I think folks took a ‘Day after the 25th’ holiday. There was a session with Justifay later that day though. I’ll look for link and notes.
The Justifay sessions took a break for New Years and will resume next week (about three hours after this Sync-up Session).
Good huddle today with @brndnkng regarding state of the entity and communicating with DSP collaborators.
Thanks to everyone who joined the Product Check-Ins meeting today, where Karim (our joint Resonate-Justifay Product Manager) and David from Justifay joined our call to discuss progress and our ongoing inter-organizational work. Here’s the recording and work updates from the call:
Recording from the Product Check-In Meeting with Karim & Justifay, January 18, 2023Here’s Notes (by @psi):
meeting with karim
introduce himself give a little bit of context around this approach that he’s taking. a product manager, have experience in different industries in regulatory / financial industry / different saas companies. steps we’ve done so far, the sense we have on this approach and give a high level overview about where we stand where we want to move from a project and a product perspective and what the expected outcomes are.
my contribution is to help gather the objectives and needs that are from the part of creating a sense of a product. the final end of this work is to offer a platform where artists can get a solution where they can meet the needs of reaching their audicence inside this ethical model.
we have identified certain problems that the artists have. we want to address those problems through the platform that we have. If we find a motive or a reason to address the roadmap of our platform, this will help us really identify the vision of our project.
different users - subscriber, artist, label user, admin. what are the modules or group of modules needed for addressing these tasks. Created user personas.
broke down the activities and tasks in an information architecture kind of view. the information architecture is a living document that we have to keep updated. this will help us define an MVP. then we’ll be able to define the timeline based on all of this. We can then look at the different components to build out.
We can then build out a backend first that will enable merging justifay and resonate based on the needs of both organizations.
Si: How are we defining as an MVP. “Compete with Spotify” is not an MVP.
Karim: Once we have something that in a minimum way can do something. Focus on giving the current userbase a platform that keeps on working. To have that baseline, we will need to understand what is the current state of the current system. Possibly the current system already has components implemented we want to keep. Just to manage expectations, this is not going to be a big bang. We’re going to do this in an iterative way.
Si: good to know that the current state is going to be taken into consideration
Karim: what we are searching for is a way to give order and insight into all these feature rerquests and handle them in an appropriate way. We know that users requests and features on the business side have specific interests. Even the team proposes improvements and changes. Trying to handle that in an orderly way and give it a sense of product. That kind of approach will give us a chance to improve the product. It’s alligned with the philophy of the organizations.
David: from the Justifay point of view our interest is to deliver an MVP as fast as possible. We want to drag out that much the development. We want to have something the sooner the better. So of course that doesn’t mean we don’t care about the design. We want to focus on the core component to get started. We don’t want to invest two or three years if we can do something in a year.
rich: that timeline theoretically is revealed in the process of the work that Karim is working on. We don’t know what that timeline is now that timeline can become apparent.
Si: pointing out that dev estimates are hard but also that since we’re in an open source community, self dogfooding is a real thing for contributors.
David: we are looking for money. We’d hope to pay the people who are already working on it full time or part time. If we then still have money left we will hire other developers. All of these people should be working on the same approach. I think that’s how we grow stronger.
piper: boundaries between what’s going to be mvp and what’s not. iterative approach. referencing Jeremy’s doc
rich: specific question for Karim, research you’ve done so far with Jeremy’s documents and any study you’ve done of old documents and the current Resonate offer.
Karim: have done very high level research based on what I’ve been through based on what’s available in the community. I still haven’t developed a strong opinion on the current state of the stack. I haven’t reached that point yet. Once we have a better idea MVP wise we can identify the gaps and build on top of that. want to identify something that isn’t over-engineered.
side chatter about over-engineering.
brandon: I’m wondering just with this information being shared and then going back to our community with the notes and everything, how do we see this process moving forward, and how are we gauging the questions to help us inform how we formulate this MVP.
Karim: next is really to define a roadmap. It’s not realistic that we’re going to do everything. Idea is to have progressive delivery with one minimum baseline to build on top of that. In some cases to leverage on stuff that already exists. The final result of all this exercise is to also have a roadmap for the subsequent stages that we want the platform to evolve. That roadmap will need to continue living that needs to keep updating. The community evolves and the industry involves, and that needs to be adapted to those needs as well. The usual practice is to review roadmaps quarterly on the needs that stakeholders raise.
rich: I would like to reflect also on the history of the relation of justifay and resonate. as you define your mvp can you define to the aspects that are different between justifay and resonate?
Karim: definitely that’s a very good point. The platform gives service to both organizations. We know that there are going to be items and elements and components that will be common to both organizations. Some aspects can be shared. There are other specific components that will require organizational separation. Depending on the business model of each organization the general paradigm will be the same. We’re going to work together independently.
