The following tools are all free tools that are available on the internet today.
Slack
Slack is one of the best team communication tools the world has ever known and it’s sending e-mail into the dark ages. Not only does it eliminate the need for e-mail inside of a team, but it also integrates with hundreds of other websites and apps to centralize your communication for the purpose of reaching a specific goal.
To join the New Valley Church Slack channel, please contact me directly and I’ll send you an invitation.
GitHub
GitHub is where programmers go to develop applications, but the tools offered there are valuable to just about anyone who needs to keep track of documentation as well as code.
It’s perfect for documenting processes.
This site is hosted and generated on GitHub using Jekyll. Jekyll is a super-fast static website, meaning the files are generated in advance and don’t rely on any bulky databases to respond when you access them.
Waffle.io
Waffle is a visual project management board that takes care of managing issues that are created either through our GitHub Repository directly, or through Waffle.io itself. This is where you can access our project on Waffle.io.
How do we know what’s going on where?
By staying connected.
All users need to have the following:
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Slack.com account
Request an invite to the New Valley Slack site and you’ll be on your way. Once you have an account, update your preferences (notifications can be customized per channel) and add a profile picture.
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GitHub account.
Go to GitHub and create a new account.
Once you have that account, post your GitHub user name to the #github channel in Slack so we can add you to the GitHub teams and Waffle.io teams.
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Waffle.io account.
You’ll need an invitation to the team at Waffle.io. As soon as you join Slack, I’ll send you an invitation.
Once you have these accounts setup, you’ll be connected to the system and, depending on your notification preferences, you’ll receive notifications when things happen on any of the platforms.
All of this is currently free based upon our expected usage. Large organizations may find it beneficial to subscribe to more features but for now, we don’t need any additional features.
Both Waffle.io and GitHub interact with Slack to notify participants that something has happened. If a new issue is created, our slack channel #github will receive an automatic notification from GitHub. There are other activities on GitHub that may be posted to the #github channel automatically.
When an issue that’s being tracked through Waffle.io is moved along through its process (if you drag it to another column) Waffle.io will send a notification to the #github slack channel indicating what action has taken place. As long as you are part of that channel, you’ll see the notification.