Map out potential strategy for expanding global participation

[dev-earthhero]

So let's be honest, this whole COVID thing could be over in a month or two...or it could be the new normal for the next couple of years. At any rate, a fun monthly remote hack might just be something that a bunch of people around the world are interested in, and so I thought I would sketch out some rough ideas for how that might look.

Timezones

This is the most immediate issue, as starting at 9:30 UK time means that anybody in the US would have to be online at 5:30AM (at the latest, if they're in New York...LA would be 1:30AM), as well as anybody in Helsinki not starting til 11:30AM...or 8:30PM in Auckland.

It would be pretty cool to have the day "officially" start at 9:30AM in the world's first time zone (Kiribati, apparently), and then "officially" close at 5PM in the world's last time zone (parts of American Samoa and Hawaii).

Not immediately sure of the implications for the present central remote hack page...would be cool to show the regions of the world that are "participating" in the hack at any give time on the day in question...which would probably be easiest to do in pure javascript (just cause I don't know jekyll that well).

Comms

In theory, the idea of a rolling remote decentralised hackday might be appealing, and currently we have one central zoom "point of contact", but this could potentially be broken into different zooms depending on region. There's also the issue of making sure that the different zoom URL's get sent out to everyone, which is a bit trickier, given that a increase in number of zoom meetings would mean more complexity to manage (this this wouldn't necessarily have to be centralised).

It looks like the Zoom API allows for programmatic creation of meetings, so these could potentially be set up at the approximate start time and lunch time for every region, with the meeting codes sent to the slack channel maybe?

Slack is easy to scale, and different groups would probably set up their own slack groups (or discord/animal crossing/etc) anyway.

Tooling

This is where something like a "vote for your favourite potential project to hack on" or "choose a group to work with on the day" type apps might be helpful, to give a more social flavour, and maybe even put together people who don't otherwise know each other.

The current group has enjoyed putting together and sending around playlists during the day, so maybe that could be expanded to each region voting on a playlist that is their "official" playlist for the day.

...obviously the quickest way to guarantee that it gets decentralised is to try and centralise it...but having things like this as options might be nice for people who don't really have a strong sense of anything they'd like to work on, and maybe would just like to connect with other people on a saturday.

[lpmi-13]

Great ideas, Dev-Earthhero (who was DEFINITELY not me forgetting to log out of that account before posting this issue)!!!

[lpmi-13]

https://github.com/remotehack/remotehack.github.io/issues/41 is one way we could potentially address this...if we had podcasts publishing during the day, then people would be able to follow along with the various hackdays as they occur around the globe.