First off apologies for not attending the last few meetings, it has
been a very busy few weeks with a trip to India, Khmer New Year and
the move to a new office. I am still though very much interested in
continuing the meetings.
I think we need to carry on as this group was very valuable and I
think in the six months it has been going a lot of positive things
have come from the meetings, but I also think we need to make some
changes.

The problems I see are as follows:

     - If any two of Mikka, Tim or myself can't attend for any reason
then the meeting tends not to happen.
     - The meetings are very unstructured and often we don't meet our
objective of the whole group fully understanding the pattern.
     - The meeting is not time boxed, so we often start late and
finish late.
     - People often attend without doing proper preparation (I am one
of the worst for this)

My suggested solutions are as follows:

     - Each meeting has a pre-decided moderator which is arranged a
week in advance and is posted on this list. Once someone has committed
to be a moderator, they must attend or must tell the group well in
advance.
     - The moderator must have already located good materials and have
them ready on a laptop or a flash drive (In case of internet
problems).
     - Each attendee should have at least done enough studying on the
topic that they know the 'what' and 'why' even if they may not
understand the 'how'.
     - The moderator must control the meeting and stop it descending
into a free for all where everyone is talking to everyone else at the
same time.
     - The meeting should be time boxed. So if we say 6pm start, then
is must start at 6pm sharp. The moderator should start the meeting at
the time agreed by all.
     - We should also time box the end of the meeting, I think 90
minutes is more than enough for a pattern if the meeting is
structured.

My personal preferences are as follows:

     - People come the meeting venue before the start to eat and
socialize.
     - The meeting starts at 6pm
     - The moderator leads the discussion about one design pattern
from the GoF book.
     - We stop studying the pattern at 7.30
     - At this point we take a 15 minute break where people talk about
what they want or people who aren't interested in part two can go
home.
     - We then move into part two of the night and spend one hour
studying another book. Maybe a chapter each week from - Refactoring:
Improving the Design of Existing Code
     -
 This will finish at 8.45, people can then either go home or stay for
more drinks and socializing.

I know all of this seems very rigid, but I think now that the group
has grown we need some small rules and structure otherwise we risk
having it fall apart.

Please post your comments here.

Cheers,

Chris

On Apr 21, 6:49 pm, "Miika Makinen" <mmi...@gmail.com> wrote: