PROPOSAL: Manage growth

[kaniasty]

Note: See guidelines and details about making proposals and the decision-making practices. You can also see other proposals in this repo's issues.

Why

We are proposing this because the number of new people coming to hack night seems to continue to grow, and can be a challenge for project managers/members to deal with. There is an element of lost time in welcoming new people every week, most of whom do not come back.

How

Measure success in more than one way:

• Revisit the emphasis on quantity vs. quality of meetups
• Focus more on recruiting people who return and get value out of participation rather than people who come once
• Figure out how to take some pressure off projects so that work can be accomplished faster
• Include project leads in overall meetup strategy
  • Define the value that we WANT attendees to get (Is it hands-on training, networking, gaining independent coding proficiency?)

Resources

https://blog.bizzabo.com/20-kpis-to-measure-event-success (I would replace "Customers Aquired" with "Long Term Attendees" or something like that.

Proposal History

2020/02/04

1. Proposal issue made with 'proposal' label and other relevant labels. ~Was posted to slack (with end date, voting chart, and link to this issue), and post was pinned to the channel.~ (needs to be posted to Slack)

[plocket]

I like the main idea here. I think it might do better broken up into individual items so that we can talk about what specifics to consider with the core team. I also think we have some items that we proposed and decided on during the initial workshop that fit into some of what this proposal describes and that we already intend to bring to the core team:

1. 9 (don't market as a learning environment)

2. Rethink our decision on #6 (Don't market to other skill-based meetups) and how we could make it work for us.

3. 7 (have new members join projects in the second week) which I'm going to propose we discuss more because I have concerns about engagement and thoughts on how else that can be handled.

4. 2, #3, & #4 (templates and knowledge management examples) might apply here too as that's been helping a lot in some instances.

5. 8 (a proposal for regular meetings that include the core team and the project leads)

Items listed in this proposal that I think aren't already proposals or decisions:

1. Quality vs. quantity of meetups - is this suggesting fewer meetups? Fewer new members of 'better quality'? If the latter, is it addressed by the recruitment items above (#9 and #6)? Or are there more specific suggestions?
2. Define the value that we WANT attendees to get.
3. Implement KPI assessments for long term attendees.

I think these should each be discussed as distinct strategies to pursue with specifics of how to accomplish them and measures of success, though I do think they fall under the umbrella that has been named here. What are your thoughts? Have I missed the mark on the intention of this proposal?

P.S. I hadn't thought of measures of success and it'd be great to have ways to measure how well our strategies are or aren't working. I have no idea what we'd measure, though.

Final note - this hasn't been posted in Slack yet and it'd be really useful to have it there so people can give their initial votes on it and open up discussion.

[de-la-viz]

Thanks for the proposal, Eva! I particularly agree that if the project leads were more included or at least better informed of the overall meetup strategy, it would help us propose and/or implement solutions to mitigate the issues that we face (may it be inside our team, together with other project leads or with the core team).