- How would you define your community?
New programmers in Edinburgh who want to develop their skills past the "intro to X" stage.
- How many people are currently in your community?
- How many would you like to be in your community?
- Historically, has the group always been about the same size? If not, what brought on that change?
The number of people my definition applies to is quite large — but there's no real community among them at the moment. I won't have too much input on that number, but what I do want to have an impact on is how many people are coming together to improve their skills. (And maybe by doing that, I will be able to encourage some more people to learn and participate and grow the community slightly.)
- What is currently available to people in your community to learn about tech?
- Are there meetups, seminars, online tools, office hours, hackathons?
I don't think there are many resources available to these people in particular.
Edinburgh has a lot of events aimed at teaching the basics to students — there are introductory Python workshops, introductory HTML workshops, etc. On the flipside, there are a lot of meetups aimed at people who already have a good idea what their doing and are focused on developing advanced skills in specific technologies.
There are a lot of online learning resources, of course, but I think (and have heard from others!) that the in-person social aspect is sorely missing in Edinburgh.
In an ideal version of this community, there would be a lot more local community events aimed at this sort of intermediate programmer.
- How accessible are the current resources in your community?
As I wrote above, I don't think there are a lot of resources available at all to people in this community. An approach that some members of this community might take is attending events that are aimed at skill levels a bit beyond theirs, and are maybe only marginally related to their interests. This sort of approach is a lot easier for some people than others though — it requires people to have the confidence to step outside their comfort zone, into an unfamiliar environment which is difficult to get an idea of ahead of time. It also demands a lot of effort on the part of those members of this community that participate, because there's not a lot of active encouragement and support for this sort of person.
- Are meetings held during hours where people may be working?
I think that the meetings that are available are usually held at quite sensible times. However, it's of course impossible to schedule anything at a time that works for everything — especially when targetting an audience of students who may have university during the day and work during evenings or weekends.
In an ideal version of this community, events might be held at varying times to allow everybody to have a chance to participate. The challenges to overcome here will be the limited time available to the organiser(s), and the difficulty that may arise in getting people to regularly attend an event that might be at a different time every week — in particular, I'm given to understand that non-regular event times can be especially difficult for autistic people.
- Is there childcare available?
No regular tech events of any sort that I know of in Edinburgh provide childcare. This would, of course, be a wonderful thing to provide if possible — though childcare is expensive and very likely to be beyond our means.
- Is your community made up only of computer science students? Are you OK with that?
I'd like the community to be as open as possible to everyone who's interested in tech. I think it would be sensible to aim it at computer science students, because there's a level of common ground there that would be easier to build upon and aiming at students might give us more acccess to the resources we need to provide the services this community needs. However, it's very important to me that as many people are included as possible, even those who aren't studying CS, or aren't students at all.
- Is your community open to other topics, or are their interests very specific?
We would be open to any topic our members were interested in — my goal here is very much to help people develop their skills in whatever way they want, rather than choosing a direction for them and leading them down it.
- Why do people get involved in your community?
People will get involved in this community because they will benefit from the friendly, supportive environment we will aim to provide. They will have the opportunities to make friends, develop their skills, and help others develop theirs.
- Are they students hoping to get a degree?
- Are they trying to ramp-up to get a job?
- Are they passionate about developing, regardless of their major?
Participants may be trying to learn skills to help them get their degree or a job, but ultimately I think the people who will participate are those who are passionate about learning about tech.
- What activities and goals can you set for your community based on their existing goals?
My main idea currently is to provide regular open workshop sessions where people can attend and support each other in their learning. I'm very keen to provide a collaborative environment rather than a student/teacher approach, since that's what I feel is currently lacking here.
- Where does your community currently gather?
- Is it an online-only group so far, or is there a place where people can meet?
- Is there parking, and if so, is it free?
- Is there public transportation available to and from meet-ups?
- Is the location accessible to those both on and off campus?
- How much does it cost to use the space?
- How flexible is the space for different types of presentations and meetings?
- How many people can it fit?
- Is there comfortable seating for all shapes and sizes?
- Is there water or snacks available nearby?
I think the community doesn't currently gather extensively, with the possible exception of people who attend the monthly student tech meetups provided by CompSoc.
In the ideal version of the community, there are regular physical gatherings of people so they have dedicated time to focus on socialising and developing their skills. Ideally, this would be at the central campus of the university — it's a great central location in Edinburgh that should be accessible to students and non-students (the University of Edinburgh is not a campus university — it's very much integrated within the city, all over). Using university venues would provide have many benefits — they already put a lot of effort into making sure people are able to get there and providing a variety of different rooms that could be chosen based on our exact requirements (type of event, number of participants, seating, etc.). If we partnered with a university society, we should be able to use the space for free as well. Water is readily available in most university buildings, and snacks could easily be provided through small donations or sponsorship.
If there was demnad, it might be possible to expand and hold similar events in other places, such as offices of companies that were willing to provide a space in return for some sort of sponsorship.
- How does your community get in touch with one another?
- Is there an email group, a GitHub organization, a Twitter account, a Facebook group, a chat room or channel?
Currently, it appears that they mostly don't. In future, though, I'd like to provide whatever online spaces our members wanted — this might be an email, Slack, Facebook or Discord group. Particular care would be taken to ensure that the online spaces were easily accessible to new participants.
- Could your organization benefit from one or more of those, or another way of communicating?
Providing online spaces would allow participants to access some level of the same support and community that was available to them in person. This would allow them to continue developing whenever it was convenient for them, and do so as much or as little as they were comfortable with, rather than being constrained by time and location of the physical meetings.
- How welcoming is your community to new people and new ideas?
Ideally, very! The idea of the community is based around encouraging new people to participate, and pursue whatever ideas they wanted in a supportive environment.
- What happens if there is a disagreement?
- Are there any policies or procedures in place, and are they documented?
- How will you personally handle it?
We will have a strong code of conduct that will apply to all interactions within the community, both in person and online. It will handle how to resolve disagreements and explicitly state forms of conduct which are unacceptable. One in particular that I can foresee being a problem would be bashing other people for their technical choices, which will be completely untolerated, since it can make people feel unwelcome, and put them off learning and participating all together. If there is a disagreement that the parties involved are unable to satisfactorally resolve on their own, I will personally handle it with reference to the code of conduct, and with priority given to ensuring that the community remains welcoming and inclusive to as many people as possible, especially those from under-represented groups who are most likely to otherwise face barriers, discrimination and discouragement when trying to participate in tech communities.