Osurb: thoughts on changing some things
Tony Schneider
After talking with some people and gauging interest to continuing
working on Book Exchange, we are considering shelving the project for
a while and trying a new meeting format.
The project has always been about creating a realistic setting where
people could get their feet wet with Ruby on Rails. From that
perspective, I think the project has been a huge success. However,
based on the attendance and focus of recent meetings, it's obvious
that motivation to keep working on the project has steadily dropped.
The cool thing is that this is perfectly okay. We're not under
contract and no one is financially invested -- we had some fun and
maybe learned a thing or two. It's a tall order to complete a
non-trivial app that isn't for a class when contributors range in
skill-level, free time, and commitment. As a result of this, I think
the right move is to set the project aside for at least a little while
and try something new.
In its place, I'm proposing that we have weekly themed hack nights.
Before attending the meetings, members will discuss potential
languages, libraries, tools or frameworks that they'd like to hack on
for that meeting. Of course the theme is optional and hacking on the
same thing over the course of several weeks would even be encouraged.
The themes would exist purely to provide a loose structure of what
someone might hack on or research beforehand if they don't have
anything in already in mind. In addition to this, we'll have a goal of
one speaker per month. This could be a member who just has something
cool to share or a pro coming in to give an awesome talk.
There will be some challenges to this:
In order to know what people are interested in hacking on for the
week, we need to unify our communication. Currently we have a mailing
list, irc, use twitter from time to time. It seems as though currently
the mailing list is serving as a medium for announcements, and the
majority of discussion occurs in irc (#osurb). The problem is that
some people aren't on irc, and others just aren't on all that often
(which I am definitely guilty of). Should we try and have more
discussion in the mailing list? Should we try to get folks in irc?
Does it even matter?
To be a successful group, one of our main goals should be to try and
attract new folks. I'm willing to bet that a lot of the stuff we are
interested in hacking on won't be noob friendly. For example,
certainly we can't teach someone html, css, sass and haml in the same
night that we are planning to play around with compass. This is always
going to be a problem, but perhaps improved communication can give
newcomers a heads up on what they should try and get familiar with
beforehand to alleviate some setup and prerequisite knowledge issues.
We'll just have to be as accommodating as possible.
I apologize for the long winded email. Looking forward to hearing your
thoughts on this.
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Tony Schneider
Craig Muth
Tony Schneider
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Tony Schneider
Michael Kusold
Tony Schneider
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Tony Schneider
Andrew Grieser
Ryan McGowan
Gets my vote.
Alex Burkhart
Haochi Chen
Haochi
Tony Schneider
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Tony Schneider
Andrew Grieser
Other ideas welcome.
Andrew
Tony Schneider
- todo
- chat
- poll for osurb hack night topics
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Tony Schneider