@Jesusbill I've added a 1 hour and 0 minutes before tweet to remind people. There's a scheduling feature in https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
I hope this isn't annoying for people - I think it's probably a good idea. Must really get shit together and cross post better to mastodon.
IMPORTANT: ping @duncan@JanF@Moult any other please chip in
1. It came under my attention that the 4th of April is the Catholic Easter, so Saturday that we have the meetup with Speckle is the Holy Saturday. I feel it would be better to move the meetup one week later (we have a little bit time as the announcement is not done yet) if and only if we run this my the speckle team and they agree. What do you guys think? My rationale is that some people may have problem following the meetup; sure with the pandemic this possibility is less than before but still, it could create some issue.
2. (Less important) In the last days I happened to use bbb for a couple of sessions and i feel it is a more applicable platform for the meetings. I think we eventually have to find a reliable solution. The current solution with a "native" screen recording doesn't look like one to me. Probably not sth to solve for the upcoming meetup but I would be very eager to explore two possibilities with bbb. Setting up our own server, or buying the support from one of the vendors (https://bigbluebutton.org/commercial-support/).
I don't think many people are fixed on the "first saturday in a month" rule yet, so as long as the Speckle team agrees, it should be fine.
I also vaguely remember we spoke about varying the meeting daytime, so that people from other time zones don't alwys have to wake up at four in the morning, should we do that as well?
@JanF for the time it could be interesting to know the time-zones of the members that are regularly following the meetups. We could even have a poll for the most "desired" time slots and base our decision on that.
1. @Jesusbill I also think you should look at moving it. I think we should also publish a full list of dates for the next 12 months and get a bunch of us looking at them for potential conflicts. @JanF yes, I would like us to look into this. I'm not quite sure how. I've been wondering about mirroring the time 12 hours sometimes. We need to think about where people are, maybe we should make a map from the supporters list ...
2. @Jesusbill the good people at https://bigbluebutton.webhostingzone.org/b have offered a good rate for us, but it's still 30-40 euro per month. I think that's too expensive for how little we would use it. I keep thinking that a pro hosted Nextcloud could solve a lot of these issues. Did you find a good solution to the recording issue for BBB? As far as I could see it was not so practical for recording anything but a lecture format. I couldn't see how to record the whole interaction.
Ok good news, the speckle team has gladly agreed, they also missed this "detail" for that date. @duncan I only participated in a couple of sessions but I will definitely check the recording functionality that you mention. In any case, should that be a solution we have to go with sth more than the "free" session, which has time limits and the last time did not even allow recording due to server overload. I agree 30/40 euro per month is probably a lot for our use, but I would still prefer to spend this to have a good reliable solution and piece of mind (which at the moment I do not have). Maybe we could have an OSArch server and build there our own instance of bbb? I know that Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com) for example has good prices, I could even offer this via Aether Engineering for now, depending on the feasibility and requirements.
Have to go now, but I will come back on this topic, I think we need to get informed of potential solutions and costs and then have a call to discuss this.
We need to think about where people are, maybe we should make a map from the supporters list
Yes but more importantly I would say of people participating or planning to in the meetups ...
In any case, a very nice idea, nevertheless, I recently saw that we are more than 1500 members registered!
What about this service? 8x8 Meet Pro. These are the guys making Jitsi if not mistaken and it looks like it costs 12 $/year. I can certainly get the first month for a dollar and have some tests.
Happy to have the date moved. Also happy for the time to fluctuate. The server that hosts everything right now is a Hetzner dedicated. Happy to put another service running on it which wont cost anything. Would be good to have another guy with sysadmin background look over my shoulder though as the bus factor is 1 right now. I'm not knowledgeable enough in video streaming to know the resources it needs.
Regarding the invitation to OpenProject for May's meetup, Robin Wagner has replied the other day, asking if we can hold the meetup during European business hours. Here is a part of his email.
It's great to hear that you are interested in OpenProject. Would you like to learn more about how to use OpenProject to manage projects or are you interested in understanding more of the underlying technology?
We have a webinar video that covers the first steps of working with OpenProject (which can be a good starting point): link to YT video.
Would it be possible for you to have the meeting during business hours during the workweek? We can then certainly schedule a session to provide an overview of OpenProject.
What do you guys think? I am kind of in the middle of yes and no :) , but the more I am thinking about it I am leaning towards a yes
@duncan to be sincere I am very much afraid of who is going to show up at 8 in the morning and on a business day, because a good portion I think of the audience is from Europe. Maybe I would say more sth like 15:00 UTC.
Edit: 8:00 UTC would be 9:00 CET which I guess could be ok, although a bit early-ish
From my own experience, recording is the most imporant part as whatever the hour / timecode, i often manage to do something else. I think meetings should not be only small event but allow further discussion to occur in "offline" way maybe through dedicated thread.
@Jesusbill my main reason for the time I suggested is that it is exactly 12 hours different from our usual time and it's early in the week, but not Monday. It's right at the start of my Danish workday, but I hadn't thought that maybe other countries in Europe start later. Moving the time and date will always mean fewer participant, people forget. Also it's easier to have a regular monthly space in the calender than check a different date often. But sometimes it can't be avoided or will help different people participate. I understand the logic to your suggestion @JanF but that only captures the wishes of the most active part of our current audience. I totally don't have the answer here, but it would be nice if we can find a durable answer to this question.
I think that "capturing the wishes of the most active part of our current audience" is what we want right now targeting maximum attendance (no?), so I would second the proposal to have a poll, perhaps not binding to comply but to have an idea.
@stephen_l I agree that recording is essential but as organizers looking to invite people to present I would like to have a "guaranteed" number of people that attend, especially if we are inviting people from more established organizations. I will feel very silly if we hold a meetup and only 5-10 people show up ... don't know if I should or it makes sense but that's the way I feel ... For the discussion offline I don't know what a solution could be, seems complicated because the presenter would have to be active to answer questions afterwards. If he is part of the community it could be more straight-forward, having for example the announcement thread act like a discussion thread afterwards, but if not, I find it difficult to implement effectively.
For the case of OpenProject and in general of projects well established, there are already online material and channels of communication for anybody that wants to know more; thus for these cases I see the importance in having a "live" presentation and "live" Q&A.
What if we organize two polls, one regarding the time of the meetup and a second regarding the day?
Happy to announce that for May's meetup Frédéric Beaupère ( @fbpyr ) will be presenting his work on 2 Blender Addons that rely on BlenderBIM:
ifc_void_data: Void data aggregation tool. overlays ifc models of multiple disciplines and combines data of interest for ProvisionForVoids.
rh2bb2rvt: Bridge to translate specific models from rh models into IFC for rvt.
This software is used daily in his current employment environment @ ERNE Holzbau.
I will be updating the wiki and the website calendar shortly and the official announcement here will follow about two weeks prior.
The Meetup will be held on the 8th of May, as I thought it is better to avoid holding it on the 1st of May, any thoughts or objections?
@gokermu without rush can you prepare this image, please? Thanks
@JanF no I didn't have the time to work on it.
We need two doodles. One for the day and one for the time.
But for the time I am not sure yet how it can be organized, I would avoid 24 "options". may be 12 or even 8?
I also think that we should have at least two votes/choices per person since I believe we want to evaluate two alternatives.
@JanF but why did you write "for the next MoMe?". These doodles would be to decide in general but not for the next one that will be done regularly at 20 UTC, unless of course there are objections...
Did you mean this by any chance?
@Jesusbill said: @JanF but why did you write "for the next MoMe?". These doodles would be to decide in general but not for the next one that will be done regularly at 20 UTC, unless of course there are objections...
Did you mean this by any chance?
Umm it waas a .. figurative speech?
No I just remembered there was supposed to be a Doodle and I wrote some words to accommodate it. I need more sleep, ha!
Comments
@Jesusbill I've added a 1 hour and 0 minutes before tweet to remind people. There's a scheduling feature in https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
I hope this isn't annoying for people - I think it's probably a good idea. Must really get shit together and cross post better to mastodon.
