I wrote the beginnings of something and struggled with the mission statement a bit, so I thought I'd read the others. When I read @vendion's I threw mine away, I love the concept of "growing a stronger community". I tried to build a different picture of the schedule so I didn't copy everything from him, but this mission statement is mostly a heavy edit of his. Many thanks @vendion :)
Growing Chattanooga's Developers and Creators
Chadev helps grow a stronger tech community in Chattanooga by sharing knowledge and ideas in an open environment.
Growing a stronger community That core idea, plus the history and origins of chadev, points towards a group trying to surface all the other groups. We don't want to do everything, with the amount of groups in Chattanooga we don't have to. We already surface a lot of other events, but there's a big difference between listing a bunch of events on our calendar and actively encouraging the community to take advantage of all of the groups. We should strive to surface and invite people to everything we can, as well as we do with the weekly lunch. That lets us have a busier month without doing more planning ourselves.
Due to a focus on the overall community, a typical month becomes much busier.
- Every other Wednesday - Carbon Five Hack Night
- 2nd Thursday - Big Data
- 3rd Thursday - Drupal Meetup
- 4th Wednesday - Art/Dev
- Thursdays - Elixir Mentor Group
- Thursdays - Chatt*Lab
- 1st Tuesday - Powershell
And more that don't state repeating dates on Meetup:
- CodeXX
- Data Science
- Wordpress
- Python
- ChaJS
- Papers We Love
- GDG GigCity
Our schedule:
- 1st Thursday - Presentation
- (One of: someone we've walked through the speaker curriculum, a talk that has been polished for a conference, a bigger speaker invited to give an early version of a talk. If we had enough sponsors, maybe this week has a budget attached to it?)
- 2nd Thursday - Social Event
- (Something designed to get people to interact)
- 3rd Thursday - Community Presentation
- (One of: What we do now, lightning talks, or inviting another local group's presenter to re-give a talk that might have broad appeal.)
- 4th Thursday - ?
- I ran out of ideas, and I didn't want to just steal @juzten's idea. A social lunch is good. A workshop would be fantastic, but is likely too much work.
If our focus becomes tying together all of these groups, it becomes a very high priority to sort out our calendar and figure out how to more tightly integrate that into what we do now. That means being prepared with slides for the events of the upcoming week. Doing a better job of surfacing and then discussing events (before and after) in Slack. Become the place where people go not just for events, but discussion of the events. I think that starts by finding videos for events that have them. Finding related articles. Allowing discussion as well as facilitating discussion. With our events, polish and document how we do things. Then offer those things to other groups. A "how to livestream" guide. "Best meeting locations in Chattanooga".
I'm sure @cavewoman, @juzten, and @vendion have a better handle on this since they run/participate in multiple events but it feels like the overlap between groups is fairly small. We don't want to be an "intro to tech" group or a general dev group, we want to be the overlap between all the groups. Contacting all the meetup leaders and figuring out how we can support them would be a good start towards that.
Like @johncotton said, we should organize responsibilities so no one burns out: that includes other group leaders. The Powershell group is about as far from my wheelhouse as you can get, so there's no way I could make that happen.. but there are things we could to to make it grow. They meet in the same space as us, but they livestream via Skype, for example.