Notes from 9/16/14 meeting

[hackygolucky]

Welcome page for New User Experience

As Mikeal mentioned: “A single "welcome" page. There are are 4 sections, each of which are very inviting, intended for people: new to programming, new to javascript, new to node, ready to dive deeper in to node. In the copy of each section we can tailor the language to fit the experience level of these users and, for now, forward them on to resources that are well tailored to their skill level. If we can't find acceptable resources, or we think we can do better, we can spin up specific projects that help people in that skill range.”

All up for debate! Ideas below:

Main(initial view)

• knowledge/docs/tutorials
• meetups
• cfp for upcoming events
• Node.js news aggregator **note that website should be SUPER simple to contribute to

@zwigby made a good point that we should use multiple mediums for this. Newsletters, blogs, Nodejs.org updates, etc. @thefoxis recommended the curation of these as important. If we are to use something like Twitter we could get into murky waters.

Welcome/Getting-Started-with-Node

• Node.js resources(curated list of how-to’s-- @rockbot had a great start with her crowd-sourced spreadsheet HERE

@jasonrhodes said "Would be really nice to try putting together some suggested course paths because even a giant list of helpful resources is p overwhelming for people of various levels" @hackygolucky thought that vetting some of the resources from @rockbot's list could be a great start.

• JS resources(ex: JS for cats, JS 101 workshopper)
• link to ‘mentors’
• nodejs.org API
• npm(how to npm too)

• nodejs freenode(and other friendly and accessible channels)

• ‘find your local group’ search

Mentors This was to be a section spearheaded by @rosskukulinski and @groundwater that involved a much more in-depth take on how we build a network of mentors, how you get to be a mentor, and how mentors/mentees find each other. This type of support is key in keeping our community personable and helping to raise each other up.

Events

• look at nodemeatspace under knode--community contributes upcoming events to calendar have a link to ‘start a meetup’

  We will need multiple curators/collectors owning this and keeping up.

• How do I start an event? resources.

--Nice to have-- Speakers in Node.js a place that local events/confs can look for speakers (from knode/nodemeatspace)

New notes/ideas from meeting: Nodeschool in-browser on the welcome for people to get to play with node while not having to navigate elsewhere. see: @lakenen Cameron Lakenen’s https://github.com/lakenen/browser-workshopper

Emphasize for beginners! They need the most hand-holding, lots and lots of info. Recommends still limiting what we put on the site because you can only consume so much without getting overwhelmed/confused.(Karolina)

Mentors Office hours in irc, video chat

Issues to file:

• Where do we want this to live? domain. -> https://github.com/node-forward/welcome/issues/2
• What goes on the homepage?
• What intro resources do we want to provide?
  • JS
  • Node.js
  • Q: How we do curate that?
• Mentors, office hours?
• Events: curator/collector of events and encouraging(mark as free vs. otherwise)
• Content: We need it and need to find owners.
• Contributing: create contributing.md

ACTIONS:

• Get in touch with Groundwater and Ross about Mentors
• Who owns what?
• Break out verticals of project and make sure content volunteers are requested for each.
• Make contributing as easy as possible but make sure there’s a contributing.md
• Next meeting?

Thanks to @jasonrhodes @thefoxis @fiveisprime @indexzero for attending and insight!

[rosskukulinski]

Hi @hackygolucky! I've been (still am) on vacation and trying to stay offline as much as possible. Sorry for missing the kickoff meeting

I'm in for pushing forward on Mentor program. I'll be back in the office by the end of the week and I'll ping you to get caught up.

-Ross

[hackygolucky]

Convo that @olizilla and I accidentally had outside of the repo(LOL sorry sorry):

My main thought right now is that from the talk on the github, nodeschool seems to be spinning up really well, and is totally in keeping with the ideas of a beginner friendly welcome to node, so maybe we should initially focus on providing more content / structure / assistance to that. The idea of local groups each fielding questions from the more active areas seems like a nice way to build communities and keep the work load manageable. The mentoring idea also seems like a natural extension to nodeschool.

Anyhoo, thanks muchly for co-ordinating...

And my response:

Continuing to push resources/excited folk towards @nodeschool is a top priority for me and I think the others with the welcome. While trying to prepare the workshops section of EmpireNode coming up, we had even considered a section of less-structured workshop that would be Hack Nodeschool and get people contributing to what is an already stellar lineup with help-in-hand on doing that. I hadn't considered this project to be something that would glomm onto nodeschool.io only because it is such a force in and of itself that the scoping may not be what is intended. Though, I hadn't asked :)

We had this discussion in the whiteboarding session before, and I think the idea was to absolutely feature nodeschool as THE way for people to play with node. Even so much as us trying to figure out how to run the workshoppers in-browser on the 'Welcome to Node' so that those who aren't comfortable with command-line can get a quick go at it. The overall intention of the project is to create a central place of resources for those newer to node because discoverability is a real problem. Curated paths for trying node or getting a little further with it. Documentation outside of core(tutorials, 3rd party fun).

[a0viedo]

Node.js resources(curated list of how-to’s-- @rockbot had a great start with her crowd-sourced spreadsheet HERE

I would link @rockbot's repo. And I would also consider adding awesome-nodejs.

JS resources(ex: JS for cats, JS 101 workshopper)

Something like javascripting?

[mikeal]

RE: mentors

Could we leverage the GitHub API along with the work NodeSchool has been doing adding users form their local NodeSchools to the repo for each event?

NodeSchool already has a lot of momentum around bringing in people to help each other, it would be a lot easier to work with them than try to build a new mentor community.

[hackygolucky]

I was thinking we could also talk to @nvcexploder more about what he's doing with the Hapi.js mentor program. It sounds awesome!

On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 2:38 PM, Mikeal Rogers notifications@github.com wrote:

RE: mentors

Could we leverage the GitHub API along with the work NodeSchool has been doing adding users form their local NodeSchools to the repo for each event?

NodeSchool already has a lot of momentum around bringing in people to help each other, it would be a lot easier to work with them than try to build a new mentor community.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/node-forward/welcome/issues/3#issuecomment-60527096.

[mikeal]

Perhaps the mentorship stuff should be its own effort and welcome should link to hapi's mentorship program and, eventually, this broader mentorship program we're talking about building out.