I've added some thought on running the meetings to the talk page https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=Talk:Monthly_Meetup it's mostly just for me, but I thought it might be useful for anyone.
IMPORTANT: ping @duncan @JanF @Moult any other please chip in
1. It came under my attention that the 4th of April is the Catholic Easter, so Saturday that we have the meetup with Speckle is the Holy Saturday. I feel it would be better to move the meetup one week later (we have a little bit time as the announcement is not done yet) if and only if we run this my the speckle team and they agree. What do you guys think? My rationale is that some people may have problem following the meetup; sure with the pandemic this possibility is less than before but still, it could create some issue.
2. (Less important) In the last days I happened to use bbb for a couple of sessions and i feel it is a more applicable platform for the meetings. I think we eventually have to find a reliable solution. The current solution with a "native" screen recording doesn't look like one to me. Probably not sth to solve for the upcoming meetup but I would be very eager to explore two possibilities with bbb. Setting up our own server, or buying the support from one of the vendors (https://bigbluebutton.org/commercial-support/).
I don't think many people are fixed on the "first saturday in a month" rule yet, so as long as the Speckle team agrees, it should be fine.
I also vaguely remember we spoke about varying the meeting daytime, so that people from other time zones don't alwys have to wake up at four in the morning, should we do that as well?
@JanF for the time it could be interesting to know the time-zones of the members that are regularly following the meetups. We could even have a poll for the most "desired" time slots and base our decision on that.
1.
@Jesusbill I also think you should look at moving it. I think we should also publish a full list of dates for the next 12 months and get a bunch of us looking at them for potential conflicts.
@JanF yes, I would like us to look into this. I'm not quite sure how. I've been wondering about mirroring the time 12 hours sometimes. We need to think about where people are, maybe we should make a map from the supporters list ...
2.
@Jesusbill the good people at https://bigbluebutton.webhostingzone.org/b have offered a good rate for us, but it's still 30-40 euro per month. I think that's too expensive for how little we would use it. I keep thinking that a pro hosted Nextcloud could solve a lot of these issues. Did you find a good solution to the recording issue for BBB? As far as I could see it was not so practical for recording anything but a lecture format. I couldn't see how to record the whole interaction.
Ok good news, the speckle team has gladly agreed, they also missed this "detail" for that date.
@duncan I only participated in a couple of sessions but I will definitely check the recording functionality that you mention. In any case, should that be a solution we have to go with sth more than the "free" session, which has time limits and the last time did not even allow recording due to server overload. I agree 30/40 euro per month is probably a lot for our use, but I would still prefer to spend this to have a good reliable solution and piece of mind (which at the moment I do not have). Maybe we could have an OSArch server and build there our own instance of bbb? I know that Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com) for example has good prices, I could even offer this via Aether Engineering for now, depending on the feasibility and requirements.
Have to go now, but I will come back on this topic, I think we need to get informed of potential solutions and costs and then have a call to discuss this.
Yes but more importantly I would say of people participating or planning to in the meetups ...
In any case, a very nice idea, nevertheless, I recently saw that we are more than 1500 members registered!
What about this service? 8x8 Meet Pro. These are the guys making Jitsi if not mistaken and it looks like it costs 12 $/year. I can certainly get the first month for a dollar and have some tests.
Happy to have the date moved. Also happy for the time to fluctuate. The server that hosts everything right now is a Hetzner dedicated. Happy to put another service running on it which wont cost anything. Would be good to have another guy with sysadmin background look over my shoulder though as the bus factor is 1 right now. I'm not knowledgeable enough in video streaming to know the resources it needs.
Regarding the invitation to OpenProject for May's meetup, Robin Wagner has replied the other day, asking if we can hold the meetup during European business hours. Here is a part of his email.
What do you guys think? I am kind of in the middle of yes and no :) , but the more I am thinking about it I am leaning towards a yes
Hey @gokermu any chance you could create the thumbnail for our next meetup #13 with this image?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CUfbL2TYfvo_rjsIn1LFq8e9Bn0vHUYr/view
@Jesusbill I guess we need to be able to accommodate different situations and time zones. I'm thinking maybe UTC 0800 on a Tuesday?
