Members

[mattburman]

Just an idea I figure I'd throw out.

What if in addition to the teams section from https://github.com/HackSheffield/website/pull/10, there is a members section too (probably separate pages but the important point is that it gets rendered somewhere).

This could also be configured in a similar way to teams, maybe an org team per year? So "joining" the society would then be via GitHub! Might have to tweak permissions some depending on how it's all set up right now.

This would be a great way to intro people to GitHub in first year, and get them involved in the society at the same time. They would join uni, maybe go to some initial GitHub workshop where they join the organisation and submit their first PR to configure their profile on the website. How cool would that be?

I welcome everyone's thoughts @HackSheffield/committee @boardfish @HackSheffield/organisers

[boardfish]

Yeah, I'm totally behind this! We could even get a similar thing going to the Campus Experts course wherein there'd just be a link to join the org, and from that point on they're part of the society.

[gregives]

It's a cool idea! I can think of a few problems though:

• What would define a member? At the moment, we have some people signed up on the SU website and the majority of people are just on our mailing list; it could just be anyone from UoS who joins on GitHub.

• Is there any advantage to displaying our members on our website? The members themselves know that they're a member, and non-members won't really care. If we had a lot of members it would be good to show sponsors though.

• It will be very hard to get people to sign up this way unless they come to a workshop about it, and I don't think we would get many people interested.

Thoughts? I'll bring this up in the meeting tomorrow.

[boardfish]

Obviously it'll get a mention tomorrow but here's my thoughts:

• The definition of a member when it comes to most societies is just that they've paid for a membership. The distinction is that contributing members actually, well, do things, and that's a very different number from those that actually constitute our members. I'd say that we could show membership as a statistic on the website, no need for users' details.
• Internally, members could use GitHub's People list for the organisation as a point of reference for contacting others if necessary. I'd maybe suggest showing a sort of gallery grid of our members' profile pictures, allowing the viewer to hover over them to reveal their details if necessary.
• I doubt it - it's as simple as giving them a link, if we do it how Campus Experts did. When I was at GH Universe, Joe brought it up in conversation and suggested that I take part, so it was as easy as going to the link and joining the organisation from there.

[mattburman]

@gregives was there any thoughts from the meeting?

• I would say currently the definition of a member isn't that clear from a members perspective. Like there's probably different definitions of a member. "Signed up with SU", "Came to a Hackathon", things touched on by @boardfish
• I don't necessarily mean on the homepage but just a place that exists that people can link to if they want to show that they are a part of something cool. "Hey look, I'm on the website with all these other people". There are other benefits too like being able to see a more visual representation at a glance (for organisers, sponsors etc). And rendering implementation could be different to /teams touched on by @boardfish (and maybe rendered differently in different places on the website)
• I'd like to hope that the desire to add themselves would exist somewhat outside of workshops by word of mouth. "Look at this, I'm on the HackSheffield website #hacked", "omg how did you do that?", "Look I'll show you - teaches about GitHub and maybe PRs". Workshops would be seeds for the initial people that would maybe spread by word of mouth. The level of engagement requirement isn't that much like @boardfish said if they don't want to do a PR they can still be on the website just with less info about them like twitter details or title (configured via PR to config repo).

[mattburman]

I might try out a similar workshop format at HackMed

Not rendering teams in an org, but submitting a PR to a repo to modify a config file used to render a list of GitHub users

If anyone wants to come to see how it goes feel free

[boardfish]

I had an idea just now that might take a lot more in the way of implementation but I'm interested to see how it would work. Let's say we create a database of events we go to or host, or a repository for each one. HS members would then be able to make PRs and write bits about what they did in a file that looks something like this:

- github: boardfish
  guestlog: I had a really great time at HackSheffield 3.0 working with some first-time hackers!
- github: mattburman
  guestlog: Pauline's art was cool!

And for each of those we render something like this:

We start out with an icon for each hackathon they've attended, and when each is clicked, their commentary on it expands out.

(Forgive the horrible demo, for some reason the bs4 snippets in Vim are still on alpha2 despite my PR)

[boardfish]

The way we structure that in terms of data is something like this:

| hackathon
+- icon.svg
+- guestbook.yml
+-| projects
  +- submodule for each project

[mattburman]

BTW, I tried out the workshop format at HackMed and it went really well! Really good feedback 👌 This was to a room full of many people who had never coded before so I think it would work even better with a room full of CS students or CS students just starting.

Data repo: https://github.com/mattburman/hackmed-people

My code repo to render a list of people in the data repo, a fork of the original hacky asf teams repo (and still hacky asf) https://github.com/mattburman/teams

It renders http://hackmed.mygit.club/ which is archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20180312174605/http://hackmed.mygit.club