Ideas for next few months of Code for Seattle

ideas.md

Rename to Open Seattle.

The goal: create a more diverse membership. We'll still be able to stay a Code for America brigade.

Partner with a local non-profit that can act as fiscal sponsor for 501(c)3 status

That will be a much stronger relationship for supporting our local projects & events, and we'll still be able to receive support from Code for America.

Recruit 2-3 more lead organizers.

The goal: distribute responsibilities so they're not just on a couple people.

Create working groups.

The goal: give people a more meaningful way to get involved.

Possible working groups:

• diversity & digital equity
• government technology
• community outreach
• education & documentation
• design & user experience
• transportation & urban planning
• news & community media
• neighborhoods (maybe even a working group for each neighborhood? maybe based on demand)

Switch to 2 Thursday meetups per month.

The goals: avoid burnout, reduce costs, plan around other Thursday events.

Hold smaller hack days focused on specific projects & other more spontaneous events.

Small, focused work sessions rather than weekly general interest meetups. This can include events for specific working groups.

Take down discuss.codeforseattle.org.

Nobody uses it.

Adopt github repos/issues for discussion.

It was effective for io.js and works well for nodeschool.

Cool!

Comments:
Working Groups - would meetups be focused on a specific group, would there be structure around the groups, what sort of structure would help people interested topics feel like they were getting something valuable out of joining the group?

Smaller hack days Sure. What support would open seattle provide for these?

Discuss / github I think for non-development community, the github flow is still a bit confusing. For inclusiveness it would be great to have something like hackpad ready for the less tech-steeped community.

Working groups: Yeah, we'd need to work on that. And it might be somewhat different for each group. We'd want one or two people in each group to be coordinators that help define those things.

Smaller hack days: I'm imagining these would be small groups of people focused on a specific project or working group. Like when Working Washington proposed the minimum wage calculator project, maybe we would have kicked that off at a Saturday hack day that runs 1 to 5 p.m. instead of a Thursday meetup. So open seattle's support would be working with stakeholders, procuring space, promotion, at least light snacks/drinks but maybe not a meal. Wait this is basically like how seanetmap development started?

discuss/github: That's my concern, too.

Rename to Open Seattle Will this still be a Code for America brigade?

Switch to 2 Thursday meetups per month I like this idea, at least for the summer since attendance will likely be down. It would be nice to open up our Thursday evenings for other meetups, and the weekly general meetings are usually unproductive because there are too many projects at once.

Smaller hack days: I like the current calendar, like DiscoTech and Electric Sky. But how would this work for ongoing projects? Would something like "Hey Duwamish Hack Day at South Park Library" be an event?

discuss/github How will the "non-development" community provide input? Forcing Github on them doesn't seem unreasonable. I like the hackpad idea too.

We should also talk about holding an outdoor meetup or hack day. Maybe we can get funding for a hotspot router/modem?

Renaming: Yep, it can still be a brigade.

Smaller hack days: The Duwamish hack day you describe is exactly the kind of thing I have in mind. Or maybe a documentation sprint for civic tech projects, or a Seattle LocalWiki editing party, or a user-testing session for a project, etc.

Discuss/github: Yeah, I've been onboarding non-technical people to Github for the purpose of using issues as discussion forum & bug tracker, and that's been working out fairly well.

Outdoor hack day: So much yes.