Meeting: 2015 02 23

Community of Practice

[All Issues for this meeting](https://github.com/renodevelopers/meetups/milestones/2015-02 MTG)

Signups & Getting Settled [ 18:00 - 18:15 ]

Meeting Start [ 18:15 - 18:30 ]

Don Morrison

Introductions
- Now that we have a fairly large group the intros will be only for people new to the group.
News
- Announced /dev/lunch has been well attended and we're going to keep it up!
Hiring
- Open floor (3-5 minutes)
Looking
- Open floor (3-5 minutes)

Main Talks [ 18:30 - 19:30 ]

Community of Practice

What is a Community of Practice?

Presentation Slides

Women Who Code Reno Tahoe are coming to the end of their third group project and they're looking to help each other learn and grow. They are reaching out to local tech folks to help them in their effort. Veronica Cannon will be speaking to us about what it is they want to achieve and some ideas of how to achieve it.

Don Morrison will lead a short session after Veronica's talk to get ideas on concrete ways we can support their goals.

From Veronica's original email about the subject:

We also have a large contingent of members who look to us to teach them basic skills in programming. Many of these people attend our meetings on an infrequent basis and aren’t ready (skill-wise or availability) to commit to working on a project.

We’d really like to start a Community of Practice to help these folks. We need your help. To explain a little of what we are looking for, let me say we hope to have three types of meetings.

1.) Community of Interest meetings once a month, on the third Thursday. These meetings are social and will include a lightening talk.

2.) Project Meetings multiple times a month. Projects will be lead by one of our female members and will be attended by a core group who have committed to regular attendance and setup of a development environment.

3.) NEW! Community of Practice sessions a couple times a month. These meetings are learning based and designed for new coders and the ad-hoc attendees.

For these Community of Practice sessions, we’re looking for tech hosts to lead the learning. Will you please ask your respective members to consider leading a session?

Practice sessions should:

be less than two hours in duration

be suitable for beginners or good practice for those who aren’t beginners

be suitable for ‘drop ins'

be applicable to many languages, tools or frameworks

not require any development environment

be on your schedule, whenever it would be convenient for you to offer them - just once or recurring

For example, it would be great if someone could work through all the exercises on CoderBytes on every other Monday. Or give a short lecture on the concept of arrays and then help the group play with them in some way that doesn’t require a specific setup on their machine. Maybe break out a half dozen Arduinos and come up with a challenge to program them. Teach us four common bash commands. Come pair program with us!