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ruby group organizer tools

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Peter Cai (Boston Ruby Group)

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Dec 24, 2023, 3:57:40 PM12/24/23
to Ruby Meetup Organizers
Happy holidays. I thought it might be helpful to share some of the tools we use to organize BostonRB. I'd love if others chimed in with theirs.
  • slack - discussions
  • meetup - events
  • cloudflare - registrar, dns
  • github - site source code
  • github pages - site hosting
  • twitter - announcing meetups
  • papercall - managing CFPs for talks
things we're evaluating / have tried in the past:
  • discord - much better community management tools, no paywall (we did this for our affiliate - railsbridge boston - but havent transitioned bostonrb yet)
  • heroku - we got off this when they removed their free tier. in the past, the bostonrb site was updated with talk summaries after every meeting
  • meetup replacements?: has come up in passing before, but like others have mentioned - its hard to get discovered if you aren't on meetup and cobbling together all the things meetup handles is expensive
  • google groups - too much duplication with the discussions in meetup + slack

things we've struggled with:
  • succession in general, and specifically access to systems - its usually a shared account password or something one person does using their personal account
  • slack free plan (when this change rolled out, we just started losing institutional memory because history is suddenly behind a paywall)

Murray Steele

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Dec 28, 2023, 10:15:00 AM12/28/23
to Peter Cai (Boston Ruby Group), Ruby Meetup Organizers
This is super interesting and useful, thanks Peter! I wonder how much common tools we all use. Let’s all jump on this bandwagon.

LRUG uses:

- mailman - for our mailing list - originally very vibrant it’s mostly just job ads and meeting announcements these days. Mailing lists are (alas) not really where communities hangout these days (https://lrug.org/mailing-list)
- slack - just for the organisers to chat about organising things. Around the time slack became the de facto online hangout place for communities was also around the time we were struggling with some moderation issues on the mailing list and we didn’t really want to add a unmoderatable platform to the mix
- github - the website and readme repos live here (https://github.com/lrug)
- github pages - the readme (https://readme.lrug.org) is hosted off here mostly because at the time it was the simplest option for a really easy editable markdown -> live html page
- middleman - the main site (https://lrug.org) is a static site and is deployed with an artefact upload github action
- dreamhost shared hosting - the main site lives here (and it’s where we get our mailman instance from too)
- team inbox - custom shared inbox software for letting all the organisers read and reply to the various email addresses we use for organising. It’s deployed on a vps and uses aws ses from mail delivery (it’s not oss as it was developed by an organiser as a potential saas product)
- harmonia - https://harmonia.io -for assignment of organisational tasks to the organising team on a schedule. It’s random assignment and was a good forcing function for us documenting all our organisational processes (https://readme.lrug.org/organising/)
- gandi - our registrar - we’ll almost certainly move off to porkbun when the next renewal comes up.
- eventbrite - for ticketing for the events
- zoom - originally for remote meetings in the Covid era, now for getting recordings of our meetings

Costs:
- zoom - just swallowed by one of the organisers
- domain name - we’ve used community pledge drives to fund the registration in the past, will probably do so again when it next comes up for renewal
- dreamhost - it’s hanging off a shared hosting plan two of the organisers have for lots of personal projects so again - just swallowed by them
- eventbrite - originally a free plan, but we scripted in a bunch of draft events for the next year to avoid the price hike
- slack - free plan - but we share the same struggles Peter mentioned about the paywall and losing institutional knowledge
- harmonia.io - on a custom free plan (it was built by one of the organisers)
- team inbox - not a public saas product, but essentially the same as harmonia (the tool was developed by the same organiser)
- socials - mostly mastodon (https://ruby.social/@lrug) these days, but there’s a vestigial presence of twitter. In both cases almost 100% meeting announcements.  We have a group on LinkedIn that basically says we’re there to name squat, don’t join it and to follow us elsewhere.

