One year with the LEOS team: what I learnt about community growth, Agile and user-centric design

Alice Vasilescu, Community Manager for LEOS, external consultant European Commission, on behalf of the LEOS Team

As we are approaching the end of 2018, I would like to share with you what I have learnt this year while working on LEOS. LEOS - Legislation Editing Open Software - is an open source software designed to help those involved in legislation draſting by facilitating efficient online collaboration.

For me personally, this coincides with one year in the team, and I can’t believe how fast time flew. But when you love what you are doing, time tends to go quickly.

Community growth

At the beginning of 2018, we started to review the community strategy and launched another round of user research. The main goal was to find out what would attract new users to our community.

Our efforts had a positive effect, as we tripled views of our community on Joinup and received more and more requests for additional information.

But the work did not stop here. We defined a criterion to measure the maturity of our community and help us improve even further. What we would love to see in the future is a community where the members take a more active role, whereas our team would be just facilitating the discussion. Having a plan ready makes us feel confident that we are on the right track.

Lesson learnt: “Authenticity” pays off. In our communication, we changed the more formal tone to the one that reflects the spirit of the team. That brought us more attention than any of the previous communications. Be yourself, it works.

Agile

For the software development, we use the Agile manifesto customised to our needs. In the past, I had been part of several projects that use the Agile method, and I was curious to see how the LEOS team managed to adopt the method and what are the benefits. That is why I asked Fernando Nubla, external consultant and team coordinator, for key takeaways:

• To build the team spirit and make the daily stand-up meetings more efficient, each team member is assigned to one of the phases of a task, such as analysing, development testing and re-testing.
• Involving everyone in the tasks ensures a good knowledge transfer in case someone leaves the team (it happened this year) and increases the sense of responsibility.
• Keeping up with technologies is another task shared between the team members. It ensures that we take the right decisions.

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Lesson learnt: Equally involving every team member in the development increases the quality of the software and reinforces the team spirit.

User-centric design

One thing that I really like at the LEOS team is the interest in what the user needs. Having the user at the core of our service design, going beyond user interface, that is what makes LEOS a success.

However, this is not easy especially when potential users are everywhere in the world and reaching them is hard at times. That is why we had to be creative and used several events, such as the ISA² Mid-Term Conference, for usability testing. How did we do it?

1. We selected key features we wanted to test.
2. From the selected features, we drafted short test scenarios in a way that would ensure full coverage.
3. We set a target for how many users we would need to have a good sample
4. And last but not least, we tried to make it fun and envisaged a demo challenge.

Lesson learnt: Conferences are a great opportunity for collecting feedback from users. “The only way to follow a user-centric approach is to involve targeted users in the process. And we did it!“ says Elsa Carenzo, external consultant and user researcher.

I would like to finish this blog post by saying that my year with the LEOS team has been great. The team has easily integrated me, and if you don’t believe me, check the Christmas picture below!

Happy holidays from the LEOS team to all of you. We hope to bring you more great news next year.