turns out to be deficient to an extent that no analysis may indeed be better than a poor-quality analysis. Is this relevant to your project and are there guard rails to detect such a situation?

  • Data provenance: Do you trust the available data and the way they were collected?

  • When you create a survey to collect data, make sure that values can be entered reliably. For example, make sure the survey form allows a wide age range, short or long names, special characters, postal codes with leading zeros, and so on.

• Issues related to machine learning and AI (skip if this is out of the project’s scope):

  • Is there a risk that a machine learning model could discriminate against any groups? For example, a language model trained on 20th century data might reflect a role for women in society that is no longer acceptable today.

  • Is your model intended to make an automated decision with significant impact for an individual or society? Is it ethical to transfer a decision to an algorithm in this situation?

  • If your model is intended to make predictions for individuals, remember that models usually treat people as groups with similar characteristics and that models make mistakes. People who belong to a group but are exceptions may be treated unfairly by such models.

  • By default, the models learn to fit the data they are trained on as well as possible. However, if the model is intended to make predictions that might have significant consequences for individuals, it might need not only a performance objective but also a fairness objective. For example, if a job advertising model learns that some job historically used to be more likely done by men, it will continue showing such job ads to men, which will exacerbate the existing gender bias.

  • Models that make predictions for people sometimes attempt to imitate a too complex reality based on some assumptions about this reality. If these assumptions are wrong, a model can cause damage. For example, a model that assumes that poor grades of pupils in one class indicate poor teaching can “punish” a teacher, whereas the true causes can be very different.

  • You might want to check whether your model receives “feedback” about its mistakes. E.g., a model that accepts or rejects job applicants may not receive feedback if it never sees whether those who were rejected could in fact be successful and valuable employees.

  • If your model has potential impact for an individual or society, you might want to check that your model is interpretable., i.e., that it is clear how it makes predictions, e.g., which features it uses the most when predicting. For example, simple models like linear regression or decision trees are considered interpretable whereas deep neural networks are considered “black boxes”.

Consider the possibility of the project not working out.

• For instance, if one project member's laptop gets stolen, could sensitive data be affected by this? (Again, since you hopefully read this ahead of finalizing your plans: You could now arrange for this not occurring, e.g. by implementing project-wide encryption, and mention it in your response.)

• If project members fall out with each other, could work turn out unfinished because only one project member has the necessary expertise and all others would be unable to make up for it? Are there safeguards to still land the project gracefully after such a conflict? Keep in mind that the Partner may rely on the project, so that its failure could in fact represent harm to them.

Is the project sustainable for the Partner?

Does the project do more than only fix a symptom where a more systemic approach would be better (even if outside the reach of CorrelAid)? Can instead an outcome be achieved that benefits the Partner beyond the short run, e.g., enables them to solve similar problems autonomously? For instance:

• Instead of preparing a given data analysis, could there be a targeted knowledge transfer in the form of learning materials with the Partner’s data contexts as object of demonstration?

• Will a solution (e.g., a dashboard or a machine learning model) work with new incoming data? With new incoming users?

• Will the Partner be able to identify when a solution becomes outdated and should be updated (e.g., a tool gets deprecated or a machine learning model degrades)?

• Will there be a necessity of knowledge transfer between the project team and the organization and is there someone in the organization that can take over tasks and knowledge from the team?

Will you make the project's outcomes (for instance, scripts, infrastructures, data or analyses) publicly available, so others can benefit from them?

Your project may be solving more people's problems than you think. Consider making public what is elaborated in the project. This includes both communicating at CorrelAid events (local or organization-wide) the team's lessons learned during the project, and making code available. Also, consider the potential extra work that this may take or how it may impact the process: Good shared works contain documentation, commenting, and clean code. Preparing your work for sharing may add workload that you should consider in the scoping process. You may want to keep an eye on documenting interesting insights that may help others avoid issues you had to deal with.

Data Protection and GDPR

This set of questions reflects the rules that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or Daten·schutz·grund·ver·ordnung (DSGVO), puts in place. Naturally, this is relevant for organizations that deal with data, and especially data about people. For this section, you find guidance right next to the questions themselves in the questionnaire.

