Thinking about returning to in-person/physical workshops

[cybergrrl]

We have had companies get in touch and ask if we started in-person workshops again and if we wanted to use their space. And we have had a lot of conversations about this over the last weeks. Obviously, we are not gonna do this without an overall decision by the codebar organisation as such but we think it might be interesting to have some conversations about this with the other chapters and see how they feel and what their situation is. Below, I will summarise some of our thoughts and concerns regarding the issue. Overall, we are really keen to be able to meet in person again but there are a lot of issues to consider.

pro return to in-person workshops

• attracting new coaches: As other chapters, too, we have had difficulties attracting coaches since we went virtual. but we need to have a wider coach base in order to be able to match students with appropriate coaches. we do have to turn coaches away sometimes, despite not having enough coaches, simply because we cannot match students' needs with coaches' skills
• being more welcoming to newbies/beginners. We have seen a real change in who is attending our workshops since we went virtual. We used to have lots of beginners and people who were just starting out on their journey into tech but these days, we mostly see returning advanced students working on projects (not exclusively but definitely the majority) Also, having more beginner students, we believe will make this more attractive to more coaches as well :) (to be fair, some of our coaches are now also not local but to a much lesser degree than is the case with students)
• in-person meet-ups are great for networking and getting to know local people and companies. also to keep codebar as an institution connected and in touch with companies.
• some companies are already keen to have us back
• we all yearn for actual human connection
• pizza! - not only is it tasty and nutritious, it also attracts coaches like honey does bees ;)

pro remaining virtual

• not everybody is happy or ready to go back to indoor meetings - not everybody has had two vaccines yet
• at this point in time, we may not actually have a local student base anymore. almost all our regular attendees are from elsewhere (as far as we know) - we might have to do some publicity work before returning to in-person workshops
• one of our organiser team (me, in fact) is not currently based in brighton anymore and not sure if she can commit to being there in person for every workshop. (this situation will change at some point early next year) The solution would be to recruit another organiser, however, with our student base now being mostly not local, this is not as straight-forward as it used to be.

hybrid?

• one idea was to alternate between in-person and virtual workshops but it seems likely that this way we would not be able to get any coaches for the virtual workshops as we fear they will mostly decide to skip the virtual week in favour for physical workshops. but hard to tell.
• another idea is to have in-person workshops with an option to join virtually. so a coach/student could attend a physical workshop and get all the benefits of that but for the actual workshop, they might work with somebody who is not physically present

We think we should and will ask our students and coaches about what they think about all this. however, we are also aware that this is a somewhat flawed method to gain insight because as i said above, our student base is not actually our local student base anymore. And it would be good to keep the ones in mind who stopped coming or never started coming because of going virtual.

It would be great to hear what other chapters are thinking.

[KimberleyCook]

Great topic to discuss tonight.

[biggianteye]

One year on, a number of chapters are doing in-person events again! 🎉