Wed, 07 Jan 2015
Quick thoughts about Jade's Meteor community talk
URL:
- http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2014-07-08-jade-wang
Very interesting phrases:
- "they are in charge"
- "power law"
- "invest in leadership, not participation"
- "don't be afraid to give people real power"
- "what if you look for community organizers in your community?"
- "poured fuel on the fire"
Very interesting concepts:
- Devshop London.
Remaining questions for Jade:
- What were some of the Devshop failure modes that were continually tweaked? How will they get tweaked in London?
Questions/thoughts it brings up for me:
- Meteor & co. have a "Chapters" list. I'm borderline surprised that they are using mailing lists. Moreover, how do they get activity on the list? (Do they?)
- Who are the leaders we could massively empower for OSCTC? Probably Davis.
- Does this mean we should rethink the idea of Chapters?
- For Railsbridge, where are their leaders that they empower? Luckily the chapters process structurally encourages local leadership. I've seen it at least in Boston.
- What would we say for BPW? Chicago? Almost. Philly? Probably/possibly.
- Was the real failure of BPW that we didn't try to identify local leaders for regional chapters? If so, how did I miss that?
- I guess we tried to, but we didn't structurally encourage it. Amazing.
- What do we say about Debian, then?
- 1K developers, but leaders? Maybe not as much. Which results in less growth in terms of user base. Breath-taking.
- For Ubuntu+Debian, and presumably meteor, The leadership needed is not so much technical as community/marketing. Jade tries not to call it marketing, but I don't know if she realizes how it's not technical leadership she's after.
- Debian always wanted technical leaders to show up, and the package maintainer based process encourages that structurally. But it does nothing structurally to encourage community/marketing leadership.
Other remarks:
- Jade looks back and forth at the computer a lot. Maybe not given a lot of talks yet?
- Very few "um"s, but some.
- Infrequent smiles at the audience -- interesting.
- A great talk, regardless of some trivial style quibbles.
- 62 meetup groups, 1-5 captains apiece.
- First meetup, reimburse for food and snacks. Generally cover the Meetup.com dues.
- Initially, found people doing interesting things with Meteor -- publicized their work, but also got in touch.
- The day of the monthly Meteor DevShops, they invite people to show up IRL, which fosters peer to peer communication.
Overall remarks:
It's not every day I watch a talk from someone who works in my space who has an idea that makes me rethink a lot of what I've done.
Welcome to Sandstorm.
