Meta Meetup Minutes

Meta meetup Q2 2019

• Present: Niall Coleman-Clarke, James Hugman, Julian Weaver, Daniel van Berzon, latterly Remi Shergold

Speaker/topics ideas

• Svelte.js
• More double bills? Themed? Lightning talk before the main one a la Pixar?
  • Beware of using this to "boost diversity" - better to have more left field talks
• AI in the web - chase Will from ProdPad? Brandwatcher?
• An evening of Codebaristas? - do Amuse Bouche before the main event
• Victory lap for previous speakers? Ask Jake Archibald to come back!
• UX talk? Danny Hope? Jesse Speake?
• WASM/tensorflow - ask Google or Mozilla? - Daniel van Berzon to investigate FFConf speaker
• Another show'n'tell
• Christmas party with stuff? Pub Quiz/Code golf?
• Jaaaaaaames Hugman! In the next six months

Diversity

• Graph out the Async Diversity Watch tweets by @jhugman and correlate with speakers - what sort of talks/speakers give better diversity?
• Female brandwatchers who could talk about AI etc?
• Sussex university - Julian Weaver happy to liaise?
• Previous FFConf speakers?
• Speech about diversity in tech? e.g. barriers to entry etc
• Have a target for 2020 of e.g. 25% women speakers
• Find out what people from underrepresented communities want to hear about
• Have an "Async sponsored" Codebar - people chip in a tenner, or use a sponsor. Pair it up with a talk as well? Do it for Brighton Digital Festival! - They might even pay some?
• Focus on inclusivity instead of diversity (although diversity is often the best way to achieve that)
• Cautionary thought: Friendliness & clique-iness are two sides of the same coin

Brighton Digital Festival ideas

• See above - Async sponsors Codebar
• Get a panel of asyncers and give them a quiz/mock the week type thing. Async question time? Plus drinking!
• Good for attendees to casually come along and be as involved or not as they like (maybe via a google doc?)

Other ideas below:

• Referendum hacknight?
• Rock Paper Scissors bot or Chess bot etc
• Ask the Experts style of thing?
• Channel frogger (brexit)
• EXTREME mob programming - 30 people code the same thing, or collective code review?
• Pass the parcel with code
• BUG HUNT - where's the bug?
• Code review the most popular project from Github for that month
• Get speakers to do a talk with someone else's slides

Meetup.com (again?)

• Try it and see what happens
• James Hugman and Remi Shergold are keen to try it if cost is the only option
• Can we spend $15 in more productive ways?
• "How did you hear about us" questionnaire? - self selecting respondents...
• Not worth it to boost numbers, but maybe to boost diversity
• Puts extra onus on people to join meetup and then sign up.
• Raise sponsorship money and find someone to help boost diversity with the extra money

Guest hosts

• Yes - wary of it taking up more of Ali Lockie's time
• Remi Shergold willing to help arrange etc. but not host
• Ali Lockie to write up delegation instructions

6th June

• Julian Weaver/James Hugman 🙏

AOB

• Book in show'n'tells/ask the experts etc in advance
• Codewalk - go for a walk and talk about code?
• Once per month = talk; once per talk = social

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Meta meetup Q4 2017

• Check everyone's happy with The Skiff

Yes. Beneficial for the Skiff as well

• Show’n’tell!

Tom will find something (async/await)? Jake is up for it Prem sees it as a personal challenge to do something Dave S is also up for it Peter C

• Speaker/topic ideas

• i18l!!! (bbc world service?)
• JSCodeGolf!
• Server side rendering
• Redux IRL - not just a Todo app!
• Reason (OCaml which converts to JS) - tweet someone from Facebook
• A “proper” AI talk
• Async/await
• Web Components
• Puppeteer/Headless Chrome vs PhantomJS
• Lighthouse (google may volunteer a speaker) - AL to ping Yann
• iframes, permissions etc
• css grid

• Restart lanyrd? Other solution?

