irc-meetups

IRC Meetups

Tantek: I had the privilege of sitting in on one of the WordPress weekly IRC meetups yesterday (20060426). They organize it around a wiki page: http://codex.wordpress.org/IRC_Meetups

I like their format. Decide on topics beforehand on the wiki page, then during the meetup go through the topics, take notes, resolve issues etc., and after going through those topics, go through anything else anyone wants to talk about.

What do people think of a weekly microformats irc meetup? Would you attend?

If there is interest, perhaps we can start brainstorming here.

i have been part of two Microformat IRC-Meetups, one for hCalendar and one for the Citation microformat. Both were extremely useful. Getting everyone together to hammer out questions quickly is much better than using the discuss list. -Brian

• Any microformat IRC Meetup should be open to the public. Everything that has been done so far has been extremely transparent, from the Wiki to the Mailing list. The IRC Channel should be the same.

• Ideally, a meetup should have a set start and end time. This will prevent discussions going one for 3-4 hours. Some people can't afford that much time, so if it is declaired a 1 hour meetup, then it should be as close to that as possible. If dicussion is too much for a single hour, it should either be picked-up at the following weeks meet-up or taken to the mailing list.

• Some people have also proposed "Office Hours", the meetups would best be served if there were NOT questions like "Can some one look at my hCard and tell me what is wrong?". Those sorts of questions are best brought-up at office hours. Whereas, meetups are designed to over come outstanding issues with Implementations, Speciifications, conferences, presentations, Announcements, etc.

• Because Microformat implementor are spread all over the globe, i would suggest a different time for each meet-up. I know consistance is best, but by changing the meetup time different people might be able to attend. Alot of people would not be able to sneak away for an hour if it was during the work time, and it is always a work hour for someone around the globe.

• I also like the idea of a single topic for each. This would avoid getting bogged down in talking about 'ideas' or random issues.

• I'm not sure how the WordPress folks work, but a nice 'write-up'/overview of the meetup would be nice as well. I know the IRC chats are logged, but a quick summary and conclusions of the meeting would be helpful written-up by a pre-decided member of the meetup.