NDoCH planning

[Chase Southard]

We're ramping up for our next big event, National Day of Civic Hacking, scheduled for May 31st. 

Code Across was a huge success. I can't thank everyone enough for your help and participation. I hope that our 2014 NDoCH event will be just as successful. 

I love to get your ideas, feedback, input about what we should do and what we could do better for the upcoming event. 

I think the 3 sub-group approach was a good idea as we did for Code Across: Non-technical, Maptime, and highly technical. 

As far as hosting an event, I think we've got it down if we stick to similar providers and format.

Below are other details from Code Across.

Located at CirrusMio HQ

10am to 4pm

Coffee from Coffea

Breakfast from Sunrise

Lunch from Stella's

Thoughts?

Chase

[Blake Hall]

If like to see a discussion about existing problems that people have with interacting with the government or community. The giant paper last time didn't get any attention. 

—
Blake Hall
@blakeshall

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[Lyzi Diamond]

In the next couple days, an official list of activities for NDoCH will be posted. One of them will be the Open Data Inventory, which I think is an insanely good idea for the non-technical group.

As far as Maptime, I had talked to Eli Warner about maybe doing something with the library on teaching OpenStreetMap editing. Seems like a cool way to have NDoCH in a central space, have more people attend, and spread the OSM gospel while gettting maybe even some UK folks in on NDoCH.

That said, I loved having the event at CirrusMio and would be totally stoked if we did it that way again! Let's have a Google Hangout next week (anyone who is interested in planning) to talk about some of this stuff, yeah? Say Wednesday the 7th, 1pm (10am for me)?

Let me know,

Lyzi

--

Lyzi Diamond [] 2014 Fellow, Lexington [] Code for America [] 510.504.4949 [] @lyzidiamond

[Tanzi Merritt]

I love the idea of using the library on one hand, but on the other hand, having this at the library is very limiting in that there's only one room there that has the capacity to hold as many as we hope to have, we can't get into the room before 9am that day for set up, it's limited on food and drink options (such as you can only eat and drink in that one basement room and no beer is allowed.) Not to mention that at this point the chances of the room being available are not high. (I used to work there and book the rooms for Central Library, so this is info I still have in my head.) If this is an option that we want to explore, we need to call right now and see if that room is available that day. I'll go ahead and check on it now so we know whether or not this is even worth talking about. 

Using the public library won't get more people from UK involved, as UK tends to be somewhat isolated and rely on their own library system for this. As far as PR at UK, we should talk about how to get info about this to the right people to get it around campus. It's such a large place that we need to strategize a bit on this. 

I've set up a FB event for this on the CirrusMio page, and I'm trying to figure out if I can make OpenLexington a host as well, but I'm not sure that I can. I won't start inviting people to it until we are sure of the details, though. 

I'll find out what's up at LPL and let you guys know if that's even an option in a few minutes. 

[Tanzi Merritt]

OK. So I was able to reserve the room from 9-5 that day, and it will hold up to 130 people. It is not a computer lab, as those are not available to use because they are reserved for library classes, but the library does have wifi and there is a screen there, so if we want to take a projector that's an option for projecting. 

Here are the things to think about as we decide for sure where to have it:

1. The Hub (the cafe on the first floor) has first right of refusal for food in the conference room. It's pretty easy to get around that. If we tell them what we want and they can't meet the need, or if our food is being donated, we don't have to use them, but we do have to talk to them about it. 

2. There's a lot of parking in the library garage, but they will only validate for up to two hours. Street parking is all free on Saturdays  and there's plenty, but we'll need to be sure to provide that information to attendees so they don't get stuck paying a big parking fee. 

3. No beer (or alcohol of any kind.)

Since we can get in at 9 and leave at 5 there's a little bit of set up and clean up time available, so that's not a worry. 

I put the reservation (which is free) on my library card, so if you guys want to do that I'll sign off on it. That puts me personally on the line if any of you crazies break anything. :) Or I'll cancel it next week. 

So, the option is on the table. Just let me know what you guys decide you want to do. 

[Lyzi Diamond]

Another thought: the adjacent room at West Sixth. People would have to buy beer, but there's wifi, we could bring food, all ages can attend... I am not sure about the other details associated, but Ben Self was a funder of CfA and they could potentially be a sponsor of the event? Thoughts?

[Tanzi Merritt]

The only drawback to that is that it's extremely hard to hear any sort of presentation in that room if there's any kind of conversation going on, and to control that they'd have to be willing to give us that room for the whole day, by which I mean limit it to only NDoCH attendees, which they might not be willing to do. They also have a ticketed event going on there starting at 6 that night and they may not want to try two things in one day. But we can certainly ask. 

[Tanzi Merritt]

I was at West Sixth tonight and talked to Ben, and he agreed with me that the space is not at all conducive to what we need. But he does want to help us out if we want to do something that is more small group focused at some point in the future. So keep that in the back of your mind for somthing that doesn't require large-scale presentations.