[Discussion] Planning your first ProtoSchool event

[terichadbourne]

@ProtoSchool/chapter-organizers
We'd love to hear about your experience planning and running your first ProtoSchool event, so we can learn from each others successes and challenges. What worked well for you and what suggestions do you have for others?

Dropping a few questions here to get you started, but please don't feel obligated to follow this format as you share:

• How did you get chapter members involved in planning (issue in your repo linked from the readme, etc.)?
• How did you advertise the event and determine who'd be coming (Meetup, Eventbrite, GitHub issue, Twitter, etc.)?
• How did you recruit mentors?
• What physical and technological needs did you have for the workshop (WiFi, power, tables near electric outlets, etc.)?
• Did you offer any food, beverages, or swag? If so, how did you pay for them?
• What ProtoSchool tutorials did you cover and how long did attendees need to complete them?
• What went well?
• What could have gone better?

I look forward to hearing about everyone's experiences!

Be sure to check out RESOURCES.md for lots of tips and assets, including instructions on how to request ProtoSchool stickers to give out at your events!

[terichadbourne]

@nukemandan Would you mind sharing some of your experiences from your first Denver event when here you have a moment?

[nuke-web3]

• How did you get chapter members involved in planning (issue in your repo linked from the readme, etc.)?
  • For this first one, there are little/no members... So I picked a time and place and see who would be interested. I have started other meetups this way, to great success most of the time! I am always delighted and surprised by who comes out of the woodwork when a new topic come up in the community meetups.
• How did you advertise the event and determine who'd be coming (Meetup, Eventbrite, GitHub issue, Twitter, etc.)?
  • Meetup. This is my primary medium to promote events. I have some twitter presence, and that will be something to use more as the group takes off.
• How did you recruit mentors?
  • I don't have any just yet, but as I run more events, I look for those that come with enough knwlage to help those that are new, and try and convince them that teaching is really exciting and rewarding. Most see this as a great opportunity to learn and grow themselves as well.
• What physical and technological needs did you have for the workshop (WiFi, power, tables near electric outlets, etc.)?
  • Laptop, Projector/LargeTV, WiFi, power cord and multi-plus/surge protectors.
  • Next time I want to play with a local swarm of nodes with meetup participants, so a router that we can all use locally will be needed to make that easy for a private IPFS swarm.
    Did you offer any food, beverages, or swag? If so, how did you pay for them?
• What ProtoSchool tutorials did you cover and how long did attendees need to complete them?
  • Tried the basics, had people work a their own pace in an "office hours" type session.
• What went well?
  • sparked interest and people who want to come back and bring friends!
• What could have gone better?
  • Weather not blockin people from attending that day 😉 ... Next time!

[terichadbourne]

Thanks for sharing your experience, @nukemandan. I can't wait to see how everyone else's first events go!

[terichadbourne]

@ProtoSchool/chapter-organizers In our new RESOURCES.md file, you can find assets and suggestions to help with the ongoing work of managing your chapter repo and events. It includes:

• Instructions for ordering ProtoSchool stickers to give out at your chapter events
• ProtoSchool logo files to use in slide decks, Meetup listings, chapter websites, etc.
• Resources on how to effectively implement your Code of Conduct at live events

Hope you find this resource page helpful as you work on planning your first events and beyond!

[kk3wong]

@terichadbourne Thanks a lot for your work and support. We will host our next IPFS meetup together with introducing Protoschool HK chapter on February 26th, hopefully it will go as smooth. And I have sent a stickers request to both swaq@protocol.ai and swaq+request@protocol.ai but I didn't get any shipping tracking reply yet so just wondering if I can get it on time before the event's date.

@nukemandan Appreciate for your sharing and hopefully we will draw more interest from the crowd and we can share more with all the organizers here how we can improve for on going events later.

[eosArizona]

* How did you get chapter members involved in planning (issue in your repo linked from the readme, etc.)? I asked existing events/projects that use IPFS to add ProtoSchool as a side show. * How did you advertise the event and determine who'd be coming (Meetup, Eventbrite, GitHub issue, Twitter, etc.)? I use Gorilla Marketing techniques to advertise ProtoSchool as part of existing event. https://www.meetup.com/MakersOfPhoenix/events/258801147/ * How did you recruit mentors? I haven't tried to recruit them, they seem to volunteer. * What physical and technological needs did you have for the workshop (WiFi, power, tables near electric outlets, etc.)? I use whatever is available, improvise, adapt, overcome. * Did you offer any food, beverages, or swag? If so, how did you pay for them? I leverage the main event, but have sent email requesting IPFS stickers (we have a few shirts from IPFS) * What ProtoSchool tutorials did you cover and how long did attendees need to complete them? Haven't held formal event yet, but its a one-on-one thing initially, but will keep track of time. * What went well? We'll see. * What could have gone better? We plan to have a webpage to replace sending newbies to github.

