In 2011 the dev team I was on went to Pivotal Labs for a few months to bootstrap a rebuild of our company’s site, and learn their style of “extreme programming”. We used a tool to organize our weekly retrospective meetings which I felt was remarkably useful and easy, but it’s since disappeared and I haven’t found a web-based replacement.

The site was actionitems.us, it was bare-bones and did just one thing and felt easy to use and understand. In a nutshell:

  • users are collected into teams
  • team has an upcoming meeting
  • team members can submit thoughts/topics for upcoming meeting
  • members can rank topics in order of what they’d like to discuss
  • members can comment on existing topics whenever
  • when meeting starts, ordered topic list is the agenda

I felt that it was a great tool for our team. It was fast enough to use that any thoughts on the current dev cycle (code, ops, design, administrative, office-related…) could be quickly recorded, and then it got out of the way. We would try to develop action items out of any pain point topics we discussed.

I haven’t found something like it. Could be a fun open-source project.

(In the meantime, stickies.io, though lacking the voting/ranking feature, has been a decent replacement.)

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