Re: Q to both: facilitating meetups (was: Question for Chris: organising more meetings?)

[Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org>]

Dear Martin,

> In what ways do you see Debian itself being a bit of the rust on the
> cogwheels making organisation harder?

Could you elaborate on what you mean here? I wouldn't want to misinterpret
your query and slander Debian unnecessarily — after all, a gentleman is
defined as someone who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally…


> What could be done from the side of the project to
> improve/facilitate the organisation of meetups?

I think there are lots of ways we could improve the meetup process.

Publishing a battle-hardened "HOWTO" to run a BSP would be one angle I
would look into — many people simply feel that organising such meetups
is beyond them or they simply become overwhelmed at the start of
thinking about it.

I'm not claiming that organising a meetup is straightforward or
diminishing the effort and stress involved, but the more unknowns that
are removed from the process the more likely we are to see grassroots
volunteer efforts.

Highlighting that there is a benefit to a meetup, however small, would be
a part of this too as many DDs might only have interacted with DebConf,
an enterprise clearly orders of magnitude above the typical BSP.

Even promoting fortnightly social meetups that are more — how can I put
it? — "IPA" than "ITP" would be really beneficial to the project.


Regards,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      lamby@debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
       `-