Reflections on 6 months of Collab Cafe

[sgibson91]

We have had 6 months worth of Collaboration Cafes now and here are some reflections.

Caveat: When I reference "low attendee numbers" below, this is not intended to mean that I think people who should attend the meeting are not, but rather that our community is on the smaller side. My personal experiences with Collaboration Cafes come from The Turing Way which is comparatively larger and hence naturally the number of people who attend such events is larger.

Attendance and Breakout Rooms

We are usually few numbers and often everyone wants to participate in most if not all the conversations topics. This means we tend to default to a linear agenda, rather than managing breakout rooms. However, when the agenda has been busy/attendance has been high enough to warrant breakout rooms, there has been good feedback about the structure.

Proposal: Update guidelines in the documentation that we default to a linear agenda, but breakout rooms are encouraged in situations where there are a lot of agenda items to get through and higher attendee numbers.

Time block

We acknowledged up front that a 2 hour block would be a large time commitment. Combined with relatively low attendee numbers, it is often not necessary to use all this time. I think this puts a lot of burden on facilitators and makes it a little intimidating for others to take over the responsibility.

Proposal: Reduce the time block of the event back to 1hr

HackMD Structure

In an effort to facilitate the breakout rooms and ensure notes were captured from the parallel sessions, the HackMD has become a bit confusing.

Proposal: Simplify the HackMD structure - suggestions and feedback appreciated!

Actions Points

• [ ] Add an amendment to the blog post detailing the changes (we often point people to this so it should stay updated)
  • https://blog.jupyter.org/online-collaboration-caf%C3%A9-launch-jupyterhub-team-meetings-to-become-more-collaborative-spaces-b713edadf15
• [ ] Update team compass docs
  • https://jupyterhub-team-compass.readthedocs.io/en/latest/meetings/collab-cafe/index.html
• [x] Restructure the HackMD
  • https://hackmd.io/@sgibson91/jupyterhub-collab-cafe

[manics]

My experience from other collab cafes is that it helps to have an advance topic circulated in advance, but keep the option of spontaneous discussions open. For example, if we were to pick a topic (e.g. "High availability", or "The future of mybinder") and advertise that on Discourse I think that would attract quite a few people.

The downside is you need commitment from at least two facilitators, one for the topic room and one for the general room.

[sgibson91]

I have restructured the hackmd a little ahead of our next meeting