Re: PostgreSQL hours

Hi,

Sorry for not replying for so long - the post-vacation season, a rush-time.

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 8:32 PM, Joshua Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>> 3. When it would be better to arrange these meetups? I think about
>> Tuesdays and Thursdays, 6-7PM.
>
> I'd start with once a week, at most. Maybe twice a month. Build up an
> audience for them.

I agree, twice a month would be better to start with. Later it can be
adjusted depending on the demand.

> You'd need to do them in downtown SF or SOMA, because those would be the
> only places with enough PG users. Personally, I'd think a Brown Bag (as in
> Lunch) would work better than an evening thing.

I think doing it at SOMA at lunch time will restrict the audience with
15 minutes around radius. The thought is that if it would be arranged
at 6-7PM (may be even earlier) it might serve as a good reasoning for
people to left offices earlier and spend their last work hours at the
meetup solving their work issues with additional help of community. I
think it might attract audience better.

>> 4. What kind of place it would be better to arrange them? May be
>> coffee shops or similar places that are not very crowded at this time
>> of day.
>
> If you did a Brown Bag, then you could use someone's office, which would
> make doing demos etc. much easier, and control the background volume
> issue.

I thought about it in a slightly different way. Free form - no
presentations, no demos, just problems and solutions, plus networking.
May be to collect visitors issues preliminary on a web site, rate them
by complexity level and delegate to consultants according to their
level. Because, for example, I can show how to smoothly do switch over
with pgbouncer, but can not do something like planner related source
code mining yet. May be even to collect a certain minimum amount of
issues and arrange these meetups like on demand. So it could be more
optimal and more flexible this way, and might be arranged in such
places a public libraries or Starbucks.

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 11:23 PM, David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 07:38:03PM -0700, Sergey Konoplev wrote:
>> I have an idea of arranging a kind of PG hour meetups several times a
>> week where enthusiasts, like me, could gather together to answer
>> questions of visitors, help them with their tasks in real environment,
>> networking, and just to chat.
>
> How does this differ from what can do on the IRC channel on Freenode?

Sure, what can be effectively solved on IRC, like atomic issues,
should be solved there.

As I wrote above, the idea is to sit next to the person and to show
him personally on his own laptop how to do one or another thing.
Often, even a small cluster migration involves a lot of issues, as how
to determine if the bandwidth is enough, port mappings for pgbouncer,
some kernel issues, though the original issue was "how to setup
replica". People are often not aware of all of these little moments
and it leads to lots of stress and weeks of discussions, though it
could be easily solved in a hour.

> Several consultancies have kicked off successfully due at least in
> part to that sort of community participation, so it's known territory.

Could you please tell a little bit more about this experience?

> Doing this in person has all the usual up-sides of human interaction,
> and the usual downsides of convening at a particular time and place.
>
> Would you consider trying a few virtual ones on Freenode first? I
> suspect they'd get you some idea of what kind of participation you'd
> get in real life, and they're relatively cheap as far as committed
> resources go in terms of drumming up interest.

Okay, I will try it.

> Your suggestion does go to something at least Josh and I have been
> mulling over for some time, which is that there's too much stuff
> happening to get covered in a single monthly meeting. This is an
> excellent problem for a local community such as ours to have.

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 9:10 AM, Craig Kerstiens
<craig(dot)kerstiens(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> A huge +1 on this, and would be happy to help spread the word. We've run
> similar a few times with the Heroku Postgres team with some good results.
> Additionally, I've been getting more and more random inquiries from people
> that want to pick my brain for an hour or so over a beer. I'm sure theres
> many others that would be far more valuable than myself and in general it
> will just help grow the ecosystem.

Yes, exactly what I was talking about - to collect random inquires
which cant be solved efficiently in person, and arrange events.

--
Kind regards,
Sergey Konoplev
PostgreSQL Consultant and DBA

http://www.linkedin.com/in/grayhemp
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