…

On Tue, Jan 29, 2019 at 12:35 PM Teri Chadbourne ***@***.***> wrote: @ProtoSchool/chapter-organizers <https://github.com/orgs/ProtoSchool/teams/chapter-organizers> We'd love to hear about your experience planning and running your first ProtoSchool event, so we can learn from each others successes and challenges. What worked well for you and what suggestions do you have for others? Dropping a few questions here to get you started, but please don't feel obligated to follow this format as you share: - How did you get chapter members involved in planning (issue in your repo linked from the readme, etc.)? - How did you advertise the event and determine who'd be coming (Meetup, Eventbrite, GitHub issue, Twitter, etc.)? - How did you recruit mentors? - What physical and technological needs did you have for the workshop (WiFi, power, tables near electric outlets, etc.)? - Did you offer any food, beverages, or swag? If so, how did you pay for them? - What ProtoSchool tutorials did you cover and how long did attendees need to complete them? - What went well? - What could have gone better? I look forward to hearing about everyone's experiences! — You are receiving this because you are on a team that was mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#33>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AnNqYnNhZn7tKWh8W0Ba-nm3JePZsKx0ks5vIKKGgaJpZM4aYxwf> .

[DjangoPeng]

@terichadbourne I've discussed with @steven004 on this topic. We plan to host the first ProtoSchool event in Shanghai on Feb 26th.

According to my experience, I could give some advice:

How did you get chapter members involved in planning (issue in your repo linked from the readme, etc.)?

We discussed on WeChat which is the most general IM app in China.

How did you advertise the event and determine who'd be coming (Meetup, Eventbrite, GitHub issue, Twitter, etc.)?

We would use multiple channel to advertise our event. We developed a WeChat Mini Program named Event Assistant to post and manage our event. At the same time, we also take advantage of Huodongxing and Wechat group.

• How did you recruit mentors?

In the beginning, we would invite our trustable engineers and researchers. They would give talks on our ProtoSchool Event and attract other tech leaders into our community.

• What physical and technological needs did you have for the workshop (WiFi, power, tables near electric outlets, etc.)?

WiFi and power are necessary.

• Did you offer any food, beverages, or swag? If so, how did you pay for them?

Stickers and swags are attractive for developers on usual event. For larger event, like summit or after party, I'd like to suggest food and beverages. In that case, appropriate sponsorships are really essential.

• What went well?

We have set up a ProtoSchool Shanghai WeChat group with nearly 100 members. I believe the number would rise to more than 300 after our frist ProtoSchool event.

• What could have gone better?

• Regular online meeting for chapter organizers regionally/globally
• Some sponsors from community, such like stickers and swags.
• First-hand news of Protocol Lab, IPFS, Filecoin and so on.

Thanks for all your help on ProtoSchool community. I'm very glad to be one of you.

[jimcal]

@terichadbourne This is more of a question for you & Proto.School.

We are sourcing venues for our meetup, and one of the venues, which is also a coding school, ask us to include their branding as an affiliate partner in our communication. Would that be a problem for ProtoSchool?

Here is their word, verbatim:

At this point, instead of asking for monetary donations to use our space, we just ask that we are represented through your social channels, that you give us some visual representation such as adding our logo as an affiliated partner on your meetup page

We are still in the discovery phase, so no commitment has been made yet. Want to make sure this adheres to Proto School community guideline.

Thank you,
Jim

[terichadbourne]

Thank you for asking @jimcal!

ProtoSchool itself doesn't really have any partners. Even within our many chapter organizers, some of whom get great support from their employers, I view everyone as individual volunteers and community members, and chapter organizing doesn't create any sort of official partnership with ProtoSchool, Protocol Labs, or any of the projects we educate about.

That said, I think it's up to each chapter organizer to figure out how they will handle the finances of running events in a way that is free or very low cost to attendees, and getting companies or organizations to donate meeting space is a great way to do that. (I would of course ask you to use your best judgement and only work with reputable companies, but that goes without saying!)

What I would recommend is that you list this coding school as an event sponsor as opposed to a partner, and think of that relationship as applying just to the events that are hosted at their venue. So for example, you could add a "thank you to this month's venue sponsor, Coding School Name" to the listing for that month's event. Does that make sense?

[jimcal]

Yes, it does! We see this venue being geographically convenient, and we wouldn't mind having their name on our communication. I like your suggestion on listing them as Sponsor, and we thank you for allowing charter autonomy to build trust.

[jimcal]

Question for my fellow organizers:

What do you use to organize your local meetup?

I ask this question because Seattle chapter use meetup.com, and as many of you may know, Meetup is testing the fee model where for RSVP an event, an attendee would pay $2.

Would like to know if there are potentially similar concern in other chapter, and the least burden alternative for both community members and organizers.

[terichadbourne]

Great question, @jimcal! Meetup is great for discoverability and for events that meet over time, but I know the new pricing structure will be a challenge. Another one that's good for discoverability is Eventbrite, which is free for free events. Ti.to is another event ticketing platform that's also free for free events, but lacks discoverability because it's not a place people go to search for events in their area on a certain topic. I recently hosted an event on Ti.to and was able to set up terms and conditions that required attendees to agree to the Code of Conduct when registering.

