Hey everyone! It has been a long, hot and exhausting summer! Continuing our conversations from our past few meetings, here’s some of the stuff we talked about:
The PLIBMTTBHGATY Event:
Positives
- Enjoyment of the attendees
- Preparation that allowed quick and easy setup the day-of
Improvements/Ideas to make the next one a little cooler
- Better outreach
- perhaps to local schools
- at least one month in advance for better attendance
- Have specific tutorial resources we can provide for each of the major languages and learning areas for people to reference and utilize
- Prepare some group “project(s)” ahead of time that attendees can to work on together with other people to encourage mingling and attendance
- People seemed shy and hesitant about giving talks. Instead of having time for lightning talks, maybe we could instead focus on introductions at the beginning of the event and use the last hour or so for people to showcase what they worked on.
The Next Event
We have a poll in our general slack channel right now that you can submit suggestions to and vote on for our next event. So feel free to get in there now and let us know what you would like to work towards next. We will leave that poll open to responses until Friday August 2nd, so get on that!
Meeting Discussions
An idea that we’ve been kicking around for a while is making our meetings a little less formal and a little more social. By doing this, lady developers in the area can have somewhere to go every month to build some camaraderie and a network of professional and personal friendships within the Des Moines tech community, particularly with other women who can share and sympathize with their experiences and struggles.
To try to spur this along, we thought for some meetings we would have a designated discussion time. Sometimes simply to socialize, other times to talk about something specific, such as an article, video, or some event happening within our community. We’d like to spend more time at our regular gatherings exchanging opinions and ideas and building genuine relationships.
And as with most things, we have an area in our slack dedicated to this. In the #discussions channel, we share content, brainstorm ideas, or simply continue discussions from past meetings. We also have a trello board linked in that channel that you can join and contribute to if you have any cool ideas for topics we can discuss at future meetings. So please join that channel and help get our discussions going!
Group Support for Individual Achievement
One final item that was a discussion topic at a couple recent meetings was the idea of organizing the group to support one another’s personal and professional goals. Perhaps we could utilize the slack and our social media profiles for members to share goals we have, share the progress we’re making towards achieving those goals, and give other members a chance to give advice or show support. This idea has only been discussed briefly and hasn’t been entirely fleshed out yet, but if it sounds like something that interests you, feel free to come talk to us on facebook, twitter or in our slack.