@duncan to be sincere I am very much afraid of who is going to show up at 8 in the morning and on a business day, because a good portion I think of the audience is from Europe. Maybe I would say more sth like 15:00 UTC.
Edit: 8:00 UTC would be 9:00 CET which I guess could be ok, although a bit early-ish
I quite liked the idea if voting for the time to get an idea what people want, it would be silly if we randomly pick a time nobody likes.
From my own experience, recording is the most imporant part as whatever the hour / timecode, i often manage to do something else. I think meetings should not be only small event but allow further discussion to occur in "offline" way maybe through dedicated thread.
@Jesusbill my main reason for the time I suggested is that it is exactly 12 hours different from our usual time and it's early in the week, but not Monday. It's right at the start of my Danish workday, but I hadn't thought that maybe other countries in Europe start later. Moving the time and date will always mean fewer participant, people forget. Also it's easier to have a regular monthly space in the calender than check a different date often. But sometimes it can't be avoided or will help different people participate. I understand the logic to your suggestion @JanF but that only captures the wishes of the most active part of our current audience. I totally don't have the answer here, but it would be nice if we can find a durable answer to this question.
I think that "capturing the wishes of the most active part of our current audience" is what we want right now targeting maximum attendance (no?), so I would second the proposal to have a poll, perhaps not binding to comply but to have an idea.
@stephen_l I agree that recording is essential but as organizers looking to invite people to present I would like to have a "guaranteed" number of people that attend, especially if we are inviting people from more established organizations. I will feel very silly if we hold a meetup and only 5-10 people show up ... don't know if I should or it makes sense but that's the way I feel ... For the discussion offline I don't know what a solution could be, seems complicated because the presenter would have to be active to answer questions afterwards. If he is part of the community it could be more straight-forward, having for example the announcement thread act like a discussion thread afterwards, but if not, I find it difficult to implement effectively.
For the case of OpenProject and in general of projects well established, there are already online material and channels of communication for anybody that wants to know more; thus for these cases I see the importance in having a "live" presentation and "live" Q&A.
What if we organize two polls, one regarding the time of the meetup and a second regarding the day?
Sorry for the delay. I will create thumbnail image and share it here tonight (GMT +3)
Open for your comments.
@gokermu looks great to me! Thanks!
Preparing the material for the announcements today.
... that was a month ago and no response. I've now written to QCAD and invited them https://qcad.org/rsforum/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=8337
Happy to announce that for May's meetup Frédéric Beaupère ( @fbpyr ) will be presenting his work on 2 Blender Addons that rely on BlenderBIM:
This software is used daily in his current employment environment @ ERNE Holzbau.
I will be updating the wiki and the website calendar shortly and the official announcement here will follow about two weeks prior.
The Meetup will be held on the 8th of May, as I thought it is better to avoid holding it on the 1st of May, any thoughts or objections?
@gokermu without rush can you prepare this image, please? Thanks
Hey @Jesusbill ,
Of course I can. What will be the name of the meetup?
Good question :) @fbpyr @Moult @anyone ideas?
Here is my suggestion but wait for others to comment and then we can decide.
IFC_Void_Data and Rhino2Revit Blender(BIM) AddOns
@Jesusbill how about: (?)
"IFC_Void_Data & Rh2BB2Rvt - BlenderBIM AddOns in Production"
@gokermu you can use the title suggested by @fbpyr
@Jesusbill do we have the doodle for the next MoMe time?
@JanF no I didn't have the time to work on it.
We need two doodles. One for the day and one for the time.
But for the time I am not sure yet how it can be organized, I would avoid 24 "options". may be 12 or even 8?
I also think that we should have at least two votes/choices per person since I believe we want to evaluate two alternatives.
@JanF but why did you write "for the next MoMe?". These doodles would be to decide in general but not for the next one that will be done regularly at 20 UTC, unless of course there are objections...
Did you mean this by any chance?
Umm it waas a .. figurative speech?
No I just remembered there was supposed to be a Doodle and I wrote some words to accommodate it. I need more sleep, ha!