If you were using Meetup exclusively for ProtoSchool events and appreciated it providing a little pseudo-website for your chapter, remember that your chapter repo on GitHub is available, either used purely as a repo or used to build a fancier chapter website using GitHub Pages. If you push to a gh-pages branch you will get your own website at https://proto.school/chapter-name.

[nuke-web3]

AFAIK if you have a pro account, this is a non-issue (for now) - if your meetup is IPFS only, consider getting on with https://www.meetup.com/pro/ipfs/ -- use the get in touch button to inquire there.

I would highly recommend as Teri mentioned, other ticketing / RSVP tools, but discoverability is a real issue with many of them. I am still exploring options... will report back if I get a good solution!

[zebul]

Summary of First Event by ProtoSchool Seattle Chapter 🙌
The goal of this summary is to help chapters organize their first event

Seattle Chapter Organizers
Kelsey Breseman (@Frijol) Jim Liu (@jimcal) Cameron Wheeler (@zebul)

How We Organized the Event
The organizers began meeting in February. We started by discussing goals for the Seattle chapter and developing a simple mission statement. Then we developed some OKRs to keep us on track (see below. still in draft stage).

Seattle Chapter Mission 📈
Support a community of learners and mentors building on decentralized web protocols.

OKRs
Organize Productive Events on a Regular Basis

• At least 1 meeting/learning event per quarter

Open Source Contribution

• Generate and publish meaningful content (videos, presentations, etc…) from each event and share with the wider community
• Generate meaningful feedback on ProtoScool tutorials at each event via GitHub issues

We met for a one hour lunch every ~month. At each meeting we set goals to be accomplished before the next meeting. We used trello to coordinate and assign these goals (i.e. create meetup.com page, find event venue, etc…). The first event date was set about one month in advance.

We Used the Following Tools/Resources 🔧📐

• Trello for task coordination
• Found a local coding school to donate meeting room
• Coordinated event via meetup.com– currently at 75 members
• Google Docs for doc sharing
• Coordinated sponsors: EDGI for meetup fees
  We also contacted Protocol Labs and found two team members who lived in Seattle. They attended to help with any technical questions about IPFS, etc...

How We Promoted the Event 💫

• Word of mouth (friends, etc…)
• Meetup.com
• Bulletin board at Code Fellows (coding school where event was held)
• reddit.com/r/ipfs

How We Ran the Event 🏃
The first meetup was held 4/25/19 from 6-8pm @ Code Fellows in Seattle

We provided beverages and snacks for people because many were coming directly from work. (low blood sugar is 💤)

Published event time was 6-8pm. Attendees began arriving around 5:50pm and trickled in until about 6:20pm, at which time we began the event.

We gave an initial ~5min presentation to explain ProtoSchool, Dweb protocols and an overview of the meetup. Link to Presentation Slide notes have details on what and how we communicated.

• What is ProtoSchool?
• What are Decentralized Web Protocols?
• Agenda
• Tutorials Overview
• Feedback & Bug Reports
• Getting Started with Workshop
• Resources
• Optional Social Time After Meetup

We then asked people to split up into groups of 2-3 and work through the tutorials together.

During the event we had a slideshow scrolling in the background with interesting information about IPFS, ProtoSchool and Dweb. Link to BackGround Slides

It took between 40-60 minutes for participants to complete all three tutorials (Decentralized data structures, P2P data links with content addressing, Blogging on the Decentralized Web).

Ways We Could Improve Next Time

• More content and more technical tutorials
  Attendees worked through the tutorials quickly. Several of the attendees commented that they wanted more technical tutorials.
• Nobody left early, but nearly everyone finished the tutorials– they stuck around in circles to discuss related topics (something we could facilitate more explicitly next time?)

Increase attendance

• 30 people RSVP’ed with about 20 attending
• Attendance demographics were: all familiar with code (if not necessarily usually Javascript coders, all were JS-familiar) and fairly diverse levels of familiarity with the decentralized web.

Real World Examples & Applications of Dweb

• Lightning Talks
• Coordinate with Protocol Labs and IPFS community in advance to schedule speaker on relevant topic

[edwardxpuzzle]

Hi, my company is one based in Guangzhou that has worked on Filecoin and IPFS for a long period of time. I saw the github page of ProtoSchool, and wondered how can we be enrolled to be a member like "ProtoSchool Guangzhou" and hold our ProtoSchool events?

[terichadbourne]

Hi @edwardxpuzzle. We changed our local leadership model in March, so we're no longer using our old chapter system. The new model is designed to make it easier to host either single events or a series of events as a part of a group you already lead, with a lower barrier to entry. Please see https://github.com/ProtoSchool/organizing to learn more about the requirements for ProtoSchool workshops and how to get started leading them.