[Ground-station] Happy Friday! It's been a great week for us. Let's document it.

[Michelle Thompson]

Greetings everyone!

Thank you so much for being part of our community.

We've had a very active couple of weeks and it's time to document it.

Do not let perfect be the enemy of the good! A couple of lines about what
you've accomplished, what you have planned, if you need any resources, and
if you have any roadblocks <=== this is perfect.

I'll be sending out summaries of the work I have first-person visibility
into, am responsible for, or already know about. This includes minutes from
our most recent board meeting. I was the interim Secretary as that position
transitioned from Karen Rucker to Keith Wheeler.

Please see who is on your board of directors here:
https://www.openresearch.institute/board-of-directors/

These are the people that are formally and publicly dedicated to you
getting the most possible out of being here.

Along with them are the team leads of all our established projects, all of
the volunteers researching ideas, and anyone with an informed opinion
helping on Slack. This is a vibrant and growing network of people. It's a
great honor to serve and enable their interests and work. We will have an
additional board member to introduce to you very soon, and we are looking
for one additional board member. If this is something you are interested
in, please get in touch with any current board member and let us know.

Currently, ORI funnels most of the team reporting content into our
newsletter, the Inner Circle.

The results have been a significant improvement over the weekly reports
that we posted for several years on GitHub. These reports were very good
and everyone that helped write them should be very proud of this unusually
good record.

That record can be found here:
https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/documents/tree/master/Management/Weekly_Engineering_Reports

These reports were not as widely read as we wanted them to be. They did not
get the engagement we were looking for. We've seen similar or the same
complaints from other teams and projects on GitHub. The core competency of
GitHub is to deliver source code, and it's at best a pleasant surprise to
find good documentation and records in parallel. Pull requests are the core
competency and we should not fight the tool.

Worse for us, these reports were harvested on at least three occasions by
"ham radio" organizations that are 1) deeply irritated that ORI exists, 2)
define ORI as a threat, and most significantly 3) have clearly and provably
attempted to interfere with or damage ORI's work instead of supporting it.

There are politics in everything. There is no such thing as purely
technical work. Work is never judged on merit alone. The technical part is
never the hardest part of getting things done. This is why we stick up for
the work so firmly, as clearly and as deliberately as we possibly can. It
is also why we emphasize and formalize things like our code of conduct, use
an open process *in addition to open source*, and insist upon ethical
practice. This does not mean we have to sit around and let our commitment
to open process hurt our volunteers.

With respect to our technical communications, we adjusted our approach and
found a much better way to accomplish communications about our work. This
has greatly minimized harmful interference and given very positive results
so far. Let's keep it growing.

https://www.openresearch.institute/newsletter-subscription/

The next newsletter will arise from this week's progress and what we've got
scheduled for September. This ranges from IWRC2023 (CHIPS act and NSF
collaboration), space transponder work, and a big expansion at Remote Lab
South.

Do you have an idea for a themed issue? Themed issues have had a lot of
impact and enthusiasm. Your ideas about how to share and document our work
are welcome and supported.

More soon!
-Michelle Thompson
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