Asynchronous standups in GitLab, or, activity logs for issue boards

Description

In the ~Geo team, we're experimenting with asynchronous daily stand-ups using Slack threads. To an extent, the things we're talking about in these stand-ups are duplicated by activity on the Geo issue board: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/boards/378276?milestone_title=10.2&scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&label_name[]=Geo

Proposal

Issue boards could have a persistent issue log. As issues are dragged between columns, this could lead to items being added to the activity log. I suppose this would look a bit like the aggregation of system notes for these issues? We'd show the activity log in daily groupings.

Sometimes, we talk about states which are not captured by the issue board. "Blocked by X", for instance, or "I did nothing yesterday because I was ill". Some of these could be modeled with additional columns in the board, but others need users to be able to add entries with custom text to the log.

We may want to attach functionality to log entries - "expand this into an issue" seems like an obvious candidate, for instance. Anything else?

Ideally, we'd end up in a state where we could do away with slack completely for this kind of asynchronous stand-up behaviour.

/cc @edjdev @victorwu

Links / references

https://medium.com/@stevoscript/why-your-team-should-try-asynchronous-daily-stand-ups-87f1b809e5c8

Documentation blurb

Overview

What is it? Why should someone use this feature? What is the underlying (business) problem? How do you use this feature?

Use cases

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Feature checklist

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Edited by Nick Thomas