Things we’ve considered :

- moving the mailing list to google groups 
  - pros: better moderation; better delivery (dmarc etc); better archive UX
 - cons: needs a google account?; importing the old archive?
- public slack
  - pros: people like slack more than mailing lists these days
  - cons: cost; lack of moderation tools
- meetup
 - pros: discoverability - there’s a definite cost to not being on here
 - cons: cost; lock-in; literally every else about the platform (I hate it so much - but maybe I should swallow that rage)
- eventbrite replacement
 - pros: cost; we really only need ticketing nothing else from eventbrite
 - cons: will the alt platforms pull the same “no more free” that eventbrite and meetup have pulled?

Things we’ve struggled with:

- sharing the load among organisers - our original plan was to have each organiser be responsible for a single monthly meeting, but this didn’t scale (easy to just switch off when you’re not actively engaged in making something happen for a few months). Almost certainly this is a personal failing as I ran the group solo for ~10yrs so just didn’t really know how to share
- maintaining a pool of organisers - partly the above, partly were not really set to work with organisers of differing (& valid!) levels of engagement (e.g. keen to help, but not to host)
- finding venues - we had a single venue sponsor for a long time, but they folded in 2019 and ever since we’ve been touring offices in London, but it’s a struggle and it means we don’t know what the AV or capacity situation might be for any given month
- advance planning - we’d really like to get to place where meetings are organised months in advance, to give plenty of notice to people and drive up attendance, but it’s painful to get ahead especially if a venue or speaker pulls out and we have to go into reactive mode
- diversity - our record on speakers is pretty poor; our record on organisers was good when it initially stopped being just me, isn’t anymore; our record on attendance is ok, could be better.  There’s a “most of the speakers are white men” problem for sure, but it is also hard for us to get _new_ speakers at all.  There is a core group of people who are often keen to talk and we favour a policy of “accept any talk so that there’s definitely a meeting each month” which probably works against us here.

Almost certainly there’s more!  Would love to hear other groups tools and struggles!  In particular I’m interested in how you keep your community alive outwith the meetings.

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Radan Skoric

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Apr 20, 2024, 11:50:48 AM4/20/24
to Ruby Meetup Organizers
I'd like to revive this topic but with a focus on the organisational aspect. 

For those of you with more than one organiser, what software are you using to keep all organiser on the same page regarding:
1. Who is organising next few meetups and the details of what has already been organised?
2. People in the community that expressed the desire to give a presentation with details like: topic title, when they can talk ... 
3. Potential host companies with details like: who contacted them, what's their stance, when they want to organise (if they want to organise)

So basically, just kind of logistics for the organisation work that's divided between 2-3 organisers. 

Various project management softwares (and even their free plans) could fit the bill, but I'm hoping for something as simple as possible yet more structured than just a large shared google drive.

Peter Cai (Boston Ruby Group)

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Apr 21, 2024, 3:19:36 PM4/21/24
to Ruby Meetup Organizers
https://papercall.io has been helpful for getting proposals in a somewhat regularized format with a topic title, abstract, speaker bio, etc. Our submission page is https://www.papercall.io/bostonrb and they now have better support for recurring meetups (as opposed to conferences).

I used google sheets as a sort of lightweight-crm the last time we went out looking for host companies - who is the poc, when did we last speak, what is their position, etc.

As far as coordination, I believe trello/google docs/slack has been part of the solution at bostonrb. But the real answer was that most of the time, there was one very dedicated Main Person at a time (even though nominally there are multiple organizers), so it just wasn't that much of a problem.

Radan Skoric

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Apr 22, 2024, 12:38:05 PM4/22/24
to Ruby Meetup Organizers
Thanks Peter for the details. We're looking at Basecamp with Trello as second choice for coordination. We'll just try it and see how it goes. 

As a rule I think we'll want a simple setup with emphasis on keeping the information readable.

Using papercall for submissions would be really useful but not that relevant at the moment considering we're mostly struggling with just getting people to submit a proposal. :D  
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