Sources

• Webinar “Datenschutz im Ehrenamt: Datenbestände Rechtskonform Nutzen” [link]

• Data Ethics Canvas [link]

• O‘Neil, Cathy (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Broadway Books

• Wulf, Jessica (2022). Automated Decision-Making Systems and Discrimination Understanding causes, recognizing cases, supporting those affected. Algorithm Watch [link]

Your responsibilities during the project work phase:

• keep an eye on the slack channel to see whether the team is still active

• check in from time to time (~every 4 weeks) in the slack channel to ask how things are going and/or whether they need any support

• keep an eye out for the team trainee. Are they active? do they get the support that they need? You can also individually check in with the person.

• update the issue in the projects repository from time to time with a comment

• If there are any problems, support the team lead, e.g. by facilitating a meeting with the NPO. You and the team lead can always get advice from Frie and/or the core team call on how to handle difficult situations.

Goals

• the project team gets fully enabled to work on the project

• team members get to know each other (who works with me? what are their skills?)

• team members get to know the partner organization and the project task (what is wanted / needed by the NPO?)

• agree on a way of organizing the team

Checklist

Purpose of the kickoff

The kickoff marks the start of the project work. Hence, it plays a special role in the course of the project. On one weekend (or an online meeting if an in-person meeting is not possible), the relevant stakeholders of the project come together to discuss the concrete goals of the project and how they can be reached. Participants are:

• the project coordinator

• the project team lead

• the project team

• representatives from the partner organization

The kickoff also marks the point in the project process where the main responsibility is passed on from the project coordinator to the project team lead and the project team.

The goals of the kickoff are:

• The project team knows the goals and values of CorrelAid, sees itself as part of it and knows the goals and values of the client.

• The project team knows the expectations and goals of the partner organisation and makes them its own.

• The project team identifies with the task and has developed its own vision for the work.

• The project team knows its own strengths and weaknesses and has developed a preliminary distribution of tasks.

• The project team had fun during the kickoff

The project coordinator is responsible for preparing the kickoff together with the project lead. The project coordinator and project lead agree early on who has what responsibilities in the preparation and implementation of the workshop. Whenever this chapter talks about activities that the project coordinator or project lead is responsible for, these are merely suggestions.

How to organize

You can find material and templates for the kickoff of the project cycle here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1d9paDcxWKQr20FO8TX18jV9J57N-RJJ9.

If all goes well, the project team is able to organize this important part of the project itself. If you don't see that this is something that they're considering, bring it to their awareness that sustainability is very important to CorrelAid projects. If the team lead is not available anymore you might need to step in and organize the project handover.

Please see the corresponding page for the project team for what they need to do for the follow up. Your job as project coordinator is to encourage and 'force' the team to at least do the mandatory things. :)

Mural Templates

We have developed some Mural templates that you can use for the kickoff. You can download a PDF overview here. If you want to use some of the templates for your project kickoff, please reach out to Frie and they'll create a Mural dashboard for you.

In this section, you'll find information for project team members about what participating in a CorrelAid Datat4Good Project means and what your concrete tasks are throughout the project. In addition, this includes some thoughts about your self-image and role as Data4Good data scientists, best practices for projects with regards to code quality, collaboration, deployment etc.

Always coordinate with the other project team members and remember: your project team lead and project coordinator are there to help and support you!

Goals

• enable the team to communicate with each other

• make data available to the team so that they can get started directly after the kickoff

• set up project tools

Quick links

Set up infrastructure and invite team members

Set up Google docs/drive folder for team

1. Create folder for the team within 06_projects

2. In the folder, create a team_base from the team_base template (right-click -> Google docs --> from template -> template_team_base and rename / adapt it as necessary

3. Share the folder (right-click on folder name -> share -> under general access set to "anonye with the link". Copy the link and pin it to the Slack channel as a bookmark.

Copy and adapt declaration on data protection and security

If the project has any data privacy requirements, the participants need to sign the declaration on data security.

1. copy the German or English template from here into the project folder under 10_project_coordination.

