We had our second network meeting this week and had a really productive discussion about ways for staying in touch and sharing knowledge, and how to run future meetings. Read on for more!
Actions
Just want to know what to do next?
- Join the email discussion list
- Join the chat space:
- Vote on your preferred regular meeting slots
Staying in touch
After discussing a few options, we decided to try out several methods of communication as a community and see what works best for us; if something languishes unused we won’t be too precious about shutting it down.
Email discussion list
The current mailing list is one-way broadcast-only, which is useful as far as it goes but doesn’t allow for conversations, or for community-members to share interesting articles, job opportunities, etc. more freely, so there is now a discussion list for you to join.
Chat rooms
We now have a private-ish chat space that you can join in two ways. NB. Both options for joining take you to the same set of rooms.
We can add more rooms to that as needed for discussion of particular topics; maybe job opportunities? Python? Workshops?
Reference material
Both of the above are quite ephemeral, so we also decided it would be useful to have a wiki-type space where we can all contribute links and resources for long-term reference. Since we already have a GitHub organisation set up for the network that currently holds this website, we’ll expand our use of that space. Ianthe and Mike volunteered to set that up, so there will be more news on that soon.
Future meetings
We’re going to try setting a regular timeslot at the same time & weekday each month to make scheduling easier. There was a general feeling that UK afternoon times would work best (with the added bonus that it will be at a reasonable hour for more timezones), so please indicate your general availability/preference for weekdays and times in this poll (make sure your timezone is selected before completing it).
We also agreed that it would be nice to shift the focus from logistics to actually discussing, well, data science, so we will try out the Lean Coffee meeting format for the next few meetings, and have a separate “business” meeting in September for anyone who wants to come back together to talk more about strategy and planning for the network. I’ll poll separately for the business meeting time.