[PLUG] A new approach to managing meetups in PLUG

[Dhanesh B. Sabane]

Hello pluggies!

After the recent online meetup, there was a lot of post-meetup
discussion around how to be efficient in managing tasks / arranging
meetups in the group. We identified a few important gaps in the current
process that is followed. Out of those, a couple of important issues
were:

1. How do we gather feedback from the members on topics that interest
them?
2. Post a meetup, how can we efficiently share resources about the
meetup topic so that people can easily find them in one place instead
of sifting through the mail archives?

After a bit of discussion and trying to gather some inspiration from
the beautiful FOSS world, we decided to follow ILUG-D's approach of
managing talks/meetups over a git repository. The process here is to
create an issue for every topic that any member is interested in and
then arrange meetups as per the available list. Post the meetup, any
feedback and resources can be shared over the same issue on git and it
can then be closed as "Delivered". This also helps us track the topics
that we've already covered and ensures that every meetup is unique.

The next step was then to create a repository on some provider. Given
that PLUG always advocates using FOSS tools/software the decision was
simple.

Presenting to you the "un-official" GitLab group for PLUG:

https://git.fosscommunity.in/plug

We have created a repo called "Talks and Workshops board" which will
serve as our issue tracker for topics to cover in meetups.

https://git.fosscommunity.in/plug/talks

I encourage everyone to raise issues on this repository for topics that
you'd like to see covered in future PLUG meetups!

P.S: This new group and repo on GitLab is not limited to help manage
meetups. We can do lots more and we're open for ideas from you!

Cheers!


FAQ's:

1. Why is this repo un-official?
A. Because we'd like to give this approach a try. Official status will
eventually follow.

2. Why not just do everything over the mailing list?
A. Mailing lists are great when you want to have a discussion on one
specific topic like troubleshooting issues, presenting your opinions
about vim vs. emacs or to share updates with the wider group. As per
our experience, they don't help when you want to decide on what topics
to cover in the next meetup.

3. Why git.fosscommunity.in? Why not any other provider?
A. The sign in page of the instance should answer this question - 
https://git.fosscommunity.in/users/sign_in
TL;DR - It uses 100% Free Software and is maintained by friends over at
FSCI.

4. Who maintains git.fosscommunity.in?
A. Free Software Community of India who are a group of Free Software
enthusiasts. You can learn more about them here - https://fsci.in/

5. Who are the admins of this GitLab group?
A. You can have a look at all Owners and Maintainers of the group on
this page - https://git.fosscommunity.in/groups/plug/-/group_members

6. How do I become a member of the group?
A. You'll have to sign up for an account on the GitLab instance. After
signing up, you can ask for membership from the group page itself or
just contact any of the owners and they'll do the needful.

7. How do I contact the Owners of the group?
A. You can catch them over at #pluggies IRC channel or just reply to
this email and any one of them will revert for sure. 

-- 
Dhanesh B. Sabane
https://dhanesh95.gitlab.io
PGP ID: 0xB69A98C9C1642329
Fingerprint: 9655 11F2 0D18 E76A 2396 D64D B69A 98C9 C164 2329