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Core/Chapter-org: Why are you (not) motivated? #370

Open martinheidegger opened 8 years ago

martinheidegger commented 8 years ago

I am not sure of how to ask this question to @nodeschool/core and @nodeschool/chapter-organizers and I am sure the answers will be diverse but:

Are you steadily working on NodeSchool?

(Hold events, improve the homepage/github issues, write tutorials, etc.)

if (thingsGoingWell) {

If your thoughts are nsfw. please feel free to write a private message to my github email address.

RichardLitt commented 8 years ago

@martinheidegger Can we have some context on why you're asking this? Should I respond here, using this template?

martinheidegger commented 8 years ago

@RichardLitt I am asking this because I think I have a gut feeling about this but I would love to have some real information for broader discussions about where to go next. You can respond however you feel like.

denysdovhan commented 8 years ago

In my chapter everything is going well. But mostly we have problems with sponsors and money.

What keeps me motivated? It may seem quite naive, but I just love that people like it. They ask me when will be next event, what can they help.

Uncomfortable period: here it is. We have to move our chapter to the new location. Currently we don't know where next, but are looking for a good place. Also on the last event we had not so much members. Maybe because workshoppers don't provide a complete learning path (I heard that from peoples).

andrenventer commented 8 years ago

Hi Martin.if (thingsGoingWell) {

} else {

}

On Sat, Aug 6, 2016 at 10:11 AM, Denys Dovhan notifications@github.com wrote:

In my chapter everything is going well. But mostly we have problems with sponsors and money.

What keeps me motivated? It may seem quite naive, but I just love that people like it. They ask me when will be next event, what can they help.

Uncomfortable period: here it is. We have to move our chapter to the new location. Currently we don't know where next, but are looking for a good place. Also on the last event we had not so much members. Maybe because workshoppers don't provide a complete learning path (I heard that from peoples).

— You are receiving this because you are on a team that was mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/nodeschool/organizers/issues/370#issuecomment-238012120, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AI3KruRSKVwv02UPz-njsqP0FN4NeE8Tks5qdEGcgaJpZM4JeHrD .

RichardLitt commented 8 years ago

Are you steadily working on NodeSchool?

No. I helped organize events a couple of years ago - in SF, and then I hosted two in SouthEast Asia while traveling - but I haven't prioritized it recently. I do read most of the issues for the nodeschool organization on GitHub, but that's more because I subscribe than anything else, and I don't help all that often.

if (thingsGoingWell) {

} else {

I don't have a community where I am right now that I am actively involved in that is doing NodeSchools. I live in Cambridge, MA - I know that there are some node events going on, but I'm not really involved. This is more my fault than anything else. I run Somerville-JS (which means choosing a place to go hang out once a month), and go to BostonJS, but that's it for now. I could get more involved, but I don't know how much bandwidth I have.

I also, frankly, just don't interact that much with Node right now. I don't really work on webapps anymore, and I feel that the small CLI stuff I do and the random JS packages aren't really all that relevant to the greater node community. I don't see running a NodeSchool as useful, for me or anyone else, because most Noders want to build webapps, and I suck at that right now.

Not really? I can reach out to Nodeschool people here if I really wanted to host and run one. At the moment, I am a remote worker, so I don't have a space or anything, and the hassle of trying to arrange that might be too much for me.

On the GitHub organization, no. It seems to be pretty well handled at the moment. There could be a doc on how to use NodeSchool bot, but I just don't get involved all that much right now (again, priorities and time).

Nothing. I'm expected to pull some weight if I volunteer, and I feel that I haven't. I'm not upset about this - if I wanted to, I could.

I see a lot of drama on Twitter, and at various JS conferences, and I don't like getting involved. I've felt a lot of judgement over the past few years because of my particular set of perceived attributes I can't really control (ethnicity, sex identity, sexual preference, background, nationality, and education, among others), and that judgement has recently made me feel very unwelcome in several venues. It has been easier for me to back away from contributing to large conferences or places where I feel unwelcome than it would be for me to have an open discussion about it, especially against, in at least two instances, openly hostile participants.

So, did something piss me off? Not really. I'd say I've just been backing away from confrontation. This isn't just about being a white male, either; I'm not sure that me running a NodeSchool in third world countries really does benefit the local population in a non-colonial way, and I'm not going to run any more there until I think about the process more in depth. (Of course, I don't have this issue in Boston).

