Here are some suggestions for how QDL team members should approach their interaction with each other.

• All teams have homepages. These serve two main purposes:
  • They provide a common meeting ground for team members, to assemble links to various folders of interest found elsewhere in QDL, and to create documents and have discussions relevant to the team's purpose.
  • They also are the public face of the team — this is how visitors will learn of the existence of the team, and get their first impressions of it. As such, the mission statement should be written such that someone totally unfamiliar with the material will get a clear idea of what the team is doing. To whatever extent is practical, the sub-folders under a team page should be organized to suit the purposes of visitors, as well as the team members themselves.
• Editing the team homepage
  • The homepages are currently set such that all team members can directly edit the homepages. People new to QDL should be careful doing this. If you delete something that you shouldn't have, contact Charles for help in recovering it. We can be more restrictive with the rights, making it so that only the more experienced members can edit the homepage directly, while new users would only be able to add new posts to the end. But let's try it this way first.
  • Currently, a document created within a homepage belongs to the member who created it, and cannot be deleted or edited by anybody else. But it can be cut by anybody who can edit the homepage (in which case you'll find it in your Chipper / Orphans folder). If you want other team members to be able to edit your documents, you have to manually grant them rights to it.
• Standard components for team homepages:
  • title (required)
    • The name of the team is up to the team, though it shouldn't be misrepresentative of the nature of work that they do. In other words, it should describe what they actually do, not what they wish they did.
    • The "homepage" can be called whatever the team likes. (Suggestions have included: homepage, workspace, place, war room, clubhouse, joint, assembly, hall, center, nook, cranny, parlor, hangout, treehouse, cathouse, pigpen, chickenhouse, birdhouse, cafe, hideout, cave, den, kitchen, lobby, happy farm, jailhouse, HQ, loft, anthill, hive, box, pressure cooker, boiler room, pit, abyss, haven, and brain drain. Be creative.)
  • brief introduction (required)
    • This goes at the top, and should be written for the benefit of the uninitiated.
  • membership (required)
    • This folder contains the list of the members. Any user in this list has group rights, including the ability to edit the member list, edit the homepage, participate in chats, etc.
  • team protocols (optional)
    • A team might decide to write up a general set of guidelines for how the team does things.
  • questionaire (optional)
    • An easy way of showing where the team members agree, and disagree, is to do a QDL questionaire. See Questionaire for an example.
    • This can be used just for informational purposes, so that members' answers reveal their basic ideologies, and it can also be used for ongoing team decision making. So a proposal can be made, and when they get the chance, each team member will weigh in on the issue, and when a quorum has been achieved, the decision is made.
  • chat room (optional)
    • These are currently set so that only team members can see the team chat pages. So these are for private communications among team members.
    • Guidelines

  • calendar (optional)
    • QDL supports community calendars.
    • Rights can be controlled, on the team calendar itself, and on individual events on it. So it's up to the team to decide what's visible to others, and what is not.
  • documents folder (optional)
    • The team should collect links to relevant articles found elsewhere in QDL, and paste them into this folder.
  • discussions folder (optional)
    • Threads relevant to the team's focus should all be linked into a common folder.
  • public suggestion box (required)
    • There should be a folder that can be used by non-members to post suggestions, or request acceptance into the group.