I’m very glad to see that this comment gathered a nice amount of interest!
As promised, I’d like to schedule a very relaxed “PureScript meetup” videocall for Monday 27th Apr at 20:00 CEST
(sorry for delay - I initially mentioned scheduling it for today, but that time slot didn’t fit me anymore)
A few notes about logistic, format, what to expect, etc:
everyone is warmly welcome to join!
if you’re interested follow this thread, as I’ll post the link to the call here shortly before the scheduled time
…and maybe like this post, so I get an idea of how many people to expect. I’m leaning towards using Google Hangouts, which has a hard limit of 10 people on videocalls. If we’re going to be more than that then I think we’d have to go with Zoom (which limit is 100 people), and I’d need to eventually prepare for that. EDIT: we’ll use Zoom, so we can fit 100 people on the call
the format is going to be very unstructured. I’m envisioning this as a very relaxed meeting between friends, so we’ll just get all together and see what we feel like doing - we can have short presentations (e.g. 10-15 minutes each) or if no one feels like presenting something we can just share how we feel about the world turning upside down, and chitchat about life, etc etc
if you’d like to present something then you can prepare in advance, and maybe PM me so I get an idea of the schedule (or just comment here!)
no worries at all if you’re not able to join, we’ll schedule another happening (or regular ones) if we find this nice
I’ll update this thread if I have any more thoughts in the meanwhile. Looking forward to see you all!
You might also consider https://meet.jit.si/ as an alternative to zoom. The haskell community on zulip has also decided to start doing a weekly call and that’s the platform they’re using. I’ve tried it out and it seems pretty solid! Just another option!
I appreciate the suggestion for alternative tools, but I recommend sticking with a paid, proprietary tool. I tested out what feels like all the Zoom alternatives, and they all were a little frustrating in some way or another.
When it comes to internet meetings, the following are important attributes for me:
availability on all platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac, and mobile. IME browser-based meeting apps are a little less efficient with system resources than installed apps, which harms users with older computers.
high audio and video fidelity
hassle-free for common use-cases, such as installing the app, sharing camera/desktop, intuitive controls for new users, and recording the meeting for archival purposes.
I didn’t choose Jitsi after my research. IIRC, the reason might have been that Jitsi had inferior audio fidelity or became un-synced from video. I think it also didn’t have options for configuring the video layout to see all participants.
I believe the primary reason people choose Jitsi is an ideological one, where FLOSS-style and privacy-supporting tools are important. It’s good to note that there are a few alternatives to Jitsi that meet these criteria, but aren’t as mature. While I personally value those attributes, I don’t know if it’s more important than a hassle-free user experience for our use-case. I worry a poor experience for participants would cause them to not want to join future meetups.
I ended up choosing GotoMeeting as my Zoom alternative, with Webex as a number two choice. It’s audio and video quality is excellent and hassle-free to use, though it does lack a few niceties of Zoom, like starting the meeting without the meeting owner present and some camera management options.
Wow, this was so great! I counted 25 people joining in total and we ended up staying in the call for 3h
I would like to express my gratitude to every single one of you for making it such a joy!
During the call we talked about making this happen again on a regular basis. Some of the open questions were:
should we have talks sometimes?
should we have a dedicated call to answer beginners questions?
how often should this be? Is “every two weeks” a good timespan or should we commit to “once a month” instead?
Right now I think we agreed that:
I personally don’t have the bandwidth to organize anything more complex than “let’s have a relaxed call and talk about anything really”, so if we’d like something more structured we’d probably need someone else to help with that (mostly to chase speakers around, moderate and schedule things).
I think we would be able to put together some small talks quite easily though, e.g. @kritzcreek offered to talk about building typesystems, and I could host some kind of workshop on the registry stuff and/or Dhall (or other things, feel free to ask).
Anyways if someone wants to talk about something please PM me or post here, and the same goes for helping with logistics
we can try having this every two weeks for now, so I’m going to tentatively schedule the next happening on Monday 11th May at 20:00 CEST
However, I’m a little bit unsure about the time. E.g. this works ok for EU people since it’s in the evening, but might not be perfect for people on American timezones (since they might be in other work meetings) and it’s definitely not good for East Asia (since they should be sleeping at that time). So, I’m open to suggestions about times that might work better for audiences in other parts of the world. Please follow up here
One proposal that was brought-up during our breakout room session is organizing working groups around some of the themes we discussed, such as:
Tooling
Ecosystem
etc.
It would be nice to review what everyone is working on in a particular area, and brainstorm ideas of what to do next. With some recorded meeting notes, we could even come out of these sessions with some sort of roadmap. I’d like to discuss plans for improving new-user experience in a breakout room during our next meeting.
Q&A for beginners with voice and screen-share would also be great to offer. When starting out, I could have really used some pair-programming-style assistance for clarifying topics that were difficult to even figure-out how to write-up for Slack. This is my favorite feature of in-person programming meetups, and it would be wonderful if we could reproduce this online.
The breakout room feature seems like a genuine gamechanger for this kind of meetup, with the possibility to be really transformative. In particular, it seems to me to offer the possibility to make online event much more like an “unconference”, as Fabrizio was talking about at the beginning, that addresses several distinct community needs and yet is not diffuse and hard to follow. It also allows a lot more people to speak and ask questions.
I think yesterday’s format could actually be a good template with the addition of 1 short prepared presentation at the beginning. Like maybe a presentation that’s interesting to all but accessible to beginners, followed by breakouts that cover at least the three most common-but-sort-of-mutually-exclusive things that communities need:
answering beginner’s questions
discussing futures, technical ideas, papers
open chat that just fosters some community
It’s been my experience with online communities going back to the 1980’s and USENET that many virtual spaces gravitate to serving only one of these needs, to their eventual detriment. And if instead they have separate forums the time commitment becomes too much for the biggest contributors.
At any rate, i’m definitely willing to participate in a fortnightly or monthly call and to do my share of answering beginner’s questions and questions about my experiences in bringing FP/Purescript into a team and the challenges and successes of that.
Many, many thanks to @f-f Fabrizio for organizing and for all who participated.
However, I’m a little bit unsure about the time. E.g. this works ok for EU people since it’s in the evening, but might not be perfect for people on American timezones (since they might be in other work meetings) and it’s definitely not good for East Asia (since they should be sleeping at that time). So, I’m open to suggestions about times that might work better for audiences in other parts of the world. Please follow up here
I think it’s better that there’s at least some activity in the community doing an Unconference-like thing rather than one that tries to work for everyone and fails to accommodate everyone. If this time works best for EU, why not let that be? While I don’t want to segregate people based on time zones, I also realize that it takes someone to organize these things. Why not use this as a testing situation to create a model that people from other timezones can follow? That being said, I would appreciate it if those presentations could be recorded so that those of us who can’t be there can still watch it later.
Thanks to @f-f for organizing and @kayla for providing the Zoom! It was really nice meeting everyone and hearing about their various backgrounds and experiences. Looking forward to the next one!
We might also publicly note at the beginning of the call that we are “lurker friendly”. If people want to just watch and listen that is fine. Some gentle encouragement to turn on your camera even if you’re lurking would be nice, but of course nobody is compelled to do anything.
I’ve talked to Fabrizio and we agreed that it would be good to see if we can can adjust the next meetup timing so more of the interested PureScripters could join.
So please check all the hours when you would be able and would like to join the next meetup (on Monday 11th May):
So it looks like 21 UTC is the most popular time but that’s a bit late for me, so tomorrow we’re going to start at 20:00 UTC - feel free to join anytime (I predict we’ll stay on for a couple of hours at least).
I’ll post the link here shortly before.
