Thanks for organising! I had a great time, I’d love to see more of these events. Maybe you could circulate a Google Doc beforehand to help people brainstorm ideas, comment on each other’s ideas, and indicate interest in working on ideas. You could prepopulate it with ideas you’ve generated as the organisers. That way when people show up they can get started faster—I think we spent the first hour or so choosing our idea.
(Btw—our BOTEC calculator’s first page is at this URL.)
I think this is a great idea, thanks for the feedback—I completely agree we want people to be able to hit the ground running on the day. I would imagine groups are most effective when they’re formed around strong coders, perhaps there’s a way we can work that into the doc.
One thing we’re considering is an ongoing Discord server, where people could see ideas/projects/who’s working on what, etc. The idea would be that the server would persist between events, and move more towards having ongoing projects as above. I think this could potentially solve some of the cold start issues, but I am also hesitant to ask people to join yet another Discord server, and it’d probably need to reach a critical mass of people in order to be valuable. Having written out this comment, I think we will likely start it and push to get it to a good size, and if not we can re-evaluate.
Thanks for pointing out the bad link, I’ve corrected it now!
Thanks for organising! I had a great time, I’d love to see more of these events. Maybe you could circulate a Google Doc beforehand to help people brainstorm ideas, comment on each other’s ideas, and indicate interest in working on ideas. You could prepopulate it with ideas you’ve generated as the organisers. That way when people show up they can get started faster—I think we spent the first hour or so choosing our idea.
(Btw—our BOTEC calculator’s first page is at this URL.)
I think this is a great idea, thanks for the feedback—I completely agree we want people to be able to hit the ground running on the day. I would imagine groups are most effective when they’re formed around strong coders, perhaps there’s a way we can work that into the doc.
One thing we’re considering is an ongoing Discord server, where people could see ideas/projects/who’s working on what, etc. The idea would be that the server would persist between events, and move more towards having ongoing projects as above. I think this could potentially solve some of the cold start issues, but I am also hesitant to ask people to join yet another Discord server, and it’d probably need to reach a critical mass of people in order to be valuable. Having written out this comment, I think we will likely start it and push to get it to a good size, and if not we can re-evaluate.
Thanks for pointing out the bad link, I’ve corrected it now!