Building on the success of DevCamp 6, many of us decided that an ongoing student developer zoom call would be beneficial to the community, and I have been honored with a nomination to coordinate.
So I shall do my best. The coordinators of DevCamp 6 combined to make a high-quality experience for all of us, which I very much appreciate, and I think we can continue that vibration. On our first call we will discuss the format, likely to be a mix of networking, topical presentations, and project show-and-tell.
Whatever thoughts you have regarding format, topics, or timing, kindly post here.
Do we like a weekly call? Is that enough? What day of the week? Do we want two days? Is noon UTC the best time? Do we want one topical call and one open call? Do we want pre-planned topics? Kindly let me know what you think.
I think that a weekly call would be just enough, maybe even biweekly (depending on the amount of information / participants). But since the community is so distributed, it might make sense to have 2 calls so that different people can attend at different times. Kinda like with the networking session during the devcamp.
I see advantages to having call both on weekdays (people who allocate their entire weekend would still be able to participate) and the weekend (people who’re very busy during the work week would still be able to participate). I would suggest to start with something like Thu (not Fri on which many people have plans, but also not the beginning of the week) and handle scheduling problems as we go depending on the participants’ needs.
Regarding time, I feel like we need more opinions! To avoid the decision paralysis we could start with noon UTC and then adjust as needed.
Regarding format I think that strict requirements (like a need to have a particular topic to be discussed) would make it harder to make it a long-lasting call, so the format shouldn’t be fixed. I think it’s a good idea to define an option pool to choose from and go over it on every call.
Format planning. I think it’ll be useful to have a kind of a backlog to keep track of content for future calls. I suppose a thread on forum would suffice.
A concern about awkwardness. I have seen regular some calls with a free format go stale and awkward because people would gather together and they wouldn’t know what to do and say. Here we have an advantage with conversation topics because people could just network (in my experience participants already knew each other) and also there’s a never ending stream of holochain questions and discussions. However, I still think that precautions should be taken to keep the quality of calls high. But other than planning some “plan B” content, I don’t have any ideas here…
I would say that it makes sense to use the momentum of the devcamp and schedule a call for next week, just to avoid postponing the start.
Generally I see we are finding our path to the best practices on Holochain.
Thanks to @guillemcordoba that created this repository to share real practice projects on Holochain. Please follow and notify if you would like to participate.
also thanks to @e-nastasia and @jimays for continuing the talk after dev-camp and finally all of you are joining, talking and participating.
Thanks to all the participants!
With all the chaos and anxiety going on, it’s been a great pleasure to have everyone in the call sharing their stories and discussing a technology that is becoming more actual than ever. I hope to see you all next time! Take care
