About a week ago, I blogged about our need to involve the community in new ways on Medium, proposing “Chapters” – local meetups with the idea toward
- Bring people together in local forums to discuss developing standards
- Create a ‘safer’ and ‘easier’ place for lesser skilled developers to learn with mentoring
- Get help reviewing both standards and human documentation around them
- To enlist help in looking at/reviewing and developing prollyfills and tests with an eye toward the standard
- To ask introduce people to new technology and get them to try to use it
- Most importantly perhaps, to help figure out a way to coalesce this feedback and information and feed it back into standards bodies to manage noise and channels productively.
In this time, we put together a pilot on short notice in Burlington, Vermont (US) and last night, we had our first meeting at the University of Vermont (UVM) – 20 people turned out, including: A W3C Team Member, Darrel Miller who drove all the way from Montreal, UVM 5 students and numerous professionals with varying interests and skills. UVM’s CS Department graciously sponsored food as well. I just wanted to take a few minutes and record my own thoughts about what happened, as this is a pilot we hope to emulate in other parts of the world – it’s worth capturing to make those better.
First, I’m fairly introverted and not especially social in real life – I hadn’t expected to be ‘speaking’ as much as just facilitating getting people organized into some groups and helping discussions get rolling. In retrospect, it’s fairly obvious that I should have expected to do a lot more organization on the first night. Some people really didn’t know a lot about standards, the interests and skill levels were very diverse (that’s a great thing), it wasn’t clear to some what the goals were (not such a great thing), etc. Such a diverse audience turned out to be a little rougher than I imagined – I think if I were going to do it again, I’d plan to have a half hour to 45 minutes just to introduce things and then hope that’s all you need, but be prepared for another 30-45 minutes worth of questions. In our case, despite a few attempts, I didn’t leave the front of the room for the entire 2.5 hours, which seemed to me like it must have been painful to the audience. In other words, don’t expect a lot of concrete discussions as much as organization, goal and process agreement, information trading the first night. Also, tell people to bring laptops and make sure there is wifi in the room that they can access… whoops.
Despite the hiccups – I’m hopeful that people weren’t too bored and return, maybe even bring a friend. The good news, even afterward, it seemed that there was genuine interest… Pleasantly, I got a few communications and a hand full of people who stuck around afterward to tell me that they are excited to be involved – so the group will go on, it remains to be seen how the next few will go, but I expect good things once we start digging into it.
If you were in attendance last night and have any thoughts you’d like to share for posterity or have thoughts/advice to others setting up a similar group, feel free to share in the comments.
briankardell 