Peter’s Data Viz meet up has 750 members(!); pays for it out of his own pocket Ask BW to pay? Yann has a registered charity; could help with the bank account

• Videos/YouTube

• Will anyone actually watch it?
• Important to post it on the website if we do do it
• Would be great to have it live streamed (AL to talk to LW about it)
  • Could livestream before it happens
  • Would need mic’ing up
  • Need to do a Cost/Benefit Analysis
  • Worth talking to Jon at the Skiff? Likely to be yes if we set it up
  • Needs “a device” for the streaming

• How to promote more

  • Posters at universities!
  • AL to check that for google analytics
  • Meetup :-D
  • Chris H volunteered an email template (Yann to follow up)

• Brighton Web Development Meetup

Run by a recruiter Follow up with link to async site Point out it’s not formal There was previously a jQuery meet up; every month the organiser of jQuery Brighton hosted an async but it only lasted one month Prem says: “let them do what they like, we just focus on what we’re doing” Remy says: “what happened to crushing the skills of our enemies”

• How to ensure actions are followed up on after meta-meetups (Ali!)

• Trello
• Github Issues/projects (there are loads of issues!)
• AL to systematise the GH issues
• Yann happy to badger (❤️)

• Momentum?

• Would be good to know the stats of attendance
• Dave G’s flow talk was well attended
• Codebar was sparsely attended, but there could be many reasons for that
• CSS talks etc can bring in a different crowd
• AL can keep it going, but needs more help to push it forward
• Prem says: “don’t wait to be asked, it’s your meetup”

• "Discussion evening" suggestion from James Cowan:

• Steve says it works really really well for the Alt.net meet up
• Could keep it “themed”?
• Steve to lead and organise in the new year
• Great to get a diverse group
• Worth being aware of “dominators”, good to mitigate against that

Meta meetup Q1 2017

Attendees: Pete Goodman, Tom Parslow, James Hugman, Julian Weaver, Graham Smith

Review of meetup frequency (have social nights at the skiff on off nights?)

• Feels like it's busier each time so far this year.
• Not too much enthusiasm for drinks on off nights; didn't work that well for Brighton Python.
• There is scope for a more general purpose idea. Perhaps the attendees tonight can have a bit more of a push to use slack to get more of a community feeling.
• Maybe have an occasional social thing; e.g. summer/winter party?
• Would be good to have a beer/food sponsor for a social night.
• Julian offered a space for the summer.

Future speakers/topics

• There have been some pretty bad talks in the last six months. We should really keep up the quality.
• Should put any uncertain ones as part of a double bill.
• Dave Gurnell?
• Remi Shergold ⭐️
• Contact some big companies and get one talk a year - Brandwatch, ClearLeft, Cristiano Solarino.
• Open call for speakers on Twitter? Ask for RTs on Slack.
• Speaker from Alexa
• Would be good to have a talk on performance
• Introduction to React/Ember/Angular2 etc.
• Hiring/Managing JS devs
• An introduction to Git (for beginners) - Mary Rose Cook?

More beginners

• Intro to JS dev in 2017 - just ES6 and npm scripts etc. "Here's how to not have a terrible time". Julian happy to do it later in the summer. Work with Rosa/Ryan from Codebar? Follow up with a workshop.
• Have an earlier-stage speaker as well? "This much I know..."
• Ask egghead or Frontend Masters for a discount?
• Let's try to explain how to evaluate things, and what the big questions are (e.g. state management, DOM manipulation etc).

Discuss moving away from Lanyrd again due to stability issues

• Let's look at Meetup again, incl. costings.
• Subsidise via beer costs?

Beers

• Make it clear that the donation is completely separate.
• Set up a Patreon? Let's have an Async bank account

Videos?

• Between 12 and 250 viewers each time
• Not convinced about it
• Should we stream it and automatically upload? - AL to talk to Brighton Java
• Can be a boon to have it not recorded for big name speakers.
• Yann/Graham to help with live streaming :)

Venue - move to Skiff?

• Trial it there for a month.
• Projector is not great quality at the moment.
• Is there someone who can have ownership? Ali can have a key.
• Tom P to talk to John about the projector.
• Ali to pop round and see the space.
• Would be more community oriented and might help with diversity.

Sponsors

• No long-term sponsorship
• Skiff might help finding freelancers
• Self funding is also a possibility...?

Non-pizza options during sponsored events?

• Nice to have snacks etc. like nuts and stuff

Diversity

• Bovine Cemetry had an all-female panel.
• Have an all-female show'n'tell?
• Atmosphere is welcoming, but we need to get more people through the door.
• Getting more women speakers really is the key.
• Everyone at the meta meetup should try to find one speaker.
• Dot speech!!!
• Codebar takeover - some women are getting to the "find a job" stage.
• Women-in-tech from London
• Prioritise, even if it means moving others around.

