document all the things

[bevacqua]

Right now it seems like every new chapter that gets started, including our own, has to go through the process of asking stuff around.

• How do I take signups? Google form? Tito? Eventioz?
• Where do we buy stickers? Bulk discounts? What image should we fork? How do we format it?
• Should we charge? How much? Why?
• How many people per instructor?
• How long?
• How often?
• Which workshoppers?
• Beer? Food?

Anyways you get the gist. There's an established, canned answer for pretty much every question in this list, but they're not documented anywhere. It'd be nice to have more documentation.

[greelgorke]

i think many of the answers depend on the location, present culture and local orga taste. here are mine, Hamburg, Germany:

• How do I take signups? Google form? Tito? Eventioz?

we're via Tito atm. The features of this service is nice, and we hope, that the taste of a ticket will lower the no-shows rate a bit

• Where do we buy stickers?

in germany i guess @fgnass took care of it

• What image should we fork? How do we format it?

we have used https://github.com/nodeschool/nodeschool.github.io/tree/master/images/make-a-sticker

• Should we charge? How much? Why?

we didn't, at least not for the first time. We have enough sponsoring to do it for free. And we are not comfortable (enough) to handle money. If there will be a need for that, i'd rather make an organization to back it up first. Germany thingy.

• How many people per instructor?

we reach out for 1:5 ratio, especially because over the half of attendees have interest for JS beginner session.

• How long?

2+5 hours, Beginners First. But it depends on the format. I guess 2-3h at eve work

• How often?

for now i haven't thought about it yet, but i guess 2-4 times per year, may be with mixing cooperations (OpenHackSchool is there too)

• Which workshoppers?

any, but depends on interest and available mentors. But everbody could just choose any workshopper

• Beer? Food?

yes

[bevacqua]

So my point is not so much that I don't know the answers to most of these questions for myself (I do), The point is to document this somewhere and point people there when they're starting to organize a chapter.

[greelgorke]

yes, i understood. my point is that such a documentation might be of more or less use depending on the location etc. i think http://nodeschool.io/host.html explains a bit and there are writeups from other meetups too

[greelgorke]

and this : https://github.com/nodeschool/nodeschool.github.io/issues/15

[max-mapper]

i've written the majority of the copy on the website as well as the existing organizer guides. The suggestions in this thread are great but it'd be even more great to get some PRs to the guides/website.

The website is just static html (plus our new translation json files for non-english translations). It should be pretty easy to get running locally: https://github.com/nodeschool/nodeschool.github.io

For stuff that doesn't belong on the website we can use this very repo (https://github.com/nodeschool/organizers), currently its just a readme but perhaps someone wants to take a stab at adding a couple new files?

[mcoquet]

Coming from the perspective of a local organiser/mentor I can say that what I found most useful with every step so far was the GH wiki from this repo. I'd say using that has the lowest barrier to entry in starting that documentation process.

Just to further the discussion: this sounds to me like a great FAQ for organisers?

[martinheidegger]

Should we charge? How much? Why?

For some reason I always tell people: "NodeSchool is all volunteer based, free and completely open-source!" It think running it like a regular "school" would put a lot of pressure on the materials to be of "higher than volunteer" quality.

[Sequoia]

I'd like to do this too. I have some notes & resources (slides, feedback I've received, etc.) that are not strictly necessary but might be help someone get their workshop up and running.

Proposal

Start using the Organizers wiki to collect resources & info for running a successful nodeschool workshop. What's on the nodeschool.io website is good too, but it's brief (which is also good :smiley_cat:), wiki could be a good place to collect longer-form info.

I propose wiki over readme/PRs because

1. Those take longer to process
2. Navigation is built in to wiki

[Sequoia]

Some of this is addressed here: https://github.com/nodeschool/discussions/wiki/ Would probably be useful to migrate to organizers so discussions can stay focused on helping people with nodeschool lessons. I'll take a whack at this later.

[martinheidegger]

@Sequoia You did a heck of a job here! What is the current status of it though? I think there is a loss of overview.