2. The declaration outlines the requirements for the highest security setup (including the requirement to create a separate user account), so please make sure to adapt them to your specific project by removing passages not needed for your project. If you're unsure, ask our data privacy team (#data-protection-privacy Slack channel).

3. Export as PDF and and reupload the PDF to the folder for the team (see previous step)

4. Team members should sign this declaration and send it to you (e.g. via Slack DM or email). You can then upload the signed declarations to the project folder in 10_project_coordination (see "Initial Slack communication with team members" below).

Create Git repository

Usually, our project teams use GitHub for collaboration. To request a repository in the CorrelAid GitHub team, please proceed as followed:

1. in your project team channel, collect the GitHub of all team members.

2. On GitHub, click the new button

3. Pick one of the templates that we have created as boilerplates for project repositories. If none fits, create an empty repository with a README and (optionally) gitignore for the language(s) you'll be using. The existing templates are:

• cookiecutter-python-analysis: template based on the popular cookiecutter project. suitable for analysis and machine learning projects.

• python-bare-template: minimal repository with Python gitignore

• r-bare-template: minimal repository with R gitignore

• r-project-template: repository suitable for R analysis projects

1. Make sure to pick CorrelAid as the owner using the dropdown.

2. Choose repository visibility. Should be private by default unless it's an open source project and/or open data project

3. LICENSE can be left empty. If it's an open source project, choose MIT.

4. In Settings -> General, enable Projects for the repository so that the team can create a kanban style board for their issues if they want to.

Continue here once you have the GitHub profiles from the team members

1. invite team members as outside collaborators via Settings -> Collaborators and Teams. The default permission should be write, the team lead can also get manage.

Set up NextCloud for data transfer

While our project teams usually use GitHub for their project work, we use our NextCloud instance for the initial data transfer from the organization to CorrelAid and from CorrelAid to the project team members.

Ask one of the project coordination admins (see below) to create a folder with your project id (e.g. 2021-02-COR) in the 06_projects folder structure to enable the data transfer. Project coordination admins with the necessary permissions are (so far):

• Pia (@Pia B / pia.b@correlaid.org)

• Frie (@frie / frie.p@correlaid.org)

This folder will only be shared with you, the project team and the NPO representatives.

Admin: How to create and share the folder

1. Go to the 06_projects folder

2. Click the plus to create a new folder. Name it with the project id.

3. Enter the folder by clicking on it. In it, create a folderraw_data

4. Click on the share symbol next to the plus symbol. Invite everyone that needs access to the data via their email:

• other project coordinators with their CorrelAid email

• NPO representatives who share the data

• team members who need to access the data

Initial Slack communication with team members

Invite the team to the Slack channel

You should have created a Slack channel for the project as part of the team selection phase. If you have not, you can do it now.

Once you have your Slack channel, invite or request to invite all selected team members to the Slack channel as members by inviting them to the Workspace and adding the created channel to the default Slack channels that they'll be added to (we have a standard plan).

If applicable, you should also invite the representatives of the NPO to the Slack workspace/channel. They might prefer to be invited as a guest if they also use Slack for their own organization. Check with them regarding their preferences. Having the NPO representative(s) on Slack makes team communication easier and increases NPO engagement.

Welcome message

It's always nice if people join a Slack channel and there is already a message waiting for them to get a conversation going. Hence, you should post a welcome message.

You can find a template message here.

Goals of the message:

• get to know team members

• point out Google drive folder and other bookmarks on the Slack channel

• get necessary information and give actionable items

  • get GitHub profiles

  • sign declaration on data protection and security (if applicable)

Coordinate date for kickoff workshop

Post an emoji poll on Slack to coordinate a date for the kickoff workshop.

Inform team members about data privacy & security

Make sure to inform your team members at some point about the data privacy and security considerations for the project. If you are unsure about what applies to your project, ask the project coordinator - they should know this. Express yourself as clearly as possible in DO's and DON'Ts. For examples, please see here. You can do this as part of the kickoff or the onboarding process

If encryption is necessary for your project, share this documentation page with them so that they can familiarize themselves with the options. A more detailed introduction to the tools - particularly VeraCrypt - should be part of the kickoff.

Quick links

Goals

1. decide whether we should do a project with the organization

2. if yes, scope the project