Harry's snake game for BDF? https://hhogg.github.io/snake-heuristics/

• Pretty popular!
• Would be good to have Harry and one or two others helping out.
• Tom is up for doing another nodeventure

Website update from Yann?

• Metalsmith migration nearly done!
• Can still use Github Pages via Travis.

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BDF Brainstorm 5th July 2016

What worked well?

• JavaScript jungle
  • well prepared
  • good mix of people (not just devs)
  • important to have a good design
  • right balance of constraints vs freedom

JavaScript jungle in space or under the sea?

Doing it in space: - Have physics, and gravity? - Larger area? - Spawn bots at one or more places

Doing it in the sea: - Blue to black gradient - Automatically sink - Have a bit of sky at the top with waves that you can jump out of - Taller than one screen; click to follow on a character? - Call to arms for designers: blobfish vs pretty fish - Designers can export in SVG - Pete to ask Ruth to do a poster - Include the top of Brighton Pier (pixel art?) - http://www.piskelapp.com/ - Can we use Ben Hall’s audio API?

Have other creative types, not just designers? Try to make sure that everyone is collaborating

FISHCOTEQUE

Next steps:

 - Clone the repo, and rip out what’s unused
 - Blue to black gradient for the background
 - Get an example creature + docs
 - Get it working on a subdomain

Meta Meetup 14th April 2016

• What happens if ali get hits by a bus?

Let's cross that bridge when we come to it

• Formalise process akin to Moscow.js? See https://github.com/MoscowJS, particularly speaker & organiser

Sushi.js -> Ali to look into it and come up with a set of proposals

• Offload video production to Pusher?

We should maintain copyright. Opt out for certain speakers.

Willing to let them trial it

(Fabien willing to automate promotion)

Further fleshing out of Computer Science 101 events.

• Take the module you really enjoyed at university and teach it to the group.

• Link up with codebar.

• Onramp between beginning to program and getting your first job

• Some basics and some advanced topics e.g. neural networks 101.

• Different kind of meetup to Async?

• Don't call it Computer Science 101!!

• Have 15 min at start or end of meetup

• Not long enough with questions

• Need a lot more talks that aren't just javascript - make that clear!

• Terminal/bash would be really useful

• Don't formalise it into 'every other async'

• Copyrights?

• Loose focus on js/web?

• Talk about whatever you want, but should be understandable by a JS dev

• Rebrand as a general web meetup slowly

• More collaborations with other meetups! Talk to functional brighton etc. - AL to talk to Brighton Java

• At end of meeting, say "if you wanna speak, doesn't have to be about JS"

• We're interested in smart people who can make it accessible

(Julian raised that if pusher are filming, we should remove the marker line on the screen) Julian has a magic eraser!

• Use of slack

Not a problem for people that don't use it Get self-invite to slack - ask yann Add an announcements channel with limited authorship that people can set their notifications on

• Local events promotion

Turn up to the event! We'll give them a minute at the start Ask for tweet to retweet!! Carry on sending to google group

(Yann promotes ludum dare this weekend)

• Meta-meetup frequency

Twice yearly unless there's anything urgent to discuss

• AOB

12th Nov

Minutes of Last Meeting

• Sponsorship; was good but let's limit it a bit more.
• DO NOT WANT any kind of control over content.
• Bring somebody from further afield which we couldn't normally?
• Have alternate meetings sponsored?
• Tom Parslow to contact speaker from Norway and ask if they would come if we pay for them to come?
• Speakers on hot topics should get good attendance so may be worth the money

Venue

• No objections

Hosts

• Everyone from last time plus Rosa

Future topics

• Fundamentals of computer science (James Hugman?): maybe a series of lightning talks for the evening? Add an event in March, add gist for topics that people can vote/volunteer on.

Website revamp

• Yann already building a yeoman generator for metalsmith. Let's keep the same design.
• GraphQL talk not up yet, Julian has been chased. ADD THE UPCOMING EVENTS AS SOON AS THEY ARE CONFIRMED!
• Calendar widget
• A bit embarrassing to ask for a PR; most people don't have time/headspace. Something more self service would be great.
• Prose.io gives you a web interface for Github Pages.

