Re: PostgreSQL hours

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Hmmm. You could be right. What about scheduling one brown bag, and one
> evening session, per month for a couple months? We could see which one
> is more attractive to people.

That make sense. I also have another idea of how to optimize it, that
is described below.

>> I thought about it in a slightly different way. Free form - no
>> presentations, no demos, just problems and solutions, plus networking.
>
> Ah, ok. I misunderstood you. As a warning, historically SFPUG events
> where there was not a structured presentation had fairly low attendance
> (like, 4 people). So you'll need to see if this kind of freeform thing
> appeals to anyone.

Again, below is described the idea of how we could probably avoid low
attendance.

>> 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.
>
> Hmmm, I'm not sure I quite follow what you're planning to happen at
> these meetings.

Sorry, I messed things up. Here is another attempt to describe it:

1. We are creating a "SFPUG hours planning" event without day and place
- The event asks potential visitors to
- describe an issue they would like to solve
- specify their convenient location or locations
- put a convenient time for each location
- It also invites potential consultants to
- review the issues and choose one or several
- specify their convenient location or locations
- put a convenient time for each location
2. As we are getting requests we clusterize them by ~location and ~time
3. As we get enough issues in some cluster we arrange "SFPUG hours at
Blabla 7pm"

Place-clusters I think should be San Jose area, San Francisco area,
East Bay area. Time-clusters - weekdays lunch, weekdays evening,
weekends morning.

In addition to problem solving it would probably be also good to make
a kind of a short intro to recent changes and events, as you, Josh,
usually do every time at normal SFPUG meetups.

Thoughts, objections?

--
Kind regards,
Sergey Konoplev
PostgreSQL Consultant and DBA

http://www.linkedin.com/in/grayhemp
+1 (415) 867-9984, +7 (901) 903-0499, +7 (988) 888-1979
gray(dot)ru(at)gmail(dot)com