This illustration is created by Scriberia with The Turing Way community. Used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3332807

The JupyterHub team are refactoring our monthly meeting into a collaborative, co-working space that is more accessible and inclusive to those who are just getting started in the community — an Online Collaboration Café! This blog post aims to explain what that means, and what to expect when you attend. We plan to hold our first Online Collaboration Café on 21st March 2023. Please come along and let us know your feedback!

TL;DR

The team meeting will be held in a new format for 2 hours in the original time slot. Instead of a typical meeting style with an agenda, the group will be divided into breakout rooms to work more collaboratively on ideas and perhaps begin actioning them. There will always be breakout rooms available for onboarding newcomers and those who wish some dedicated time to undertake maintenance tasks, as well as a quiet working space in the main room. Participants should feel free to swap rooms and join/drop out as they need.

Why the change?

The JupyterHub community often cite the team meetings as a touchpoint for newcomers to familiarise themselves with the JupyterHub project. However, this is not always the case. The team meetings have an emergent agenda built by the community members — which is great! — but it also means that it is a potluck as to whether the meeting you happen to attend will actually be useful depending on the agenda, and a newcomer may have to attend multiple meetings over a long period before feeling comfortable to ask questions and know where they can begin to help.

By reformatting the meeting into a collaborative co-working space using breakout rooms, we can cater for both the need of newcomers to be oriented to the project, and for the community to discuss in-depth topics in an emergent nature.

What is an Online Collaboration Café?

The Collaboration Café is a concept that was developed by The Turing Way community, and you can read more about it and how they are run in their Community Handbook.

In short, an Online Collaboration Café utilises breakout rooms and pomodoro sprints to allow groups of community members to work together on a topic that best suits them. The space between the pomodoros are used as shareouts to the rest of the group, or as biobreaks.

What are the logistics?

1. This is an online café. We will meet on a video call.

2. We will be using the same alternating time slot that the team meetings used to occur in, but the slot will now be two hours. You can view the Team Calendar for details.

3. A chair will always be present in the main room to manage breakout rooms and greet folk who may arrive mid-sprint.

4. There will always be some default breakout rooms available:

• Onboarding: For new arrivals to the community. A member of the team will be available on the call to support anyone wanting to learn more about collaborating on GitHub, getting a virtual tour of our GitHub organisation, and help you in any way we can.
• Maintenance: Folks working in this room will be triaging issues, reviewing pull requests, and other maintenance-related activities across the JupyterHub organisation.
• Quiet working in the main room: If you would just like some quiet time dedicated to any JupyterHub-related work you have, you are invited to hang out in the main room (and keep the chair company 😉)

What will happen when I attend?

When you arrive to the Online Collaboration Café, there will first be some housekeeping, such as introductions, Code of Conduct review. There will then be some goal setting around what folks are hoping to achieve during the time. These goals will determine the topics for the breakout rooms. Any attendee is welcome to: suggest their own topic, join a suggested topic, join one of the default rooms, or work quietly in the main room. The breakouts will then run in sprints with breaks to share their progress. The Café is closed with some reflections, for example: how did your work progress, what should the project think about working towards next?

Here is an example schedule of how an Online Collaboration Café could happen inspired by The Turing Way:

• Time: Activity
• Start: Welcome, CoC review
• 10 mins: Introductions and goal setting
• 20 mins: Pomodoro 1
• 5 mins: Break
• 20 mins: Pomodoro 2
• 5 mins: Break
• 20 mins: Open discussion: celebrations, reflections, future plans
• 5 mins: Close

2 hours seems like a long time… Why not multiple meetings?

Various individual meetings covering separate topics, such as onboarding and maintenance, were considered. However given that the majority of JupyterHub’s community are volunteers, it didn’t seem practical to fill up the calendar with lots of meetings. Another reason to use parallel breakout rooms is that participants can swap rooms if the current conversation doesn’t appeal to them, as if you were at tables in a real café. This practice is highly encouraged.

The extension to 2 hours is important because this is a pivot towards collaboration and co-working, and we want to provide a dedicated time for folk to achieve that and begin actioning ideas. However it is a large chunk of time to devote when we are all busy, and so it is not a requirement to arrive on time and participate for the full 2 hours. Joining when you can and dropping when you need to is encouraged and doesn’t require apologies.

Will there be cake at this café?

It is an online café so there will be as many virtual cakes as you like! 🍰🍰🍰

This is an informal space, so you are encouraged to bring along any beverages and/or snacks. We hope you will join us!