Global Gathering 2019 - Day 8 - UK DevHack retrospective

What is the purpose of this session?
Review and learn from this first OFN hackathon in London

What outcomes/deliverables do we want?
A list of actions and things to take into account if we ever have host another one.

Who is facilitating? Rachel

Who is scribing? Pau

Good:

We managed to spot the barriers to entry of our documentation and setup and improved it

We developed a simple tool based on Vagrant to run it on Windows machines and Matt learned a lot. We can use it to run OFN locally. We can adapt it a little bit to run in Ubuntu machines without Vagrant. It has no manual steps so we can point any contributor that gets stuck to use it, although it is a bit slow.

Having the backlog separated in a different way without having to deal with the ZenHub board was useful. It helps people land into the project as people can choose which topic they feel they can contribute to the most.

The level of contribution was great but that was because they also got a lot of attention. There was a balance of team members and participants. We managed to attend them all.

We got lots of women showing up.

It was useful to have a tester on site. With more atendees, it would have been more useful though. We also trained Kathy and expanded the testerbase.

Lynne did an amazing job show driving this.

We got the team together, we got marketing and other intangible things.

The people who came will attend to bootcamps and will establish the link with OFN.

We had an amazing volunteer, Hannah to organize the food.

Bad:

Lots of people registered but never turned up which resulted in a huge food overspend. We spent 500 pounds on all the costs plus travel on top of that. More like 800 pounds in total we don’t have a final amount yet.

The cost/benefit ratio of it.

Lynne had to carry with all of the tasks, cooking, cleaning, etc. partially because we had to leave before the end to catch up our trains/flights.

Lynne did a great effort at communicating the need to know whether attendees would not finally come but still, we had a big drop.

Actions:

We should meet more regularly!

Rachel got a lot of dev questions so we should have had clarified the roles of the team members beforehand.

Asking for a monetary contribution to food would perhaps cut the drop rate. It could be refundable. Still, we need to reach out to more people.

We could think about sponsorship. Just Eat or bootcamps might be willing to do it. That could cover travel and food which mean no cost for us. Is a cheap sponsorship.

Bootcamp sponsorship sounds like a reasonable thing to look for. Lynne will look into it.

We could have a next London Devhack as a local Hacktoberfest event so we could ask for sponsorship and be highlighted on their website, if there is a place for it, and grab lots more attention. Pau will send them an email to ask.

Rachel will look into a European hack tour 2019. What about Barcelona - Paris - London?

We said both Rachel and Pau would write an article in their local blogs and translate it to English. We could do it this week while we are together.