Draft automated communication policy + automation of the communication workflow!

[yuvipanda]

No description provided.

[balajialg]

@yuvipanda I love the way you have drafted the communication policy! Thanks for working on this :)

A couple of details -

• I would like to make the welcome email target multiple users. One welcome email is for all individual users. The other welcome email with similar information should address our instructors/GSIs at the start of the semester (Re: Discussion during our Tech Strategy meeting yesterday). Can you add that to this draft?
• You mentioned the threshold for archival and deletion in this draft. I wonder the difference between the threshold for deletion and archival? I assume that any content that is not yet archived eventually gets deleted. If my assumption is right then both the threshold should match, right?

Otherwise, Looks good to me.

Let's target communication one week prior to the start of the fall and spring terms? Maybe start this August?

Should we target enforcing the communication policy during summer terms? As there are multiple summer terms, we should be sending welcome emails one/two weeks prior to the start of each summer term. It also means we need to track the courses taught during each summer term. It can get logistically complex. What do you both think? @felder @yuvipanda

[yuvipanda]

How would you determine who are GSIs / TAs? I think that is a fundamental problem that I want to keep out of scope of this policy to begin with, as it's simpler to be 'ok, an email goes to everyone'.

Re: deletion and archival, I think that isn't really defined anywhere quite yet, and I've only used them as examples here. We should sharpen them before we actually send out the email.

As an implementation step, let's target start of fall? I can investigate what it would take to automatically send this out to people on first login. What do you think?

[balajialg]

@yuvipanda Thanks! Re: Sending emails based on the first login during the fall semester - Looks like a great idea to me. Thanks a lot for thinking it through in detail.

Re: Difficulty identifying GSIs/instructors - I am not sure whether you are aware of this google group named Datahub announce list. I am adding instructors and GSIs from the course enrollment data to this list as of now. If you are thinking about automating the communication process with a focus on GSIs/instructors, this google group can help. I will try to ensure that I have up-to-date information for all courses using Datahub before the start of the fall semester, of 2022. Let me know if this information is helping you revisit your stance on the scope of this policy proposal.

[yuvipanda]

@balajialg ah, that is very nice! I do think the purpose of that group is a bit different, and probably more tuned to manual communications. I've specified the scope to be just for automated comms - triggered automatically by some events. How does that sound?

[balajialg]

@yuvipanda sounds good! Do you want to merge this PR as it has been out in the public for quite some time to solicit feedback?

[balajialg]

@yuvipanda Let's publish this policy asap? Seems like there are no pending comments to be resolved.

[yuvipanda]

@balajialg yeah, i think this can be merged now!

[balajialg]

@yuvipanda Since, you created this PR. Can you merge this as soon as possible?

Next steps for implementing this policy:

• Figure out the content for the email that needs to go out to the teaching teams
• Figure out the mechanism for the email

[yuvipanda]

We never implemented this mostly due to lack of resources in implementing the technical parts of this. I'm trying to cleanup my open PRs, so am going to close this one. Please feel free to take-over / reopen / reissue as needed <3

[ryanlovett]

I think this one is still relevant, so I've just assigned it to @balajialg, mostly just to keep it in front of us.

[balajialg]

Thanks @ryanlovett!