NYT Library Community Call, Oct 15
12pm - 1pm ET
Call in Number: +1 470-705-4259, PIN: 988 473#
To unmute your phone: *6
Agenda
About the call
This call is an opportunity for anyone interested in (or already using!) Library to meet the maintainers and find out how it can be useful at your organization. It's also a chance to ask questions and share any ideas or challenges you've had so far with using Library. We hope to use the conversations that emerge in the call to make Library more useful for everyone.
Who’s here?
Add your name to the list below to let us know what you’re up to and who you are. We’re eager to meet everyone in the Library community and hear about what’s been working well and what can be improved.
Good to add here: Your name, your experience/knowledge about Library (if any), contact info.
- Isaac White, NYT Interactive News (@tweetAtIsaac, @NYTInteractive). Built Library in 2017 and led recent open source effort.
- Andrew Fischer, NYT Technology (@afischer15). Former Interactive News Intern, helped with effort to open-source Library.
- Joe Germuska (@JoeGermuska), Northwestern University Knight Lab -- we’re helping field test Library and foster the broader community
- Maxine Whitely (@maxine_whitely), contributor to Library, fellow at Northwestern University Knight Lab.
- Surajith Kizhakkayil, Developer, Authentication Team
- George LeVines, CQ Roll Call, interested user/editor, george.levines@gmail.com
- Thomas Oide (@thomasoide), Star Tribune -- Deployed an instance of Library to use within the STrib’s Digital Design/Graphics/Data teams
- Chris Frank, NYT Publishing, Library contributor
- Jon Poley, NYT Publishing, Library contributor
- Brent Jones (@brentajones), St. Louis Public Radio — haven’t implemented it yet, but interested
- Ben Koski, NYT Interactive News, curious to hear about how other organizations are using! Also excited to talk about collaborative features that might be useful to wider community. bkoski@nytimes.com
- Shawn Gao, NYT delivery engineer,
Interested in hearing about Library
- Snags
- At the trib, documentation in youtube videos don’t always work as expected
- Ideas
- How can we help more people in the community use Library
- For people never used before, where does it fit into world of confluence and github
- For people using it, what features are going to be added soon (Star Trib)
- For contributors that have added code, how to contribute more and what’s next
- How do we include the collaborative nature of Library as a collection point and ongoing
- How to get the whole org to adopt Library?
What are we looking to improve about Library?
Discoverability: helping people find Library docs that exist already and contribute to them
- Customizable search, filtering, power user feature to work with particular types of documents within Library
- See other pages in the same directory level, tree view
Interoperability with other tools:
- Linking slack with Library as a way to memorialize conversations that document shared knowledge
- Additional integrations/multiple drive support
- Github wiki implementation?
- Confluence integration?
- Oembed for YouTube, other embeds?
- Indexing external content within Library search?
Content flexibility:
- Multiple team drives, to facilitate other flows of editing or restricting editing to certain documents
Notifications:
- Can I get notified as the author of a doc when something has changed?
Guidance about document lifecycle
- How should we optimize Library for particular types of documentation?
Deployment flow
- Break the guide into even more steps
- GAE button available now, could investigate this
Guidance on how to contribute
- Possibility of having default public drive for development? Need safeguards to prevent accidental deployment using the public drive.
- Feedback
About Library
For those of us that are new to Library, we’ll do a quick intro to how it works and why we built it.
NYT Library is an open source wiki powered by Google Docs. Originally built in 2017 to streamline the sharing of existing documentation in the NYT newsroom, Library has emerged as our best solution to date for keeping internal knowledge collaborative and visible across departments. Now that Library is open source, we're excited to share all that it can do with the community and see how others use it.
What’s working for you about Library? What can be improved?
Let’s talk through any use cases you’ve been exploring with Library so far and the things that have been working well. What do you wish Library did better? Let’s capture our ideas in notes and new issues.
To get started:
- Better discovery of potentially outdated docs
- Guards for common mistakes around setup
- Simpler caching logic
Ideas for what’s next
There’s a couple areas for Library improvements we’re thinking about:
- Documentation improvements
- Better step-by-step setup and getting started guide to make Library easier to use.
- Better error messages for common mistakes during setup
- Integrations with slack:
- Using Library as a way to archive conversations from Slack to document organization decisions
- Increased scalability for organizations with many documents
- Support multiple folders + team drives
- Many documents with shared folders
- Bugfixes
- “Home” sometimes triggers tagged behavior in document titles when it should not
- Support links around images
- Fix redirect behavior when running Library behind HTTPS proxy
- Caching logic rewrite to better handle document redirects