Running PDX Ruby

[Kirsten Comandich]

Greetings PDX Ruby co-meeting-leaders,

I'm looking for people to take over my role as anarchist pirate ghost ship co-captain (?). I've run the meeting (with your help) for three years now, and I feel like it's a good time to step aside.

I've talked to Chuck and Brent and they will continue to keep the event running as usual, of course!

The things I've been doing that we need help with are:

* Send out a meeting announcement email a week or more before the meeting

* Send out a day-of reminder

* Bonus: tweet about the meeting, post on slack #announcements

* Update the meeting slides that show during the pre-talk socializing time. (https://github.com/pdxruby/preshow)

* Create future events in Calagator (duplicate existing ones).

* Be the go-to person for who is speaking at the meeting (this could be more obvious as to who the contact is - maybe create an email address, or a form on the website).

* Make/send out other PDX tech announcements that might be of interest.

* Chuck and/or Brent will make the opening meeting announcements, unless someone else really wants to.

* Rico and Joey have been coordinating getting the video recorded, so I think this is taken care of.

Thanks all! I love this community, and I'll still be around, so I'll see you at the meetings. :)

[Chris Hough]

I was not sure if I should reply directly or to everyone in the group, but I would be down to help out Kirsten.  

[Chuck Vose]

Reply to all is just fine. Which of those things do you want to pick up?

If you're wanting to share the load, maybe pick 2-3 and see if others come through and want others, if not, well, maybe you can pick up some more. ;)

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[Chuck Vose]

Also, my biggest concern is meeting reminders, then getting speakers. (Then a long list of ambitions)

I'm terrible at getting things out on calagator and Twitter, recurring, oddly scheduled things are my kryptonite. But speakers just requires legwork; I've done it in the past and I can help whoever feels passionately about this. We might need more than one person on this though.

[Chuck Vose]

Also, holy shit we need to make Kristen a 10' trophy for all she did for us. What an amazing woman!

Anyone crafty?

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

Perhaps a shared email account for coordinating speakers would help? That way old email chains are accessible to whoever' picking that up on a given month.

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(Sent from phone. Please excuse: brevity, top posting, hilarious autocorrections.)

[Jesse Cooke]

1) Could we automate some of this?
2) Maybe we should add a #business Slack channel for coordination chatter? I like the idea of a shared email account too.
3) Kirsten, thank you for all your work, we all appreciate it very much!

[Kirsten Comandich]

Ha ha, Chuck, thanks. Actually Sam LG made me one of the nice 3D-printed Rubies:

​

[Kirsten Comandich]

Thanks Jesse!

There is a #pdxruby-bizness channel in Slack, that would be a good place to chat.

[Shawna Scott]

Hi all!

FYI, I'm also willing to help out, especially with public-facing stuff like email's and introing meetings. I'd love for our members to see a range of faces in leadership when they come. :)

I'm sure there's been discussion on Slack also, so I'll pop in there when I'm no longer typing this all on a phone.

Best,
Shawna

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

I think it's important that new attendees see themselves represented in our group.  To that end, I'd love to see Shawna do the pre-meeting intro / housekeeping / announcement routine when she's back in town.  She's got a friendly, approachable presence and is at least one (immediately obvious) axis off from the presumed default.  :)  Plus, a lot of the newer folks in the community know her from her time at PCS.

If an alternate is ever needed, I've emceed once or twice and wouldn't mind doing it again.  (I'm not nearly so well suited for it as Shawna, though.)

Also:  thanks so much, Kirsten, for stepping up to do this after Igal left us.  I really appreciate all the work you've done, including the invisible bits most of us never have to think about.  Thank you.  :)

[Chris Hough]

Jesse +100 for the business channel in slack. I think we should start that there.   It's far easier to keep this threaded there instead of gmail at least for speakers.  

If Shawna is going to take over the announcements each month, I could help with the other bullets: 

* Send out a meeting announcement email a week or more before the meeting

* Send out a day-of reminder  =>  Do we still need this with Slack and Caligator? 

* Bonus: tweet about the meeting, post on slack #announcements

* Create future events in Calagator (duplicate existing ones).

* Make/send out other PDX tech announcements that might be of interest.  =>  Do we still need this with Slack and Gmail?

Also, who is Shawna's backup? It seems we are singled threaded in a few areas.  

Happy Holidays. 

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

I think the "other tech announcements" are things like the coders' socials, and the occasional other all-nerd item from, e.g., the pdxgroups list.

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(Sent from phone. Please excuse: brevity, top posting, hilarious autocorrections.)

