Hello everyone,

I'm excited to start working in earnest on some of the Openspaces stuff :)

I can make a rough pass at drafting a google doc with possible tips for running an Openspace sometime this week. Having never run myself, I'm planning on looking through older sources of information about Openspaces from previous Pycons and going from there. Any suggestions on existing material that's worth looking at are most welcome.

I've also begun looking at ways to improve the bot this year. I added a few new issues to the github repo and will start working on making improvements in the coming days/weeks. Planning on starting with cleaning things up, fixing some minor bugs, adding better Slack integration, and making it easier to deploy. From there will work on making the bot more useful and expanding the types of tweets it recognizes and its available responses.

I hope you're all doing well!

- Zak

On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 3:28 PM, Hobson Lane <hobsonlane@gmail.com> wrote:

Yea that's exactly what I intend to do.

On Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 3:21 PM Anna Ossowski <annabell.ossowski@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Thank you for kicking things off!

Two things from me:

* If we could do a little education  on open spaces (like Trey suggested) that would go a long way. Maybe a blog post on how to run an open space, which we could push put before PyCon, and a small cheat sheet with a couple of tips on how to run an open space, which we could distribute during PyCon.

* I liked the bot last year and I appreciate all the work that went into making this happen. I also think that it is a good idea to discuss how we can improve the bot, but I wanted to point out that we should also acknowledge that some people won’t use the bot or Twitter so maybe we can think of some other “traditional” ways on how to promote the open spaces, just to make sure we reach as many people as possible.

Thank you!

Anna

——
You are appreciated.
You are enough.
You matter.
You are not alone.

On Jan 14, 2018, at 2:25 AM, Hobson Lane <hobsonlane@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you Trey! Apologies for the late response. Really excited to hear your thinking. Those 3 bullets are spot on! Seems very similar to ideas Anna and I have been batting around since I joined her open spaces team.

If you or Zak want to take a stab at drafting material to support one or all of those 3 bullet points, I'd be happy to help

1. flesh them out

2. incorporate PyCon staff feedback

3. seek approval for publication by PyCon staff

4. get them incorporated into the website and other announcements (maybe even Zak's twitter bot dialog)

I think they'd really advance the quality of the 2018 Open Spaces experience, especially if the Twitter bot can be evolved to incorporate them into its "brain".

Regarding Anna's "High's and Low's" list from last year, some things I observed last year:

* Low: The chatbot was pretty basic and needs work to be made really useful

* High: The chatbot was used by more than 50% of the openspace event planners and seemed to get the word out a bit

* Low: Some of the open spaces (inluding the one I led) could have benefited from some of Trey's guideance/ideas in his bullet points

* High: Tweeting a pic of the board seemed like it helped some people plan their day

* High: The board posting went smoothly once we had a board up
* High?: Did we accomplish that 2-board approach we planned?

If we can support open spaces organizers with some or all of Trey's ideas/docs this year I'd be super happy.

--Hobson

On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 7:30 PM, Trey Hunner <trey@truthful.technology> wrote:

Hi all!

Thanks for kicking off the planning Anna and thanks for continuing the conversation Zak and starting the issue tracking and announcements Hobson.

Maybe we should start another thread for this, but I was brainstorming some open spaces ideas recently and wanted to dump them here.

I met someone deeply involved in the agile world through a mutual friend recently and we talked quite a bit about communication at tech conferences.

We discussed some strategies agile conferences use to get people meeting each other (determining topics to discuss in a group by using a Trello-style to-discuss, discussing, discussed system) and we talked about our views of open spaces. He noted that talks often draw people away from open spaces if they're hosted at the same time and we debated the merits of having dedicated open space days/times vs shared talk and open space times.

Some things that I've been thinking about:

• Sharing a fairly curated ideas list for open spaces that have been popular/successful in the past and open spaces we'd like to see folks put up in the future
• Brainstorming and sharing alternative open space formats with potential open space planners (e.g. quiet room, yoga, sticker exchange, or an open space where people hold 2 minute conversations with a person and then rotate musical chair style)
• Making a "how to run a successful open space" cheat sheet with things like recommendations for giving a voice to attendees, taking shared notes, and exchanging contact information with each other and considering continuing the discussion online in a structured way

Many of the things I've been thinking about involve more active recommendations/nudging from us to encourage a particular feel/vibe from the open spaces. Thoughts on this?

On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 11:13 AM, Anna Ossowski <annabell.ossowski@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I hope you’re all well!

I thought it would be a good idea to officially kick off the planning of the PyCon US 2018 Open Spaces before the holidays hit everyone. May may still seem a long time away but it’s never too early to start planning :)

In the past I have used a Trello board (please let me know if you don’t have access) to keep track of ideas and tasks but I am open to using something different. I do think that using some sort of project management tool, whether that’s something like Trello or GitHub, makes sense and makes things a little easier.

Maybe we can start by discussing what went well last year, what didn’t go as planned, and any ideas we would like to implement for 2018.

Looking forward to working with all of you again!

Anna

——
You are appreciated.
You are enough.
You matter.
You are not alone.

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Trey Hunner

Truthful Technology, LLC

http://truthful.technology

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