Facilitator wanted for monthly calls

ODK developer calls are held on the first Wednesday of every month on UberConference from 14-15 UTC. These calls are a great opportunity to connect with the worldwide community and discuss topics that affect us all. Plus, it's really wonderful to hear the voices of people we generally interact with only in writing.

@yanokwa or I have facilitated most of these calls. I will not be available to facilitate for the next 4 months or so because I am going on maternity leave any day now!

The next call would be on Wednesday November 7th. Would you like to facilitate? The facilitator simply needs to pick a topic, announce the event and then keep the conversation going!

We had a really good conversation in September about the general goals and structure for the calls. See the notes here. The main conclusions were that calls are most successful when we have a specific topic to discuss and the invitation post goes up at least one week in advance to give everyone a chance to plan for it. Ideally, it would be even better to plan topics for a few months at a time. We've also discussed making these more "community calls" than "developer calls."

Here are some topic ideas:

  • Social call! Chat about where everyone is from, favorite foods, ODK stories and other things that help connect us all.
  • Introduction to ODK Central and its development - Central is a modern server currently in beta. I know there's been curiosity around it and this could be either entirely non-technical and an opportunity for people to ask about features and planned development or it could be a dive into some interesting parts of the system. @issa and/or @Matthew_White
  • Deeper dive into the code review conversation from October's meeting including writing down more of the process.
  • Planning for participation in GSoC and/or Outreachy 2019. Brainstorm what it would take to participate, what kinds of projects might be good fits, who could mentor, etc. I have been the org admin for both over the last two years but I won't be able to do it this year. @ggalmazor @Shobhit_Agarwal @Jeff_Beorse
  • JavaRosa overview -- where does it fit in to the ecosystem, what tools use it how, what are some of its strengths and weaknesses and things that need to be done to improve it. @ggalmazor @dcbriccetti

These are only some preliminary ideas and of course anyone can propose a topic. Is anyone inspired to facilitate in November or perhaps a later month?

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@issa and I would be happy to do a call on ODK Central! (I think I would do the facilitating.) I'm not sure that the November date would work, but I think we'd both likely be available for December.

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I will be unavailable on the November date, but would love to talk about GSoC and Outreachy 2019. If @ggalmazor or @Shobhit_Agarwal want to run a call around that it would be awesome, and I'd be happy to share thoughts on the forum. Otherwise maybe we can start a discussion around that?

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If no one else steps up, I'm happy to facilitate the November call :slight_smile:

Since December seems good for talking about Central, we can do a November call about GSoC/Outreachy. It would be great to hear @Shobhit_Agarwal's take on this.

In any case, I agree with @Jeff_Beorse and we should start discussing it here anyway. Would you start a thread for that, Jeff?

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