APM: Activity?

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Jun 8 14:33:49 PDT 2012


On Tue, Jun 05, 2012 at 10:10:41AM -0500, Mark Lehmann wrote:
> It takes a lot of effort to coordinate events.  I'd be happy if someone
> else wanted to coordinate.  
> [...]

I don't know if this will help here, but one of the user groups 
I frequently attend started having monthly "meeting managers".  
We got the idea from Perl's new release manager process, which 
in turn got it from Parrot.

In Perl/Parrot, each monthly release has a separate "release manager"
that is responsible for the tasks associated with that month's release.  
The procedure is all well documented, so someone just volunteers for
a month, follows the steps, and a release comes out.

In the user group scenario, each regularly scheduled meeting has
someone volunteer to be that meeting's "coordinator" (or whatever
you wish to call it).  That person is responsible for arranging a
speaker or event, making the meeting announcements, etc. for the
given month.  The meeting manager can *be* the speaker, but isn't
required to be.  And of course the manager can delegate out as
desired/necessary.

The whole point is that the work of setting up a meeting (or release)
doesn't fall to the same person month after month after month to
the point that he/she burns out or runs out of ideas.  Also, 
having more managers brings more ideas and improvements into the
process.

It's worked reasonably well at the UG that I attend; perhaps
it can work for you as well.

Lastly, I'd be happy to come down to Austin sometime and give a
presentation.  :-)

Hope this helps,

Pm


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