johannhof
commented
9 years ago Great writeup Finn, thank you.
I have to say the groups always feel very diverse and are very friendly. Cool to see the numbers are very good (obviously it's just a trend but it's already way better than most tech events, including those I organize).
The number one problem that I almost always face when mentoring people new to Node at Nodeschool: There is no good way to get them up and running in a few seconds (or even minutes without taking over their computer).
The installers from the website are crap, mostly because they get file permissions wrong. nvm is a good tool but complicated to explain. I usually go with nvm but it adds more overhead and people mistake it with npm, which doesn't help to convey that node is super easy to use.
It would be great to find a way to get a simple, clean, bug-free installation of node and npm on peoples computer.
stryju
I missed doing a write up on our past events. So I am going to do one for the last 6 events.
After having a great NodeSchool Berlin event during jsfest.berlin at WikiMedia in September 2015, we decided that we wanted to establish a recurring NodeSchool meetup. WikiMedia was not able to host a regular meetup, but thankfully Project A with @stryju offered to host a monthly NodeSchool at their office fitting about 30 people. They were also nice enough to support us with food (pizza and wraps!) and drinks.
While we had quite a few mentors at the WikiMedia event, we started not to have specific mentor tickets for out meetup. Usually there are only 3-4 specific mentors at out meetup for 20-30 learners. This was generally enough, since we also tried to foster peer learning and pair programming. This often needs a nudge from the organizers. I usually try to identify learners doing the same workshops and bring them together to solve their problems.
At the beginning of the event, I always say a few words and show a few slides. I remind everyone about the Code of Conduct at first, which is generally well received. Then I usually ask these questions:
Then I show which workshoppers are best for the different groups of people. I often recommend jsforcats, in case we have someone who is a total beginner. I recently noticed that many people don't get how to use a workshopper at first, so I think in the future I am going to show to everybody how to do the first javascripting exercise.
At the last few meetup I started doing introduction rounds. I think they are helpful so that learners can see who is doing similar stuff. I always do this quite restrictive to make sure no one is telling their life stories to the group. The rules are: Say your name and what you want to do today in two sentences max. Then I start with: I am Finn and I'm here to help you with Node and JavaScript.
I use the introduction to identify people who seem less experienced. Then after the introduction, there are usually a few of these people, who need help with installing Node and starting the workshops. Those are the ones, we try to help first.
Then we then usually larn and hack from 7pm to 9pm.
Something important I learned at the last events: Reaching out to networks for women is quite effective in improving the gender ratio. At the 5th event I started tweeting to accounts like RailsGirls Berlin or Berlin Geekettes and asked them for a retweet. At our last meetup we even had >70% women attending, which is a huge improvement considering that we had meetups with only 1 out of the 30 participants being a woman.
Here's a graph I created using tito-gender-ratio-data. It's the estimated percentage of women who signed up for our last events: