- Speaker Recruiting
- Topic Curation
- Meetup Organization
- (i) Above agenda items were being discussed and worked on in small groups. Results were presented and collectively reviewed afterwards.
- (i) All specific topics were discussed with a clear focus on inclusivity: making sure Hamburg JS is a safe space to foster diversity was identified as our overarching goal.
- (d) Provide a high-level list of topics of interest; avoid to compete with neighboring meetups like the React & Angular meetups, though.
- (d) Provide a list of possible formats; it doesn't always have to be a talk — panels, fish bowl discussions, etc. are valid options, too.
- (d) Consider non-talk-related factors in the "CFP process", too, like the biography of the potential speaker.
- (d) Look outside of Hamburg; folks, that give a talk in an other city might want to travel to Hamburg to speak here & have a nice evening.
- (d) Reach out to universities & (non-obvious/-techie) companies, to get "newbie" and non-professional speakers onto the stage.
- (a) Create & maintain a safe space.
- (a) Make the process transparent by tweeting about it and documenting the progress in e.g. articles.
- (d) Provide a way to contact a CoC-person anonymously.
- (d) Make diversity a topic of talks to raise awareness.
- (a) Reach out to "Women-only" meetup groups and similar ones.
- (d) Create a knowledge base like a wiki and/or a list of links to helpful resources concerning preparing & giving talks.
- (a) Provide mentoring if it's feasible.
- (d) Provide opportunities for final rehearsals.
- (a) Consider involving not-yet-speakers into the process of preparing & giving a talk (including a joint presence on stage).
- (a) Have a ~day-long meta-meetup about "How to prepare & apply for a talk".
- (a) It makes sense to regularly reach out to dev advocates, whether they can come around for a talk.
- (i) Oftentimes their employer pays for travel & accomodation, which is additionally nice for us.
- (a) Don't contact companies, though, but developer relations teams specifically; they're usually available via email, Slack, twitter, etc.
- (d) Create a list of "most wanted or suggested topics" to enable potential speakers to find a topic for their talk.
- (d) Provide a flipchart / wall at the current meetup to collect and vote on topics the audience wants to hear about for one of the next meetups.
- (d) during the presentation / discussion round we discovered that a call-for-papers process through a Google form might also be a strategy to collect and select talks
- (d) Lightning talks: No longer than 5 minutes.
- (d) Regular talks: About 20 minutes.
- (a) hasn't been specifically answered, but according to the answers above, that "lightning talks should be 5 minutes", we might assume that the answer to this question is yes?
- (a) hasn't been specifically answered, but maybe the card "Announce meetup topics beforehand" could be seen as an answer to this?
- (d) Have both, thematically mixed topics and specific topic meetups.
- (d) Break the ice and create relationships by doing some games / activities with the audience at the beginning of a meetup.
- (d) Allow short spontaneous presentations of "a cool npm module", "something I read in the past" or "some weird JS behaviour" etc through games like a fortune wheel (similar to Hamburgs Node.js meetups).
- (d) Allow the audience to present real day-by-day problems and try to solve them in the group.
- (d) Once in a while we could do a "cross-over" meetup with one of the other JS related meetups to expose a greater audience to our shared topics.
- (d) Provide tech / presentation support for first-time speakers. (should be part of Speaker Recruiting)
- (d) Advertise meetup communication channels (especially Slack is not well known). (should be part of Meetup Organization)
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General
- (d) There will be shared responsibility for the time being: dedicated roles/responsibilities appear to not be required.
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Locations / Sponsorship
- (i) Despite audience size (~100 people), finding meetup locations has never been a problem.
- (d) Using meetup.com as primary communications channel for potential and actual sponsors appears to be the most appropriate solution.
- (a) Decide if we want to be more specific with regards to catering and general conditions of location sponsorship.
- (a) Decide if we want to introduce speaker sponsorships (i.e. speaker accomodation and travel).
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Marketing / PR
- (i) Hamburg JS already has a Meetup page and a Twitter channel, both of which we control.
- (a) Decide if we need clear responsibilities and/or guidelines for communication on these channels.
- (a) Decide if we want/need a regular homepage to improve visibility and ensure independence of 3rd parties.
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Communication
- (d) We will continue using Meetup and Slack for community communication for the time being.
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Schedule
- (d) We will set the dates for our meetups to the 5th of each (other) month. We decided to do so to make sure meetups are scheduled for alternating weekdays.
- (d) We will exclude public holidays and weekends. If the 5th of a meetup month is a day off, we will shift it to the closest workday.
- (a) Decide on initial cadence: monthly or bi-monthly?
- (i) A common understanding was reached with regards to the required individual effort required to become a part of the official Hamburg JS orga team: 2-4 hours per week.
- (i) A rather large, diverse group of candidates for membership in the orga team have stepped up.
- (i) Ideal orga team size was discussed: ~5 members appears to be a sensible team size to balance capacity to act and to decide.
- (a) Decide on orga team size and membership.