Define process for recording and sharing orientation meetings

[shiragoodman]

User Story

As a new VFS, Platform and/or OCTO team member, I want to be able to see a recording of the latest General Orientation so that I can view the recording if I am unable to attend the meeting or have to leave early.

Description

There was a request to record General Orientation (and other Platform Orientation) meetings so that individuals who needs to refer back to the meeting or cannot attend the live session can still view the recording for that month.

Proposed design solution from Ray Wang:

New Artifacts

Artifacts Needing Updates

Tasks

• [ ] Placeholder task

Acceptance Criteria

• [ ] All orientation sessions for each month are recorded
• [ ] Transcription is included in each recording
• [ ] The most recent recording is posted Calendly Orientation Sessions
• [ ] Recording is shared with people who signed up for each orientation at the end of each meeting
• [ ] Updates have been Peer Reviewed by Governance Team member
• [ ] User Story need has been fulfilled
• [ ] TBD

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Related Governance Team Resources

For additional information and guidance to complete tasks, please see links below. Documentation Update Guidance for GitHub templates
Documentation Update Guidance for Platform Website pages
Documentation Update Guidance for Confluence pages
Guidelines for Governance Team Confluence Space
Guidelines for Platform Products and Services Confluence Space
Description of Platform Website spaces and content

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How to configure this issue

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[CherylEvans]

@shiragoodman @chaseakirby In an effort to accurately and completely convey the details necessary to complete the specific work or request tracked by this issue, it is necessary to understand the following implications of implementing this change:

• Platform Orientation was designed as an interactive tool to onboard and orient new VFS teams and VFS team members to Platform products, processes, services, standards and expectations. The availability of a pre-recorded Platform Orientation presentation would possibly discourage or possibly negate the importance of attending these very important and informative presentations in person. The interactive nature of the Platform Orientation session ensures that questions/concerns are answered immediately, and accurately by the subject matter expert/s for a specific practice area. Platform Orientation gives new VFS teams and VFS team members an opportunity to introduce themselves, and meet their contemporaries in a neutral environment, which encourages teamwork and facilitates future working relationships to flourish. Participants are more likely to forget information provided in a Platform Orientation session recording, than if they attended the interactive live session.
• Platform Orientation sessions are conducted once a month for all practice areas. This allows flexibility for participants to plan and schedule their sessions at their convenience, and on their timeline. Attending interactive sessions in person keeps the participants engaged and more likely to exchange information, and ideas, which is essential for creating the best possible outcomes. Anyone and everyone can participate. This allows participants from different practice areas to share information that will facilitate the overall understanding of everyone’s specific role and background. The interactive, in-person sessions keep Platform Orientation from becoming repetitive and stale.
• The Governance Team would be responsible for recording the Platform Orientation sessions, and maintaining/updating an active page/link to these recordings. This implementation would necessitate frequent updates/changes to the Platform, which would become time consuming and would require additional resources to facilitate.
  Recordings would have to be written-over monthly in order to ensure the most recent recording is available. Writing over the previous recording would erase information that was shared in a previous session. Each Platform Orientation session is unique to the participants. If participants don’t attend the in-person, live sessions, disparity of information could potentially pose a problem. The tasks involved in this implementation would be time-consuming, and resource intensive.

[shiragoodman]

Thank you @CherylEvans for summarizing our concerns.

I would also like to add a comment to your last bullet. All recordings shared on Platform Website are required to be 508 accessible, meaning we would need to create a transcript and add closed captions to each video. This would require additional time and resources each month.

[shiragoodman]

@raywangoctova @mchelen-gov please see the summary above as to why we do not this this is something we should be implementing. We will keep this ticket in our backlog as a future enhancement, but we do not believe it is valuable to move forward with this work at this time.

[raywangoctova]

@shiragoodman The request was to record the orientation sessions and post the recording after each session. This way the most current recording is available. This request is not intended to create prerecorded orientation sessions or replace the need of the interactive sessions. Can we use the Zoom transcription for both transcript and closed captions?

[shiragoodman]

@raywangoctova - The summary is referring to the process necessary for posting the recording after each session. Zoom transcription could work, but not for closed captions. I do not think the benefit outweighs the work required to maintain it. At least not at this time.

[raywangoctova]

Can we validate the benefits? Looking from a program perspective, it is inefficient for a new development team to time their project with the availability of orientation offerings. This would especially difficult if a project has a shorter time frame. How do we offer closed captions via the zoom meeting today? Why can we do the same?

[shiragoodman]

We can turn closed captions on during the meeting (if requested - we can make it a default action), but they don't transfer over to the recording.

I can ask @CherylEvans to document the benefits of recording here as well and we can make a decision. For the record, I'm not suggesting we don't record... I'm suggesting that we don't take action at this time as my team has other pressing items and this is a low priority for us. Plus, VFS teams have been very understanding of the reasons why we do not record and we have never gotten push back.

[raywangoctova]

Did we validate the assumptions identified in the bullets? Beside the close captions, it is not clear how the recording via existing Zoom meeting tool would be time-consuming, and resource intensive. If posting on the website is adding to LOE that might impact other priority and the assumption of people might not attend the interactive sessions are the main concerns, can we provide the recording after the session to be a take away in a follow up email or slack message?

[shiragoodman]

Orientation availability has never come up in the VFS satisfaction surveys, and as I said above, we've never had push back from VFS teams when we share that we do not record the orientation meeting. To be frank, it seems like this is solution to an assumption, not a validated issue. I am open to doing discovery to answer your questions, however there are validated issues reported by VFS that we would like to prioritize. We can put this on our backlog as a future enhancement and address at that time.

[raywangoctova]

Updated acceptance criteria and moved to the backlog.

[shiragoodman]

@allison0034 @sterkenburgsara FYSA with your current Platform Orientation discovery work.

[shiragoodman]

closing this ticket. This work is being completed as part of initiative #52273