}

NorthDecoder commented 8 years ago

Martin, thanks for asking!

In 2014 a friend recommended that I teach to share some of the stuff that I know. It seemed like a bad idea at first, but then I thought that if the teaching only included people that were really interested and there were no mandatory deadlines, then I might be interested. So I searched the web for local interest groups and found that they are now called meetups. In my search to find a common language, I was surprised to see how ubiquitous Javascript had become, that there was no meetup here in Tacoma, and that I had around 15 people attend the first meetup. I have tried to host a meetup one Saturday per month since then with varying numbers of attendees.

We have switched between browser and node topics. At each event I ask what type of laptop each person is working with and what they have at home and at the office. The type of development system is really important for working with nodejs. A few attendees arrive with brand new company paid equipment, but many are working with older equipment that they are paying for themselves. The portable pads are so minimal we have had trouble with keys not mapping correctly on the command line. A few real hackers arrive with linux installed on an old laptop that has extra batteries wired to the outside. To be clear the batteries do not make one a better node programmer, but they do help improve the hacker status. To be relatable to attendees I have avoided working with the latest hardware upgrade.

That means working with a hand-me-down macbook darwin version 10.8. I have had trouble getting new versions of node with any package manager, so have used the binary downloads. I am writing an article about how to do that correctly, but am unsure that the directory ownership definition is correct, so I would like feedback on that; or any other issue with the article.

On the other hand, the world does not care what works on my development machine as long as the public app works, and that it is properly backed and controlled with scm. So we include detailed discussion about git and how it relates to our example project, and we have experimented with deploying to several infrastructure-as-a-service companies.

Copying the tradition of some other meetups, I have scheduled after work no-host Taco Thursdays this summer as a way for newcomers to attend and decide if the group is friendly and worthwhile. The best part is that we get to converse with people who bring all sorts of knowledge to the table.

Being relatable to everyone is difficult. Each person that attends has a unique situation, skill set, end results goal, interest level etc.

There are a couple of other related meetups, Big Data and Tacoma Dev Ops that I have taken responsibility for leadership and those take time away from my ability to focus only on nodeschool. Oh, and most importantly, I have family, home and friends that need me too!

llkats commented 8 years ago

I co-organize NodeSchool San Francisco together with @jedireza. We meet monthly at the public event space at Mozilla SF.

SF is situated in a geographic area of great need and demand for code education. I know a few other chapters that have a similar demand, but it seems like not many do. Additionally, we have a great sponsor in Mozilla, who has hosted us monthly for over a year. We're absurdly lucky in those regards.

Since we don't have many logistics to handle from month-to-month, we've been able to explore things like having focused sessions (having a volunteer present on a topic or work through a workshopper with a group all together) or having mentor hack nights to work on the workshoppers themselves. I think the variety has helped us not get burned out or de-motivated.

if (thingsGoingWell) {

} else {

}

Hope this helps!

martinheidegger commented 8 years ago

@denysdovhan @andrenventer @RichardLitt @NorthDecoder @llkats I am keeping your responses here close to my heart, thank you for taking the time. I leave this issue open for a little longer in hope to hear more voices from @nodeschool/core @nodeschool/chapter-organizers

Fauntleroy commented 8 years ago

Well

What advice would you give to people that are not motivated?

What keeps you motivated?

Did you get over a uncomfortable period?

Yes—when I first inherited the meetup group, we hadn't had a meetup for an extremely long time. I basically needed to get everything set up from zero, but luckily I had a great deal of help from @llkats, @jedireza, and Isaac from npm. Once I got things moving we became able to have an event every month, and the regularity has helped things a great deal.

Not Well

What is missing?

A lil' more organization—I know what the SF chapter is up to because I speak to their organizers often, but I honestly have no idea what any of the other chapters are up to. Maybe lots of communication happens in the Gitter/issues, but I feel like I have no idea what the other chapters are up to.

Can we make your situation better?

Many NodeSchool workshoppers are in a state of disrepair. It'd be lovely if there were a concerted effort to go through and modernize workshoppers. We've had issues with things like text coloring being unreadable in CLIs, workshoppers not working in Windows, and some workshoppers not working at all.

What would you expect us to help you with?

