Overall, I enjoyed last night's lab meetup. It was great that so many people turned out and that we could share site building tricks, development techniques and hurdles we run into when building sites in Drupal.
It was very disappointing though that we lost any time discipline and went on giving five presentations in the 2 hours between 7 and 9. No time was left for casual conversations afterwards for people who needed to head out.
And I was the one who broke the seal by giving the first over time presentation :(
If we want to have lab meetups that are constructive and informative for as many people as possible, we need to get a grip on our presentation timing. Otherwise we risk misusing people's time with topics they're not immediately interested in plus don't give them the time for personal conversations to ask the questions they came into a meetup with. That's the surefire recipe for keeping meetup attendency low.
In the previous couple of Lab meetups the presentation timing issue wasn't critical: we were mostly less than 10 people which allowed us to share our stories in a very organic way. But: as soon as we grow to an audience size like last night, keeping things nice and tight make it critical for the meetups to work.
Let's create a more effective and more fun culture of sharing and let's all work on this together. I suggest (once more): 5 minutes lightning talks for an hour, one hour time for huddling in groups after the talks.
What do you guys think?
Comments
Sounds good
I agree, although of course I don't want to see people cut off at the five-minute mark.
Also, for anyone in this group who has frontend web dev questions (CSS, HTML, JS) feel free to come by my forum at www.cssforums.org. I just re-launched it a couple days ago, so I'm trying to re-build the community that was there when I took it down for upgrades back in January. I wouldn't be at all opposed to adding a "Drupal theming" category to the forum either.
You'll sometimes recognize me at these meetings as the standardista blathering about compliance and accessibility, and CSS (with semantic markup) is far and away my expertise. Last night was the first time I attended a DC Drupalers meeting, and it was a very good experience!
I fully agree regarding
I fully agree regarding Alex's comments on time discipline. Asking people to self-limit to something like five minutes ought to enrich the experience for everyone, since each topic is generally much more deeply-understood when discussed in a smaller group setting. I'd certainly like to have had the time for a more in-depth discussion about security, be it a just dissection of Heine's blog post or more.
That said, I thought the topics last night were fantastic, and thanks to all who spoke. Hearing about install profiles and seeing ubercart was great. Hook_form_alter and jQuery are definitely useful things for just about everyone. It's a great space over at Affinity.
Sorry I missed it - question about the Buddylist module
two meetups in a row and I miss them - it is clear that I am missing out.
We are thinking of adding the Buddylist module to our drupal site - http://developer.broadsoft.com
I am curious if anyone has implemented this and could point me to a site where we could see this in action.
thanks!
One possible solution
I think that focusing on the length of presentations might be a bit of an oversimplification of the problem. I would agree that the initial concept that the presenter gets up to show the group should be something that can be explained in 5 mins. However, I actually like the digressions, where people ask questions throughout the presentation and we head off into unplanned areas. Some of the most useful information comes from those conversations.
Perhaps a practice that we can adopt is to have the presenter ask for a show of hands to see how many people in the group are interested in exploring whatever tangential topic comes up. If it is less than 5 people that are interested, then they can meet with the presenter during the mingling time at the end of the meetup. If a majority of the group is interested, we should certainly discuss the topic further.
Hear Hear
Drupal meetups tend to be more interesting when members of the group have ample time for discussion. I recommend specifying an agenda for each meeting, limiting it to 60 minutes, and having a general session at the end where people can talk.
M