Community events funding

[manics]

Detail

We have some funding available as part of the current grant.

Actions

• How much is available?
• What is the deadline for spending it?
• Can it be used to pay in advance for events after the deadline?
• Make proposal for both a working group co-working day and a documentation day
• Get clarity on what is possible to spend it on and by when (payed in March for things in the future)
• Make proposals to the community and get feedback
• Decide by 20th Feb

Who can help

No response

[Davsarper]

6 Feb

• Could potentially use for future event (in person) as long as invoice comes in before end of funding (Balint to check)
• There could be some accesibility or support costs for remote events as well
• Think of an event that does make sense to have, for exmaple support creation of Governance (maybe not for CMWG but for necessary support and assistance like proper notetaking, documentaiton, people who ensure the transparency of the process). And to bring all those in the community that should be part of this conversations
  • If we go for it, the event needs to be planned now and invite people already. Probably already looking at April
• A working groups day is a nice idea, but there is too few of them yet
• One possibility is to spend in September for a ful hybrid event (but it will need a full plan in place, all costs established)
• Another, maybe preffered, is to celebrate an event that makes sense for the community in the short term
• To move forward we need a plan and proposal for both option and make a decision latest next meeting

Gov writing discussion

• • WG chairs should be part and parcel of the governance model. If there are few of them yet, we could invite proto-WGs (people in our community who have been involved in different aspects but have not yet gone for it) and other people in the community that need to be part of this conversation
• Involving everyone is important, but it should not hold the work. People may have low involvement in still vague processes
• The participation has to be open to everyone, and then people who contribute can. This group should be about facilitating.
• Summary (governance writing process): cannot create without making participation possible, have to put together our draft proposals so the discussion is based on something (which are already open). Because it will have to happen in April, basically we will get to it with a first proposal already

[KirstieJane]

I think getting the chairs of the working groups together in person would be a great use of the funding.

In the meeting on 6 Feb we discussed the tension between writing the governance for WGs and then inviting WG chairs to an in person collaboration session vs having a session scheduled to bring the WG members / chairs into the writing of the governance documentation.

I feel quite strongly that having the small group write and then bring the WG chairs together misses an opportunity to set culture for people across the community to participate and see themselves as having agency in building the documentation.

The flip side from others in the room was that it may end up being just a small group who do the writing either way so why not focus tightly on getting the first complete draft together and then sharing it with the WG chairs / members. Maybe more pragmatic and maybe what would end up happening anyway!

The other point that I think is important is to actively reach out to people in the community who could chair working groups. (I think of these as proto-working groups) rather than only engaging with people who currently have expressed interest in chairing a working group. The reason for this is that you'll get a very biased group of people who proactively put themselves forward to chair a WG in the absence of any governance and we need the community to have more diverse representation and leadership than that!

My suggestion there was to go back to the breakout room topics that have been popular at community events and reach out to people who have been active in those topics and ask them to be at the event. They don't need to commit to anything but you need their voices in the room 😸

[Davsarper]

@harisood and I have brainstormed two possible events that we think would be worth organising, during the next meeting we will decide wheter to move forward with these or propose different activities.

• Documentation sprints, to collaboratively finalise the first version of our governance documentation (https://hackmd.io/ty_bEhtBTrKjmYsJEEP8Qw)
• Working groups day: to get interested WGs through the set up process and help them success (https://hackmd.io/nTAAo7fOT_quE18y0NYjnA)
  We feel that these represent good events for the current stage the community is at - getting all our infrastructure set up properly, and getting some working groups up and running.

[manics]

I like the idea of the Working groups setup and prep day. We'd need to make a big push to get people to propose a WG in advance, but I prefer that over an earlier idea of getting the WG chairs together to write a Governance doc.

Having input from the WG chairs on the Governance doc is obviously important, but the WG chairs are just one of the stakeholders who's input is required. It's equally important to have input from the community on how they want official WGs to work, since they're the ones who will be contributing, supporting, and consuming the results.

[Davsarper]

We have the capacity to fund this event beyond March by reprofiling grant and increasing DI person time (which we are inveesting in the project) and Turing will later cover the costs for the event

[Davsarper]

Community feedback was positive and we will organise these two events in specific issues