Honestly I'm not sure... I've never thought of getting help from y'all. Aside from a few interactions at the beginning, I haven't talked to NodeSchool at all.

Did something piss you off?

Nothing directly related to NodeSchool.

jaybobo commented 8 years ago

I co-organize in Central Ohio with the lovely people of PairColumbus. We're a language agnostic group focused on pairing and mentoring so we don't have the same issues that other groups might have as nodeschool is just one component of many. Monthly attendance is 30-40 people.

if (thingsGoingWell) {

What advice would you give to people that are not motivated?

Be flexible. We widely vary from month to month, sometimes we work on nodeschool tutorials but we've also done things like...

What keeps you motivated?

Knowing that we're making people's lives better. We've had so many people new and experienced devs use our curriculum and that of nodeschool to get jobs or transition into different roles.

Did you get over a uncomfortable period?

No, not really. We embrace when things go wrong and pivot during the session or before our next meetup.

} else {

What is missing?

Not much just encourage others' creativity. There's opportunities to grow in the direction of wherever node and ECMAscript are being used across the industry.

Can we make your situation better?

Some workshoppers could be better, but other than that its great!

What would you expect us to help you with?

Don't stop. Keep fighting the good fight. 👯

DId something piss you off?

Nope not yet.

}

tdd commented 8 years ago

Hey all, sorry I'm late to this party. Vacation, baby boy and stuff 😉

So here are my 2 cents.

I run NodeSchool Paris, which tries to stick very close to the original NS format: full-day free event for anyone to try their hand at any NS workshop in a friendly setting, with mentors, etc. We're trying to have one every 6-7 weeks, mostly because this is as short a timespan between two absent Saturdays as my wife will let me get away with 😀

We're blessed with an easy road for every session:

  1. Mozilla Paris hosts us for free, providing a kick-ass venue with great beverage choices (in quantity, quality and variety: a lot is non-alcoholic, too, which is awesome).
  2. My own company sponsors the catering as a matter of course; sometimes additional sponsors help split up the bill (we provide high-end, diverse catering for 60 pax which comes in at a fixed €600 VAT-excl. every time).

What advice would you give to people that are not motivated?

Don't try and make it perfect; don't try and make it happen at too high a frequency; it's okay to take breaks; it's okay to delegate to fellow event runners; it's ok to resort to non-experts for mentoring: they just need to grasp the topics better, or at least no worse, than the other attendees 😉 Above all, make sure your event is social: it's at least as much about meeting the local community, incl. complete rookies/beginners, as it is about learning JS/Node.

What keeps you motivated?

The enjoyment of attendees, and the tons of ah-ha moments and eye-sparks we see in them across sessions. We're giving a lot of people (despite a strict 60-pax cap and not too many sessions) a great headstart / leg-up to JS, Node and other stuff, and that feels amazing.

Did you get over a uncomfortable period?

Fortunately, no.

What is missing?

  • A more homogeneous platform / subtrate across workshoppers. Esp. wrt translation.
  • More maintenance on workshoppers so they work on the latest Nodes (and on Win!) w/o glitches
  • More FR translations (our bad; Jérémie and I worked hard in early 2015 to g11n as much as we could, but we dropped that ball after a few months).
  • Better communication channels between chapters in nearby timezones / locations, to help build common events / dates / crossovers.

Can we make your situation better?

  • See above.
  • Also, tons of NS chapters are run through sites like Meetup.com / EventBrite. Providing an easy way for the main NS site to get their next events and info from the public API for these sites would be great; less duplication/maintenance effort for organizers.

Best,

gangstead commented 8 years ago

I co-organize @nodeschool/dallas with @samiconductor @prochafilho @michaeledavis . We've met monthly for 20 months now. It's going well but it's getting harder as time goes on.

if (thingsGoingWell) {

} else {

}

To sum up: Nodeschool/Dallas has been going well but we need a way to help keep workshoppers up to date. Opening PRs on repos that no one is maintaining is very frustrating.

thibaudcolas commented 8 years ago

Are you steadily working on NodeSchool?

Yup! I've been contributing to workshoppers now and then, now starting a chapter in the city I moved to.

if (thingsGoingWell) {

I think things are going well because I've set my expectations according to what I believe NodeSchool to be – volunteer run by people in their spare time, without much financial backing, open-source, "grass roots". That works well if/when people dedicate their motivation and energy to it, which is not always the case, nor everyone's cup of tea.