[Shawna Scott]

I think we still need email announcements, since we have about 1000 members there, and only ~163 on Slack. And Sam seems to have volunteered to be my back up for meetings. FYI, I'm not able to do announcements for the January meeting (I assume we're talking about going forward, but just so everything's explicit!)

Kirsten, maybe we could meet up sometime in January or before or after the February meeting and I can take over some of that for you?

Thanks!

[Kirsten Comandich]

Thanks everyone!

Yes, "other tech announcements" meant the coders' social, OS Bridge, Ruby on Ales, etc - announcing them at the meeting as well as emailing the mailing list, posting to Slack, etc. Reviewing Calagator to see if there's anything else of interest.

[Kirsten Comandich]

Chuck has also volunteered to do announcements, so I think he can cover January.

Sure, I'd be happy to meet up.

[Audrey Eschright]

I appreciate these conversations remaining in email where it's possible for me to keep a permanent, searchable archive. After ~10 years I often notice the value of being able to find past information no matter how long it's been. 

I don't mind quick discussions about who's handling what this month and similar kinds of coordination moving to Slack, but please keep the general strategy and planning here. 

Audrey

On Jan 2, 2016, at 1:59 PM, Chris Hough <chris...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Chuck Vose]

Agreed, I'll restate something I heard a bit ago:

Slack is for things we should forget.
Email is for things current members need to all see.
Wiki is for things that all current and future members might need access to.

Implied in that is that slack things need to be summarized and promoted. If this isn't happening, we'll need to talk to people 1-1 and continually remind.

[Chuck Vose]

Also, there hasn't been discussion on slack about this, so you've not missed anything. :)

[Rico Jones]

Agree re: email announcements.

Regarding stuff from upthread: I feel great about having Shawna be the public face of our merry little band of programmers and I am happy to be a backup responsible adult when one is needed.

And thank you, Kirsten, for being an integral part of PDX Ruby. Working remotely can be pretty lonely and my life since moving to Portland would have been much poorer were it not for our awesome little community. So thank you for making it happen.

- Rico

[Chris Hough]

Just a heads up but it looks like we already had a "bizness" channel setup.  :)

Chuck - I have experienced what you outlined a bit differently in organizations... 

Slack is for things we should forget. 

=> Possibly, but IMHO I have used it to replace email in organizations.  Slack will send notifiers when applicable i.e. channel announcements.  It can do both.  

Email is for things current members need to all see.

=> By this I assume you are referring to google groups... In a way, possibly, but online tools like slack or hipchat are far easier for collaboration, especially in real time.  I am not sure you can track participation on either though.  Also, using the free version of slack has limitations in this area.  Google groups has threading which is nice.   

Wiki is for things that all current and future members might need access to.

=> Do we track activity on our wiki? I have heard it mentioned a few times at our meetup but I was not sure if we were still updating this.  The last time I checked the content was pretty outdated.

I have been thinking about why we have so many in our primary google group ~ 1k versus just over 100 in slack recently... It's very odd considering many corporation use these tools throughout the day.  

Just a few pennies.... 

[Chuck Vose]

Apologies, I said it wrong, the above was an ambition. That's how he wanted the org to be run and I think it worked very well.

We used slack all the time to flesh out the details, then we serialized it into email or the wiki depending on intended audience.

But the important thing was that slack was not considered to be the end of the road for discussions, it had to be stored somewhere with broader access. This allowed us to also have more private discussions, but meant that we really needed to be clear and unified when we serialized.

It ended up saving us tons of time in the end; we often found small incongruities and were able to correct misunderstandings very quickly this way.

[Chuck Vose]

Also, I've observed that some of the responsibilities have been claimed but many have not. How could we do this better? Do we need to do something at the actual event?

[Kirsten Comandich]

Would someone like to make the pre-meeting slides for tomorrow? If not, I will create them with an ad, "help us make these slides!". :)

I agree with Audrey, I like having the archive of discussions on google groups. I still look up things from over the ~10 years too. [I recently wondered, when was Igal's first post to the mailing list? Oct 18, 2006.]

[Jonan Scheffler]

I'm late to this party but I'm happy to help make announcements at meetings with Shawna and Sam and be a loud voice where necessary. Glad to see so much support for PDX.rb.

Thank you for everything Kirsten! 

Jonan Scheffler

@1337807

jonansc...@gmail.com

(503) 985-6626

[Audrey Eschright]

On Jan 4, 2016, at 2:50 PM, Chuck Vose <vos...@gmail.com> wrote:

Also, I've observed that some of the responsibilities have been claimed but many have not. How could we do this better? Do we need to do something at the actual event?

That seems like a good idea. In fact... what if we use the 30 mins before the presentation starts to have a short business meeting? We can review what tasks are open, and start collecting any new ideas for what people want the group to do this year.