The Cleveland Code Co-op (C³) is a new group that invites people in Northeast Ohio to meet in Cleveland to directly collaborate on Free Software project development. The third C³ meeting is scheduled for December 14, 2008, where we will continue our work on geopy. Please join us! Note that some of our collaboration takes place in IRC. We hang out in #C3 on irc.freenode.net; even if you can't make it to a C³ meeting in person, you are welcome to hack with us remotely.
The mission statement for C³ is to strengthen the Free Software community in the area by encouraging us to code together, notably including work done on projects beyond our current experience. At each session, we will work on a project of interest to one of the members. We may end up working on a number of very different projects, with a number of different programming languages.
The current plan is to have these sessions be very casual, and to allow structure to form during each session as appropriate. In this spirit of informality, we don't intend for any membership requirements or the like. Those who are interested in a given focal project meet, code, push the code back to the community, and discuss successes and failures here, on our blogs, over beer, or whereever.
This concept sounds very similar to a Coding Dojo, and in fact it could be quite fun to have some C³ sessions focus more on programming challenges, perhaps to teach certain languages or skills for future projects.
How do we choose projects?
Anyone can suggest any FLOSS project to work on at a future C³ session. Please post suggestions to the nooss-talk mailing list or on the project proposals page, or both! Ideally, the proponent of the project would have some experience contributing to that project or would have researched how to contribute to the project, and would have a set of concrete contributions in mind. At a given C³ session, the participants decide on the focal project for the next C³ session. The proponent of the project would then serve as the guide while working on that project at that session.
How often should we hold sessions?
We initially thought about having one session a month, but after the last session we have been pondering having more frequent meetings (since the last one was so much fun, but left so much work still undone). This is totally in the spirit of C³, since really we just want to meet as frequently as possible to work on our projects. Brian suggested keeping one "focusing" meeting per month, where we can make any decisions that need to be made (as well as coding, of course), and then having as many additional working sessions during the month as we want, where we focus on the same project as at the last focusing meeting. What do you think? How should we schedule or announce these additional working sessions?
Where should we meet?
For our first session, we met at BitBacker HQ, which was a good meeting location but inconvenient for our host. The second session was held at the main branch of the Lakewood Public Library, which is a beautiful library but has a very small meeting room and restrictive wireless and food policies, and is not horribly convenient for East-siders. For the next (focusing) session, we will meet at Gypsy Beans, which is at the corner of West 65th and Detroit Avenue. Thoughts? Suggestions?
TODO
Address the following questions on this page:
- What should a project proponent do to prepare for a session?
- What do I need to bring to sessions?
- How can I prepare for sessions? How prepared do I need to be for sessions?
- What happens during a session?
It will be easier to answer these questions once we actually see how things go the first few times.