Retrospective 2017-2018

What We Did Well

• We all thought that we did a good job defining goals and work plan in the beginning of the year. We met a few times and devoted at least two calls to reviewing and revising our goals and mission statement, and then clearly defined our work plan for the coming year.
• We were able to work towards and meet multiple goals because we were able to clearly write our work plan for the coming year.
• Despite having some months with less work, we did a good job of brainstorming ways that we could keep us busy and better engage the community. This mostly happened during calls and was generally spurred on by referring back to our Work Plan. We feel like we've been good at trying new things and adapting to new goals when we have down periods.
• Once we gained momentum we kept it going by staying on top of our month to month Action Items.
• We all liked the idea of occasionally adding community members to the calls to talk about their work.
• We feel like we've engaged with the community better through new means: adding members to our calls, blog posts, new email interactions with the community.
• Additionally, and we're not quite sure why, we've had good luck starting community conversations. This might be because of increased direct interaction with the AS community.

What We Could Improve

• Leadership (Patrick) feels like he could do better about sending meeting agendas out earlier.
• Cross-team/project collaboration could improve. We did not have much interaction with the Awesome ArchivesSpace project or any other team.
• Following up on communication better. We sometimes send emails out to the listserv, and never push for more responses; effectively letting the topics die.
• Reaching a broader, non-member audience. Most of our emails are just to the AS community listserv.
• More professional development share outs (presentations)
• Could do better about figuring out if we are meeting the community's needs. Maybe we should be asking what the community would like from us.