Anything we need to expand on? How do you feel about this overview.
rich: like to see some interaction in the future between the team that is building and talking about building in the Resonate context. Figure out how to have more conversations like this.
Karim: my expectation is that the more near we are for the definition for an MVP the more we’ll need input from community members. As a product manager it’s impossible to build a product by a product manager only. We need to do research, get input from users, the other stakeholders, the team that’s involved in building. All that information is very valuable and is part of the product.
rich: we’ve switched from a client relationship to a collaboration process. I know we’ve got people with really high expertise in the resonate community who I really hope do find a way to get involved in this process.
Karim: yes absolutely, this is part of a community that is bigger than us.
brandon: we want to get this in front of more people. Bring people into the conversation.
i liked Karim’s framing of an “iterative, progressive approach” rather than a “big bang implementation.” Karim also seemed a little taken aback at the notion that Resonate would be competing with Spotify any time soon. @psi’s question and Karim’s answer made me think of the questions and comments that were coming up in the Which Way Forward meeting regarding Resonate’s comps. is it Spotify? or Bandcamp? or both? maybe it’s shifted over time… if not for everyone, for some people.
I think there’s potential in seeing the “roadmap” not just as one product, but as potentially a series of products that work in concert with each other. That way maybe we can stop thinking of Resonate in terms of existing products.
social session w/@honeyanhibiscus & @richjensen
good points raised about ‘serving the interests of professional independent artists’ as a matter of defining the minimum service to be provided… NOT as an exclusive qualifier.
Perhaps there has been some confusion around this.
‘Professional’ here means that the service should meet the business conditions that a typical independent musician or song-writer operates within for their current livelihood. It is not intended to define certain standards of ‘quality’ or ‘seriousness’ or specific ways of approaching the work. It is not intended to exclude any people or musical work they hold rights to.
The point is that the service should handle current international conventions around the typical intellectual property transactions relating to music, ie separate standard accounting protocols for sound recordings and the songs (compositions) they contain, with geographic specificity as needed and a reasonable standard of diligence that the user holds the creative rights in what they post.
More about these minimum service factors here: What does a Professional DSP (Digital Service Provider) Look Like?
We also discussed the value of ‘non-technical’ aspects of the coop, the social significance of the Dismantling White Culture at Resonate sessions, for example.
We shared some of our persynal journeys and interest in cooperative spaces and reflected on the various institutional legacies of coops, both as a legal construct that might be traced to Britain or other sources in the 19th Century and as a body of social conventions that have developed in societies across the planet since time immemorial. We also explored tensions between those social legacies and how they may be relevant to conversations we have experienced at Resonate.
Hi there!
I’m David, from the Justifay team. Just in case anyone has questions regarding our involvement or part in this, I will be hanging in this thread and I will try to join the calls, if you consider it valuable.
So, feel free to ask me, contact me or mention me in case you want to ask or discuss something regarding Justifay.
Notes from Justifay/Resonate Session Jan 23
@honeyanhibiscus @brndnkng and I joined today’s call with Karim and Justifay collaborators. Karim shared an update of his process and invited Justifay and Resonate reps to set work sessions for each of their teams the week of Jan 30 - Feb 5.
The purpose of these sessions will be to analyze and critique the user personas and assumptions of his work to date from the specific perspective of each collaborating organization (Resonate for Resonate and Justifay for Justifay).
The goal will be a refinement of the components in his documentation, first confirming that they identify the needs of each organization and then ranking them in terms of their priority for inclusion across initial versions of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
The object will be to identify and sort:
Karim intends to help guide each team to apply this ranking across a series of versions extending into the future while also defining what components may be common to both collaborating organizations and which represent components which may be unique to one organization or the other.
More details from Jan 18 Product Check-in.
lots of thoughts are coming up for me after attending the 1/17 meeting, watching the 1/18 meeting, and attending meetings yesterday. there are also threads / posts i started reading which i plan to return to… but even though me reading 1,000 or so posts pales in comparison to how much many of y’all who’ve been here for longer have read… i’m starting to experience the Resonate forum reading fatigue that a few people have mentioned recently. 
what possibility is there of pushing back the session to review Karim’s process… even just a little bit? the time frame of Jan 30 - Feb 5 is only 6 to 12 days out. i would have mentioned this yesterday but i didn’t think of it at the time, plus i was invited to join last minute and i wouldn’t have wanted to speak out of turn.
