Thursday, February 11th Meeting Minutes - nodeschool/toronto GitHub Wiki

Reason for the meeting:

I wanted to get everyone together talk about the future of the event. I wanted to touch on things like: venues, sponsorships, format, content and growth. Overall, I’d say the meeting was very helpful and would suggest organizing one of these types of meetings/hangouts each quarter.

I’ve formalized what was talked about below in point form. If you notice that something is missing from what was discussed then please feel free to add to the document.

Venues:

  • Lighthouse Labs has moved into a much larger space (ie. DevHub) and are running a month long “Dev Month” in April
    • They’ve asked if we’d like to host our event in April (the 16th) in their new space
    • We should vote on this after we agree that they will meet the Venue Criteria
    • We should approach other bootcamps, about hosting, in order to show no favouritism amongst organizations
  • We outlined what Shopify currently provides our events and what we expect from new venues to be able to provide us

Venue Criteria:

  • A venue must meet certain criteria to be able to host a NodeSchool Toronto event:
    • A representative of the venue must read and agree to uphold our code of conduct
    • Must provide a safe, clean and welcoming atmosphere
    • Must provide chairs, desk space, electrical outlets and wifi for at least 75 attendees
    • Must provide a projector or equivalent presentation equipment and space
    • Must cover drink and food costs (roughly ~$100)
    • Must provide security (roughly ~$300-400)
    • Must provide a means of attendee registration/confirmation before entering the space (ipad login/confirmation, name tags etc.)
    • Must be wheelchair accessible
    • Must not market to attendees
    • Must not try to recruit attendees
    • Must not insist on speaking
    • Must not provide alcohol

Sponsorship:

  • Since our running costs are extremely low, a “sponsorship” is something of an enigma
  • Shopify has been considered a “sponsor” because of their ongoing support through the use of their space and covering more then basic costs (ie. teeshirts etc.)
  • Shopify has also not asked for anything in return for this ongoing support
  • Venues do not get their logo on the website

Mentors:

  • We should try to maintain a 1 to 8 ratio of mentors to attendees
    • “1 mentor to 1 table” ~ Jeff
  • We’re averaging roughly 10 mentors each event (we’ll need to increase this if we plan to grow past 75 attendees)
  • We need to outline the different roles and responsibilities for an event
  • For each event a mentor will take on a specific “role” and is in charge of the corresponding responsibilities

Mentor Criteria:

  • New mentors must be championed by a current mentor
    • This was already happening, organically, but it should be outlined now
  • Must read and uphold the code of conduct
  • Must know some Node.js…

Content:

  • Jordyn will speak on “How to Google” (it’s a great talk and very relevant for beginners/intermediates)
  • Rich will speak about “Practical Node”, “Node in Practice” or “Node for Weirdos”

Swag:

  • 20 mentor teeshirts will be ordered with $200 worth of the cost being covered by Shopify
  • An “attendee” teeshirt design will be made available for purchase through tee-spring (i.e. a red on white variation)
  • the svg logo will be made more readily available for usage within the community

Website:

  • A “projects” section will be added to showcase attendees work
  • Information about the guided workshops will be made available
  • Photo gallery will be updated

Our 1st Anniversary:

  • We agreed to run our May event (ie. International NodeSchool Day) at Shopify
  • Put together a video of interviews with mentors and some attendees

Growth Ideas:

  • Split up and/or add new events
    • Office hours
    • Guided workshops
    • Self-guided Workshops
    • Hackathon
  • Open registration to unlimited ticket sales

Other Recommendations:

  • We should help set goals for attendees to work towards
  • We should try to gamify the learning or work done at our events a bit more
  • We should try creating our own workshoppers for our Chapter
  • We should have some talks focused around working through a specific workshopper
  • We should start recommending potential projects to work on
  • We should try grouping people with similar interests or what workshop they are working on
    • This may help people make new friends
    • This may help organize our efforts as mentors
  • We should try doing mentor-driven icebreakers at the beginning of an event
  • We should create slack channels for each workshopper to monitor/help people with specific questions/needs
  • We should scale back the amount of hangout/socializing time that is happening
    • We’re there to help attendees
    • We need to be very approachable
    • We can hangout and socialize at the end of each event
  • We should try adding some level of “cheesiness” to the event
    • Play up the “School” aspect
    • Potentially assign “homework” or “in-class group work”