} else {

My ongoing concern with NodeSchool is that there isn't enough focus on the quality of the workshoppers. For newcomers, this means getting frustrated when a npm install -g <workshopper-name> fails on their system, not understanding the instructions of an exercice, not understanding the error messages.

I think what's missing is some quality standards for workshoppers to be featured on http://nodeschool.io/. I imagine this is nothing new though. Here are things I can think of off the top of my head:

I'll stop there. I think the NodeSchool core team is in a good position to address this by setting those standards and enforcing them, but ultimately it's up to the workshopper authors and contributors to make it happen.

}

Hope that's useful.

pcuci commented 8 years ago

Can we fork these workshoppers in NodeSchool org anyway and let the original maintainers upstream pull updates as they want, and viceversa?

An officially maintained fork for each workshopper

Happy to help out, having our first NodeSchool event in Montreal next week, and honestly, I'm scared about npm install -g <workshopper> not working for people, and failing on first impressions

On Wed, 7 Sep 2016, 03:55 Thibaud Colas, notifications@github.com wrote:

Are you steadily working on NodeSchool?

Yup! I've been contributing to workshoppers now and then, now starting a chapter in the city I moved to. if (thingsGoingWell) {

I think things are going well because I've set my expectations according to what I believe NodeSchool to be – volunteer run by people in their spare time, without much financial backing, open-source, "grass roots". That works well if/when people dedicate their motivation and energy to it, which is not always the case, nor everyone's cup of tea. } else {

My ongoing concern with NodeSchool is that there isn't enough focus on the quality of the workshoppers. For newcomers, this means getting frustrated when a npm install -g fails on their system, not understanding the instructions of an exercice, not understanding the error messages.

I think what's missing is some quality standards for workshoppers to be featured on http://nodeschool.io/ http://nodeschool.io/. I imagine this is nothing new though. Here are things I can think of off the top of my head:

  • Green CI tests for all exercices with their official solutions, in Node 0.12 / LTS and latest, on Windows / Linux, in every translation of the workshopper.
  • Translations possible by just adding extra language definitions (it's ok not to have any, but adding one shouldn't require refactoring)
  • Well-defined conventions/standards for what the README / presentation page of each workshopper should contain.

I'll stop there. I think the NodeSchool core team is in a good position to address this by setting those standards and enforcing them, but ultimately it's up to the workshopper authors and contributors to make it happen. }

Hope that's useful.

— You are receiving this because you are on a team that was mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/nodeschool/organizers/issues/370#issuecomment-245203947, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ACEb-aknvGjEkt7OJu-wW20bqAE7zobzks5qnm3UgaJpZM4JeHrD .

martinheidegger commented 8 years ago

Okay, first off: Thanks everyone. It has been great that you took the time to answer here. I am trying to pull out some time somewhere, somehow to write a wiki entry/blog post about my POV on all this.

Regarding the workshoppers: There is a "http://github.com/workshopper" organization that exists in order to not have even more repositories directly in the nodeschool. It contains many workshoppers. This organization is unfortunately no organization since there is no structure in it (everybody just somehow works as she pleases). It is possible - though I am not sure if its a good idea - to move at least those workshoppers to nodeschool.

martinheidegger commented 8 years ago

I collected my thoughts and published them on Medium: https://medium.com/@leichtgewicht/the-missing-hands-at-nodeschool-8999a90d33d1#.wzsbfg41b Thank you all for you great response.

iancrowther commented 8 years ago

I'm pretty late to this but...

I've been reading through the comments and articles (thanks @martinheidegger) and can very much relate the feedback regarding the overall leadership of Nodeschool and the ongoing maintenance of the workshoppers.

I've been digesting this with a couple of fellow organisers and am concluding that the project could be experiencing some "growing pains".

I am a big fan of the organisational structure in place and love the fact that it's been so successful without any form of formal governance. However, I do think we could (with care) look to make a lightweight plan to give everyone a steer.

I know I'm struggling to understand the projects objectives and think this could be an interesting place to start.

Any thoughts? Is it worth a PR?

martinheidegger commented 7 years ago

I published my account on medium if you are interested: https://medium.com/@leichtgewicht/introspection-of-an-open-source-effort-2b9577272898#.wbe17cm3f