what plans are there to further discuss / identify nexts steps / follow through with implementing the different resolutions that passed after the AGM? i’m not necessarily suggesting folks wait until every single issue that came up during the AGM is decided on… or that every resolution that passed after the AGM is enacted… because that might take weeks / months. but i do think a little more breathing room seems like a good idea. there are matters such as who has the capacity to work and where / how Resonate operates that are unresolved. in my opinion, a little more collective clarity regarding those matters will likely lead to people being more present when making the decisions Karim is prompting.
i’m in agreement with pushing back Karim’s session for us to have our feet under us a bit more.
are there other questions along with those @honeyanhibiscus mentioned re: AGM resolutions progress, collective clarity on capacity, and how we operate) do we feel we need to have answered before we circle back again with Karim??
how should we go about doing this? would the worker-retrospective call work for this kind of convo? I kno folks are a bit exhausted with the weekly meetings. maybe we make them bi-weekly in this interim period?
i also kno Karim’s desire is to meet with at least 1 or 2 ppl (3ppl max) to walk thru the miro board and discuss. i’m wondering how we’d decide who’d be a part of that conversation and represent our collective interests. my persynal hope is that we have technical and non-technical people a part of this conversation.
when works well for us to have this convo? i also kno Karim is on contract right now and i’m unclear of quite how long we’ll have access to him considering his contract ends very soon. i wanted to share this b/c it’s also an important variable to consider w/ our planning.
Room is open. Reflecting on questions @brndnkng posed above.
Reflecting on the Player’s current status without active Maintainers.
@DavidHernandez @honeyanhibiscus joined the call at about :15.
Discussion concerned persynal experiences or observations of community forks and GPL licensing of code.
Observations were offered about some of the operational questions and resourcing issues Resonate is facing more or less in synch with the @directors elections scheduled for the end of February.
Permission was granted for an audio recording with the intention of generating more complete notes.
I’m checking in after a family retreat in Portland Oregon (US).
Karim is scheduled to meet with representatives from Resonate (@brndnkng @remst8 @replygirl) today to help set priorities for components of a Digital Streaming Service (DSP) Minimal Viable Product (MVP). (At the last minute @piper was not able to attend.)
I’m hoping to see, or share, any updates from the session in this channel no later than 2023-02-27T08:00:00Z.
Room is open.
V2 Product Trajectory DSP V2.pdf (1.3 MB)
This is the current draft of the Digital Streaming Platform (DSP) Minimal Viable Product (MVP) development plan prepared by Karim, the Product Manager hired late last year by the Jusitfay/Resonate collaborative. (Though Resonate members participated in his selection, his position is funded solely by Justifay at this time.)
These preliminary documents, the beginnings of an outline for development of a DSP, have been drated in an open collaboration between Justifay and Resonate members over the last 6 months.
The purpose of this document is to provide a general frame for project planning by members of the collaborative. The operational requirements and priorities outlined here are intended to guide the preparation of a more detailed projection breaking out each bullet point into specific development tasks and dependencies, each with a simple “T-shirt size” metric (S, M, L, XL) to estimate their difficulty or complexity. This next more detailed projection should give the collaborative partners a reasonable basis for anticipating and gathering the resources required to implement the DSP service (Time, Skills, Finance, etc.).
When this draft (V2) is stable, a more detailed scoping plan can begin. (Anticipated in 6 - 8 weeks.)
Your feedback and participation is welcome!
I raised this question at last week’s session with Justifay (@replygirl also attended).
Karim’s answer was that his role and commitment to the process is secure. While the role was originally tasked with delivery of an implementation plan by Jan 31, his part-time schedule, depth of engagement and sufficient resourcing from Justifay have provided for a more open-ended approach built around monthly deliverables and reviews (such as the Product Trajectory shared above).
Brief update from last week’s session with Justifay attended by @richjensen and @honeyanhibiscus.
Karim was traveling. @DavidHernandez shared an overview of his contributions adding the next layer of detail, specific development tasks, to the Project Trajectory document. @honeyanhibiscus spoke to the need for interested people to be able to easily access and contribute to a coherent plan of action.
Closing sync meeting at :21 past the hour. Please reach out with any questions. 
Quick update on what’s the current thing being worked on. As @richjensen has said, we are working on splitting the epics and user stories into actionable technical tasks with two goals:
We are working on the next Miro board: Miro | Online Whiteboard for Visual Collaboration
The board is open so anyone can see the progress and can comment in case is considered appropriate.
I would like to invite anyone with the technical knowledge to do it, to contribute to this work. If anyone want to help, contact me and we can organize a call to discuss the approach and also to invite it to the board, to have edit permissions.
About the miro board, it looks empty until you click on the sidebar button on the bottom left corner.
@remst8 and I attended the collaborative session with Justifay March 27. Very brief. This phase of the work in Miro continues. @DavidHernandez is taking a couple of weeks off from the project. Next collab session will occur April 17.
