You must have heard of hashtags That is a rather clever way of organizing loosley-structured information. You would see hashtags used on social media sites such as Twitter, written like this: #gitwinch When you see that word which starts with the “hash” sign ('#') Twitter allows you to search by that term by clicking on it. It will display all the posts on Twitter that uses the same hashtags.

We've expanded on the hashtags concept, which we call as “hashtag-values”. Let us explain how that works.

One of the disadvantages of the concept of hashtags is that sometimes people may use different hashtags for the same kind of information. If one person wrote an article or post on CAD drawings and tagged that as #CAD and the other tagged it as #drawings then clicking on #CAD may not get you the second person's article/post.

To avoid that, what many do is to tag the same content with multiple hashtags. That results in a lot of “hashtag-clutter” which again brings in its own confusion.

Hashtags
What we propose is to keep one common reference file for the hashtags that you want to use in the office. One useful method is to invent and get the office to agree upon the hashtags for the various kinds of work that is being done in the office.

For example: In an architect's office, people are doing #admin work, #clientmeetings, #accounts, #gfcdocs work, #redlining, #designing, #rendering … so that office agrees upon the hashtags that should be used.

These hashtags should be saved into a file (as a comma-delimited file, without the # character). That file is then shared with everyone – so that when they do tag their work, they know what hashtag they should use without spelling mistakes.

Hashtag-Values
As hinted earlier, we have expanded on this concept of hashtags further.

In our system, you not only can place hashtags into some specific parts of our system. But you can also associate some numerical value with it.

For e.g. Some person in the office placed these hashtags: #admin:5.5, #accounts:0.5, #redlining:6.5

That means the person has done 5.5 hours worth of admin work and 0.5 hour worth of accounts work and 6.5 hours of redlining work. The owner or boss or manager of the office can then suitably reward that person for the work that was done (and can have different previously-agreed upon rates for each of those works)

This is extremely useful in small/medium size offices where people may be asked to do different kinds of work. One source of anguish that employees often have is that they don't get recognized (aka paid) for the hard-work they put in different types of work they did for the office. Such hashtag values can be inserted in appraisals between an employee and his/her manger or owner as comments into the Kanban system.

This is a loosely-coupled system. Which means, we do not insist that you must use this. Maybe you may use this with other variations. For e.g. instead of giving the values as number of hours spent, it could be percentages, reward points or actual money or some kind of gamification points… that's all up to that office which uses Git Winch.

But if you do use this method (in whatever variations) our system can collect these hashtag-values and put give them as a CSV file to you. Then you can choose how to use that CSV file as per your office policies.

Hierarchical System
This is can be made hierarchical too. For e.g. Say the office has 3 tiers in its ORG tree. At level one is the owner (all by himself or herself) At level two are the managers and at level three are the regular workers.

The managers then create Kanban groups for the set of workers they manage. These managers then do an 1-2-1 appraisal (at whatever time period is the office policy) of the workers and capture the hashtag-values as comments in the Kanban groups they had created. Git Winch extracts those hashtag-values and places them into a CSV File which only the manager can download. The manager further works on that CSV file using a spreadsheet, and then prepares a report.

The owner has also created his/her own Kanban groups – In these groups only the managers are present. The owner also does a 1-2-1 with each manager and creates the hashtag-values' CSV file. Now the managers individually can pass on their own hashtag-value analysis to the owner, and then the owner puts all of them together to get a holistic understanding of what kind of work and to how much extent is being done in the office.

The above is just an example. We are sure you can think of different variations to suit your own office.

Gamification System
You may have guessed by now that this is a gamification system. Everyone in the same Kanban group would be able to see the hashtag-values placed as comments in the Kanban. However, the CSV file is allowed to be downloaded ONLY by the person who created the group. So there is some kind of control on how this information is used. The CSV file also would contain who wrote the hashtag-value and in which column of the Kanban was it written as a comment, and who was the author of the post on which such a comment was placed.

Soft-rules
So the office can implement their own “soft-rules” for the use of these hash-tags. For e.g. some Kanban group owner may decide to ignore hashtag values placed by others – and would use only the one that he/she himself/herself had made. Why? Because the “soft-rule” in the office is that only mutual 1-2-1 appraisals would be counted.

In some other office, the “soft-rule” could be that everyone in the group is free to do their own self-assessment. (for e.g. where there is a more flatter structure, and all the members of the group are considered peers, including the one who created the group)

In short, there is a lot of flexibility on how to use this.

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