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How we work (org handbook)
  • Home
  • Onboarding
  • Code of Conduct
  • Project Management
    • Project Initiation
      • Documentation and Checklists
      • Aligning with OpenUp's Mission and Vision
      • Getting Partners and Stakeholders on Board
      • Defining Project Parameters and Limitations (scope)
      • Product Management during the Project Initiation Phase
      • DRAFT COPY
    • Project Implementation
      • Project Planning
      • Agile, Scrum, and the Lean Startup Method
      • Stakeholder Management
      • Meetings
      • Communication
      • Team Management
      • Roles and responsibilities
    • Project Close-out
      • The Close-Out Report
      • Retrospective
      • Donor thanks
      • One page write-up
      • Blog article
      • Maintenance plan (if necessary)
    • Project overviews
      • Citizen Engagement App
      • Our Project List
      • Local Gov Programme
        • Business Portal
      • Tech Infrastructure
    • Project boards
  • How we work
    • Preferred tools
      • Tool sponsorships
    • Budgets & Finance
      • Taxes
        • VAT
        • PAYE and UIF
        • Workmen's compensation
        • Annual PAYE reconciliation
      • The Types of Budgets Used By OpenUp
      • When to Start Planning a Budget
      • Planning a Budget
      • How to Create a Budget
      • How to Spend a Budget
      • How to Adjust a Budget
      • Expense claims
      • Invoicing OpenUp
      • Capturing and approving invoices for payment
      • Allocating AWS costs to a project
      • Allocating Upwork transactions to projects
      • Software, Services and Hosting
      • Downloading Webflow invoices
    • Tool Development
      • Coding Roles
      • Tools For Coding
      • DESIGN
      • The Design Process: Step-By-Step
      • Tools Used In The Design Process
      • Quality Metrics: Design
      • Webflow export rules
      • CONTENT, WRITING, AND MEDIA
      • Creating Substance: The Role of Content in Tool Development
      • Creating Content: Step-By-Step
      • What Goes In Social Media
      • TRAINING & EVENTS
      • Event Planning
      • When, Where, and How to Hold a Training Session
      • Tools Used By Training and Events
      • User testing
      • Making government accessible
    • Outsourcing & Contracting
      • Why do we contract external workers?
      • Platforms We Use To Find Contractors
      • Contracting people for work
      • UpWork Contracting
    • Monitoring & Evaluation
    • Communications & Branding
      • Resizing images
      • Creating an email newsletter
      • Posting a blog
      • Sharing a blog post
      • Marketing Q &A
      • Official communications
      • Tracking app and campaign web traffic sources
    • Human Resources
      • Recruitment
      • Recruitment template: Project lead developer
      • DRAFT Recruitment template: Product owner
      • One-on-ones (1:1s)
    • Organisational Decision Records
      • ODR1: Organisational Decision Records
      • ODR2: Building dynamic web frontends using Webflow
    • Personal Information
    • Password management
  • Tech
    • Development guidelines
    • Preferred tech stack
    • Webflow project guide
      • How to build pages in Webflow so that content can be added using Javascript
    • Setting up a new server
    • Hosting on dokku
    • CDN in front of S3
    • Setting up a new Domain
    • CKAN
  • Product management
    • Our product design process
  • Codebridge
    • Codebridge - the space
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On this page
  • Productivity
  • Service accounts
  • See also

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  1. How we work

Preferred tools

Preferred tools to use for specific purposes

We prefer using specific tools for specific purposes over a free-for-all of tools. Exceptions can usually be made when justified.

  • Less overhead of learning how to use different tools that accomplish the same task

  • Less surprises when something isn't quite like another tool we've used for something similar

  • Quick way to find the best tool, or a known decent tool, rather than having to figure out whether a new thing we're trying is sufficient

  • We may have an non-profit organisation discount arranged with a specific supplier. Setting this up takes time and effort and doesn't usually make sense for multiple equivalent suppliers.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't try new or alternative things, but we should consider the impact on the organisation and a project when trying new things and treat it as an experiment. It carries risk, and we don't try all new things at the same time, but rather just one new thing at a time.

We don't necessarily need to actively move things to the preferred thing, but we should try to use the preferred options with new instances or when it's convenient as part of significant changes to existing instances.

Productivity

Task

Preferred tool

Pros

Cons

Non-public documents, slideshows, spreadsheets

Google Docs

Change tracking, import/export common formats; OpenUp templates available

Documentation

GitBook

  • Easy to use

  • Looks good

  • Free team workspaces for open source and non profit

  • Github integration to sync data making migration and backups feasible

Moving content from one page to another is surprisingly hard

Password management

Bitwarden

  • Well-priced

  • Open Source

  • NPO discount

  • Respected by security community

  • Flexible/powerful permissions management even in the Teams subscription level

  • No way to let users see that an account exists to discover service accounts without them technically having access to the password. (Not sure any other password manager other than passwordstore.org can do this)

Service accounts

The following service accounts are available. See which unit they belong to to get access.

Service name
Used for
Unit

Buffer

Social media management

comms

See also

PreviousProject boardsNextTool sponsorships

Last updated 3 years ago

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Preferred tech stack