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Let me start by saying how grateful I am to everyone who contributed to this event. From comment to code, your contributions were essential in shaping the success of the day, so thank you, thank you, thank you.
Did everyone have a good time?
From where I was stood it looked like everyone was having a ball.
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We felt it was really important to give each chapter an "international" feel and I think inclusion of the appear.in hangout wall achieved that superbly. Great shout [issue ref]
## What's it all about? Over the last three years, nodeschool has grown very much inline with node as a whole. Its had growth spurts and evolutions, but managed to keep its community feel and principles at its core.
International nodeschool day is an annual event aimed at bringing that community together and demonstrating how dedicated everyone is to the continued growth of Node. Nodeschool excells at breaking down the barriers to entry and leads by example on how to interact with the community.
Each chapter, large or small brings with it it own blend of energy and culture which effects nodeschool worldwide. What better way to show this than to hangout with a chapter on another continent and see first hand how things work.
It was amazing to see!
Being the inaugrual international nodeschool day, there really was no handbook to help us plan for this event so I will outline how events unfolded in the run-up to the day and how we all came together to deliver this worldwide event.
Before I jump in, I must re-iterate a common theme within the node community that tells us of how fiendly and interactive everyone is and how commited everyone is to keeping it that way. Oh how true it is! Things really would not have been so successful without the support and commitment of the wider community. Yes there was an organisational structure, but wow, so many people contributed, you only have to take a peek at the issues and commit logs to see how well supported this event was.
So it started with the the date! It's Always fun trying to lock down a date, however when Tim Oxley chipped in with details of CampJS the community slowly gravitated towards May 23rd. Coinciding with CampJS was logical choice as we wanted the day to chase the sunrise and Oceania is where the day begins.
Once we had a date, we needed to get chapters enrolled which started life as a google spreadsheet but quickly turned into a github issue with comments. Its amazing how quickly chapters got onboard and it was soon apparent that this was going to be big! In the end we had 43 chapters come online with more event running in parallel who just missed out on the Enrollment. Next year folks!
The biggest challenge in my opinion came next, with various contributors now engaged and steering, the project needed to communicate a common vision of how the day would unfold. We started to put together a participating guide and over the comming months constructed a really solid guide on how to get the best out of the day. This was a completely organic document, constructed and guided by what the comminity wanted to see from the day and proved to be a corner stone in its success.
Once the bulk of this guide was up and running, everything else came together pretty quickly. A [sticker] design was completed and the landing page was developed containing an awsome roatating 3d [globe]. May 16th was designated as an international hackday and used to help clear any outstanding issues, thanks PDX for leading the charge.
A key contribution worthy of note was the enrolment-scraper. We used this to parse the enrollment and event signup comments, and generate a schedule which was used to drive the 3d globe data and to delegate blocks of time to our international day "champions".
Each international day "champion" took resposibility for the needs of their designated chapters and put in a heroic shift to keep things moving. Please take a moment to thank them.
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As we drew closer to the event we closed enrollment and tweaked the enrolment-scraper to fixed any anomalies in the data. We setup and tested appear.in/nodeschool, communicated the social hash and promoted the Gitter chat room. Gitter and appear.in certainly proved to be stable products and I would certainly use them again.
We must improve the commincation around enrollment and be more specific with the enrollment parameters. When we started, we simply did not know what the requirements would be, and as a result ended up with a split process over two issues. This proved to be difficult to communicate with chapter organisers and resulted in us not enrolling around four chapters who ran events. If we missed you, please let us know!
We can mitigate against this next year by defining the process upfront and outlining the conciquesces of partial enrollment. We could define an issue template and a bot to notify users of missing data. This would allow us to simplify the enrolment-scraper and provide a richer schedule.
The landing page was not on a gh-pages branch which meant we could not link multiple pages together. The theory was to use branches for each year.
The Gitter chat room was central to inter-chapter communication so having each chapter organiser in this room before the event would have been a big help. We will definately do this next year. Is their an api for that?
The hangout wall was great, the only improvements I would suggest are to
As an international day "champion", preparation is king! In order to cope with a large number of chapters coming online in close proximity, create a local copy of your schedule, ordered and including contact details of each of your chapter organisers. Make contact around 15 minutes before and remind the organiser of any key points such as mini-film, attendee enrollment, inter-chapter communication, code of contduct and just to let them know you are around to help.
organiser
- chat to others
- read the guide
- enroll
Create a local list of your designated chapters including start & end times and contact details. Add each organiser to the international day gitter room and make contact 30mins before they come online to make sure they have read the guide, know about the film, the hangout, enrollment and know how who to contact if they are having issues.
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attendees
- we had asked each organiser to add each attendee to a github team. In hindseight this was putting on the chapter organiser too much and was quickly dropped in favour of a "Hello from [chapter]" issue in which each attendee could say hi. The benefit of this was the rollcall was distributed freeing up the already busy organisers and was a great 1st step for attendees who did'nt have a github account. By asking each attendee to sign up we got the added beenefit of Gitter which we used to good effect. We will parse the these comments and construct a global attendee lost which will be added to the website.
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Swag
- we have a sticker! this can be purchased form a number of vendors and aprat from growing the vendor list, needs no improvement. T-Shirts will be next years improvement. We had a T, but it came a bit late. We did not have it listed on vendors suitable for differnet global reagional (postage). I did love seeing individula chapters t-shirts and would love to see a hex bin kind of thing so we can buy the swag we want.
homepages
- I had the idea to put each year in a branch which just did not work. We ended up having two pages which were unlinked.
delegation - we need to get the timezone delegation sorted well in advance. We had a huge hole over the USA which inadvertantly fell onto an Englishman on vacation to run with. Oli & ?? we thanks you and your family for stepping up here. Luckily Rich and Ross were able to support Oli and between the three of them covered a difficult time block and close the day.
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code
- max suggested a make a chapter module which i really like. I think this kind of detail was a bit too much for the first event as we needed to get organised, however we have a year to make this "easy" to adopt
- alan shaw began working on high-five, a module to watch for step completion and broadcast it. We need to build this as I think it would be useful for more than just international day.
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stories from around the world? Oceania Europe South America USA
max hackday the code of conduct, organisational chart and a chapter schedule and just worked although flags or chapter logos would be amaze..
What did i get out of it? I really love being part of the open source world and it reminds me how to remain humble and responsible.