NodeBaseCamp

[mikeal]

Unconference for node databases.

@rvagg what do you think :)

[rvagg]

Sounds like fun but I've never even been to an "unconference" before so I have little idea how it actually works.

But I do have pretty good facilitation skills (IMHO), so it's probably up my alley!

[dshaw]

@rvagg You'd be great!

[mikeal]

Unconference is pretty simple. Sessions are collaborative, no speakers, and the attendees throw up ideas for sessions. Your job in facilitating is really just to arrange the schedules, remove duplicates, limit overlap, and try to bring the sessions to a close when they degenerate (they usually do). This is something I'm pretty sure you'll be great at :)

[rvagg]

Yeah, great, I love doing that kind of thing. So what's required from me in terms of preparatory organisation? Let me know what I need to be doing to make this happen.

[mikeal]

Not a huge amount, just poking the right people to get there. Most of the work of the unconference happens "on the day."

[rvagg]

@mikeal who's the point of contact in Joyent for this? Need to make sure that we have paper and pens available and also that the room is set up for discussion; I should probably also get there early to make sure it's all set up. Should I source nametag stickers myself or do you think Joyent might have that kind of thing on hand?

[mikeal]

@rvagg Emily Tanakaa-Delgado [email protected]

[rvagg]

@mikeal have you planned any email follow-up for attendees for this to tell them where to go exactly? If not I can get Emily to send something out using the Tito list.

[mikeal]

Yup, planning for the day before the event. The closer the better with emails like that.

On Mar 4, 2014, at 5:20PM, Rod Vagg [email protected] wrote:

@mikeal have you planned any email follow-up for attendees for this to tell them where to go exactly? If not I can get Emily to send something out using the Tito list.

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[rvagg]

great, I'll leave an email to participants in your hands then

[mikeal]

We can talk about it tomorrow at KnodeCamp if you're around :)

On Mar 5, 2014, at 5:41PM, Rod Vagg [email protected] wrote:

great, I'll leave an email to participants in your hands then

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[rvagg]

FYI, one piece of important follow-up in case someone is planning on doing a similar event: We had perhaps 30% of people turn up who thought it was "Node BaseCamp" rather than "NodeBase Camp" so they were total noobs and we threw them in the deep-end talking about building databases with Node. We got around it by splitting in to two groups and I went back to basics but the factors that combined to make this happen were:

• Name
• Event was second day of JSFest so it seemed to be up there as an entry-point before the main event.
• People don't read (general problem we all understand, write too much text for a blurb and people just skip over it and assume they know all they need to know).

[mikeal]

People don't read

They really don't. This came up over and over again throughout the event and was even something of a theme during the KnodeCamp planning around building out resources.