Meetup organi­sation

Published On: 12. Dezember 2019|Categories: Tech|
meeting_organisation

For the intro­duction of Inner­Source at Europace we relied on gathering a group of people interested in the topic. While most of the discussion is designed to be remote-first with all issues being discussed in an asynchronous way we also set up an internal monthly Inner­Source meetup. That meeting is open to each and everyone for attending. Meeting dates, location, and agenda is posted in advance:

  • In a GitHub issue dedicated to the parti­cular meeting in the gh#innersource project,
  • On the Slack channel with the same name as the GitHub project (slack#innersource),
  • As a calendar invite to those attending regularly and to those who parti­ci­pated the last time.

The meetup is designed to be remote-friendly with dial-in options provided to parti­ci­pants.

Prior to the meeting parti­ci­pants are encou­raged to share discussion items in the meeting GitHub issue. Often these are being turned into individual GitHub issues — it’s not unheard of that issues that origi­nally were submitted for discussion in the meeting could be resolved asynchro­nously before the meeting takes place.

We try to start each meeting with a brief check-in so that people get a chance to be mentally in the meeting instead of clinging to whatever it was that they were dealing with right before or will have to deal with right after.

Depending on how many discussion items were collected before the meeting there’s a brief time window to collect discussion items at the beginning of the meeting.

Depending on the amount of discussion items identified, either we go through them in random order or we prioritize them according to how many people in the group are interested in each (giving each parti­cipant three votes they get to select the items that are most interesting for them).

The goal of the meeting is not so much to end up with hard and fast decisions. The idea is to get people back on the same page, give time and space to exchange best practices, as well as provide an oppor­tunity to share lessons learned and experi­ences not only on the record but also off the record.

To allow others who couldn’t make it to the meeting to parti­cipate a protocol is generated. It lists every­thing that was discussed (except for cases where parti­ci­pants wanted that infor­mation to be off the record) with names of indivi­duals stripped except where needed to under­stand context. This summary is posted in the meeting GitHub issue, the link to that issue is posted back to the Slack channel, and every­thing starts from the top.

In order to make meeting organization easier all steps, including the list of regular parti­ci­pants are stored in a checklist of the gh#innersource GitHub repository.

Written by Isabel Drost-Fromm Open Source Strategist @ Europace