[group-organizers] PySprings Project Night Format

[Ryan Freckleton]

Hi everyone,

Here's my writeup of the PySprings project night format. This time we
focused on adding PyLint documentation to The Hithchiker's Guide to Python.
The feedback I got was quite positive, everyone seemed to enjoy the
semi-structured activity and freedom to redirect and move the topics of the
group.

We attempted to go in small iterations, about 35 minutes of small-group
work followed by about 20 minutes of sharing.

1. Objective/Introduction
This is a roundtable where we discuss the goals of our end product (in this
case, an introduction to PyLint) and any additional skills we want to
develop. For our group this was becoming more familiar with git and github.

I used a 15 minute time-timer to timebox this. Some people started on phase
2. as we discussed which was fine. The point of this format is to add the
minimal amount of structure so that people feel comfortable.

2. Introduction of Material
We start by making sure everyone can check out the docs and build it.
Mentors chat with participants to confirm that everything's going well,
which will uncover some issues. In our case we ran into some issues with
SSH keys. Besides that, everyone had a development system configured.

Since we did not run into any major learnings or issues, we did not have a
group discussion after this activity.

3. Initial Exploration (timeboxed)
Based on the goals from the roundtable, we created an outline of topics to
cover in PyLint and had volunteers assign their names to the etherpad next
to each topic. We found resources and facts for installation, hello-world
use, configuration best practices, what Pylint was and how it was important.

After about 35 minutes, we went around and had verbal discussion on what we
learned, this also brought up some additional areas for investigation.

At this point, I called for a quick mini-retrospective on the project night
so far, we used the "delta/positive" method. I asked each member to list
one thing that was a positive about their experience so far and one thing
that to change.

4. Creation
At this point, we decided to use the guidance generated by the exploration
to start writing up the documentation. This triggered a discussion about
github, forking and pull requests. The co-organizer, who is quite familiar
with git, gave a walk through of how to fork a repo and push to it on the
projector. I observed and made sure everyone was able to follow.

At this point, we broke up into pairs to work on documentation and review.
As documentation it was completed and pushed to the PySprings shared
repository for integration before pull requests are sent to Ken Reitz.

5. Other notes
Having an open format really helped foster collaboration and discussion of
goals and what to do next. Making sure everyone is keeping up by having
one-on-one chats seems to also be an important technique.

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--Ryan E. Freckleton
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