Thank you so much, this is really good stuff! I do have a few questions, if you don't mind.
How often does the committee meet? For how long? Does the committee have a pretty regular agenda?
Do the developers who participate in the committee come from different teams? If so, do you feel like the committees do a great job of enabling teams to be more informed, or do you feel like the committees focus on making individuals subject matter experts?
What would you say are the committee's biggest accomplishment and biggest struggle?
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
We usually meet once every couple of weeks. We book out a meeting room and someone takes minutes so we can write up anything we've done on a Confluence page. Someone will talk about something they've done and we'll discuss things we could be working on. That said, I haven't been for a few weeks because I haven't been around the office as much!
We started out with one or two people representing each department from client services, front- and back-end development, degign, ux, social media and copyrighting teams.
We've discussed things like replacing infographics with more accessible solutions, incorporating a11y tools into our CI (e.g. pa11y)
The best thing we've achieved is probably networking and finding out how many other groups and agencies are interested. This peaked at our mini-conference back in spring.
The toughest challenges are around how to convince clients to devote time on maintenance budgets and so on to improving their sites. There are always new features and so on that suck up the money. The same with new pitches, incorporating the cost for making sure something's accessible up front is a wise move (and a legal requirement most of the time) but it sounds like the first thing prospective clients could try to shave money off. We're trying to make sure we're all not afraid to say this is essential work and not an optional add-on.
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Thank you so much, this is really good stuff! I do have a few questions, if you don't mind.
How often does the committee meet? For how long? Does the committee have a pretty regular agenda?
Do the developers who participate in the committee come from different teams? If so, do you feel like the committees do a great job of enabling teams to be more informed, or do you feel like the committees focus on making individuals subject matter experts?
What would you say are the committee's biggest accomplishment and biggest struggle?
We usually meet once every couple of weeks. We book out a meeting room and someone takes minutes so we can write up anything we've done on a Confluence page. Someone will talk about something they've done and we'll discuss things we could be working on. That said, I haven't been for a few weeks because I haven't been around the office as much!
We started out with one or two people representing each department from client services, front- and back-end development, degign, ux, social media and copyrighting teams.
We've discussed things like replacing infographics with more accessible solutions, incorporating a11y tools into our CI (e.g. pa11y)
The best thing we've achieved is probably networking and finding out how many other groups and agencies are interested. This peaked at our mini-conference back in spring.
The toughest challenges are around how to convince clients to devote time on maintenance budgets and so on to improving their sites. There are always new features and so on that suck up the money. The same with new pitches, incorporating the cost for making sure something's accessible up front is a wise move (and a legal requirement most of the time) but it sounds like the first thing prospective clients could try to shave money off. We're trying to make sure we're all not afraid to say this is essential work and not an optional add-on.