BOTTLENECKS: participants have to wait at the commit table
Workshop:
Teaching Open Source collaboration to designers (without digital tools!)
Event:
Open Source Design Summit 2017
With 11 participants being assigned the same simple task at the start of the workshop, it was immediately clear that there would be a traffic jam at the commit table. It took a long time to get everybody through their first commit, especially as each person was learning the process for the first time. In the second & third rounds of committing, participants were more staggered.
Potential solutions:
- when working on an intensive workshop where all participants start at the same time, stagger the finishing times of the initial tasks. Give one group a long/complex task to start with, and another group a small, simple task.
- run ongoing, more 'passive' workshops (like at MozFest) where participants drop-in, learn the process and commit their work over a long period of time (eg a whole day). You never have 10 people trying to commit at the same time.
- have two parallel commit logs - neither the photocopier nor the page-numbering stamp are in constant use, a lot of the time is spent writing. So in theory you could have two pages of commit logs, though this may make it difficult to find specific commits later.