Are we meeting our goals as a group?

[Chuck Vose]

All,

Since we don't have explicit goals or metrics for this group, I wanted to ask the general populace:

Is the group is meeting your expectations and goals? (1-10 with optional description; 7-8 being "yes", 9-10 being "hell yes")

What are your goals for the group? Where could we be doing better?

I have a suspicion that we're doing okay for most people, but I wanted to ask instead of assuming. Just seems polite. :)

-Chuck

[Jesse Cooke]

I think we're doing alright. I've see a ton of new faces at the recent meetings (especially given it's the summer) and a good number of old friends.

I'm in the 8 range.

Are you asking about goals for the actual group or for this business group?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pdxruby-business" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pdxruby-busine...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to pdxruby-...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pdxruby-business.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

An offhand comment just sparked an idea:  it might actually be worth doing some fundraising to occasionally fly in an invited speaker from out of town.  (Katrina Owen or Coraline Ehmke, maybe?  I <3 all of their talks that I've seen, and they might actually like an excuse to visit PDX...)

-Sam

[Rico Jones]

I'm also at an 8. But I echo Jesse's question: did you mean for this to be just for the business group or for the group as a whole?

[Lucas Charles]

8 for me too.  I'm content :)

--

[Chuck Vose]

Sorry for the delayed response, I meant for the group in general.

The responses so far are interesting to me. Those of you who've done some marketing analytics will know about the NPS score. This wasn't an NPS survey for several various reasons, but the numbers fall in line with my expectations.

In NPS surveys people's responses are buckets as 0-6 are negative (called detractors I guess), 7-8 are neutral, 9-10 are positive. This system has always jived with me, I rarely answer below a 5 unless I'm really pissed. Same for 5 star systems, we rarely see below a 3 unless that song sucks or the restaurant service was terrible.

Anyways, back to the whole point of the question.

We don't have a strong vision of where we're going or why. Clearly we're growing, which is good in my book but most assuredly it's bad in someone else's book. So how do we decide whether to change a thing?

The problem is that I have no idea how to gather a vision from the "pirate ship full of cats" that we call pdxrb. In my limited experience, it took 2 days for my board of 2 people, 2+ days for my board of 4, 8+ days so far for my team of 6. So my guess is that this just isn't the strategy you use for group decision making. :)

Every response was in the neutral camp, which says to me that people are fine with where we're at, but not psyched. That's okay, we don't have to strive for 9's, but you can see now why I find it interesting.

-Chuck

[Benjamin Turner]

I think the group is great! But I would still probably put myself in the "passives" category (aka neutral). I only make it to 3-5 meetings per year, partially because of other commitments (family & my kids' schools), and partially based on my interest level in the topics at the meetings. It's a pretty big group for me (I'm an introvert, and I find it harder to get engaged as the size of the group goes up)—not that I want the group to shrink! If I had to pick goals for the group, I would have two: (1) helping rubyists learn how to explore more stuff themselves (teach a person to fish and all that), and (2) exploring how ruby integrates with other things (using it with other technologies, or ways to use it in the real world beyond just building web stuff—even though I'm a 20-year web veteran). Those are my 2 cents.

Ben