Videos

• Big applause for Graham Smith for keeping up :)
• Hannah (Yann's gf) has 300gb of talks that she's willing to put up. Graham Smith to liaise.
• Is it worth it? Not a lot of viewings but can be valuable for the speaker themselves.
• Add to JSWeekly etc

Attendance

• Publishing up front could help!
• 'Tags' for beginner/intermediate/advanced talks? - Just indicate expected audience

Diversity/Schedule

• Better to keep to every 2 weeks.
• Good to reach out to more women to come and talk.
• Rosa to reach out to contacts in She Codes and Codebar
• Julian to reach out to contact in FLOSSIE
• Use sponsorship money to bring more women speakers from further afield (highlight motive to sponsor)
• Everybody to try and find one woman speaker who they want to come and talk.
• Code of Conduct (adapt http://confcodeofconduct.com/) and announce why we're doing that - also ensure we have a point of conduct (Ali and Rosa volunteered)
• Order soft drinks as well
• Consider contacting a catering company
• Look at middle eastern mezzes

Organisational help

• Get visibility of issues!!! AL to publish and tell people during meetup

AOB

• Adblock: use a cdn (there's a raw github cdn now!)
• The Unit might sponsor (Ali L to chase up)
• Next metameetup Q1 2016
• Tom Parslow keen to do another ES6 golf. Tom to organise on a separate night at the skiff.
• Add invite page to slack
• Add link to wiki on homepage

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16th July

Schedule

• Thursdays. Every fortnight (keep as is)

Venue

• 68 Middle St.
• Should we change? - fuck no :)

Hosts

• Dan Neame

• Nathan Buckley

• (Non-buff) Remi Shergold

• James Hugman

• Fabien O’Carroll

• Mark Everitt

• Ali L will be fallback host if somebody needs to drop out

Action (Ali L): Assign hosts for nights Action (potential hosts): Volunteer to host for topics you are interested in

Genre/scope of topics

• Other languages as well? Should we rebrand as a general purpose meetup? (No)
• Keep it fairly focused and relatable to JS - criteria = will an enlightened JS dev dig it?
• Let’s try some more avant garde talks and see how it goes

Future topics

• Fundamentals of computer science (James Hugman?)
• AI (James Hugman?)
• BioNode (call for volunteers)
• Spark (call for volunteers)
• One off night on softer skills. How to manage? How to do public speaking? etc. (Ali L)

Format

• Talk then Q&A works well
• Multiple talks if double booked
• Sponsored nights allowing the company to provide the speaker as well (call for volunteers to find sponsors)
• More workshops/hacknights (call for volunteers to organise)
• Some of the longer talks can go on too long. 40 minutes is long enough. (Ali L & others to include in Information for Speakers etc)
• Rebrand “show and tell” to “lightning talks”

How should we organise speakers?

• Put talks in the calendar at 7pm! (Ali L)
• Colour coding for ‘date under discussion’ (Ali L to investigate)
• Slack channel for Async. (Ali L to create)

Videos

• Make Google+ account to have unlimited Youtube (Graham S?)
• Better sound would be good (call for volunteers/Graham S)
• Yann to send through list of videos he still has

Website revamp

• Ghost or Metalsmith? - Leave with jekyll for now
• Visual refresh (call for volunteers)
• Contact page (especially for speakers - call for volunteers/Ali L)
• Embed the videos (call for volunteers/Ali L)

Facebook page

• Yann’s girlfriend to help set up, then Ali L to administer

Lanyrd vs Meetup.com

• Julian to investigate setting up Meetup.com page

BDF

• Tanks Round 2 (1 bot per person!)
• PlayCanvas hackathon - aaunel
• Nodecopter
• Minecraftbots
• Music visualisation generator
• Need a decision by Sun 19th (tanks round 2 is default)

Get more girls involved

• Discuss with codebar and other “women in tech” nights (call for volunteers/Ali L)
• Do another Nodeschool and other hack nights (call for volunteers)
• Fear of “nerd check” (all to be aware)
• Website grades -label beginner talks (call for volunteers)
• Ask female attendees how they found it (everyone/Ali L)
• Draw up a Code of Conduct (call for volunteers/Ali L)
• More female speakers! (call for volunteers)
• Anonymous feedback section on website/other mechanism? (call for volunteers)
• May have to find funds to attract female JS speakers from London (call for volunteers/Ali L)

Sponsorship

• Moar! (call for volunteers/Ali L)
• Brandwatch & others

AOB

• Quarterly meta-meetups! (Ali L)
• Draw up a Mission/Values (call for volunteers/Ali L)
  • Make sure women feel welcome
  • An indication of which topics will be welcome
  • Open source bias if practical (this includes speakers)

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