This was the pilot episode, hosted at Skimlinks' office just north of Old St. Being the first session nobody quite knew what to expect. As people turned up, we chatted about what we'd like to get out of the evening.
As advertised, this was an un-catered event attendees were welcome to bring or order their own food and beverages. A few people had eaten before they arrived while others ordered the traditional tech meet-up staple: pizza.
After a bit of discussion we wrote up some of our ideas on a whiteboard - this was intended to help people coalesce into groups.
When the pizza arrived people continued to chat about their projects - Greg told Tim about how he'd been trying to contribute to the turtle module, not knowing that Tim is a Python core contributor. This lead to Tim and Greg spending their evening working on a related ticket.
Given a face-to-face environment to collaborate on our projects, some of us went old-school, scrawling on notes on primitive sheets of dead tree - while much of open source goes on on-line, there are still merits in getting together to meet with your collaborators.
While some people formed into small groups to work together, others chose to find temporary solitude in which to concentrate. Giving the space to work apart helped to make the interactions that did go on easier and more organic.
At the end of the evening everyone discussed what they had done, some of the discussion was not only interesting, but also informative - people who had not been working on a project were able to contribute towards its ongoing direction by offering criticism and support for proposed implementations.
The following links are some of the output from the evening:
- Tests for the turtle module
- Naomi's blog post on teaching python
- Éléonore worked towards a talk on NLP
- Al and Sandy put together and started a backlog for Romaine
- Dan and Matt put together OSX installation notes for Pygame Zero