Every project had to be promoted and has to be maintained by some people, who should specify tasks to develop it. There should be a way to contact the maintainers privately, and also the project could have additional feedback gathering tools suchs as forums, forms and polls for others adding their doubts, contributions or specification of new tasks.
The project tasks could be published in a public tracker-repository waiting there for someone else to come to do them at some point, without previous private virtual or presential contact with the promoters-maintainers.
Maintainers want to make their project known to a broader audience and every project wants to increase commits to their tasks, that is why projects organize promotional and production gatherings.
1-Promotional events about a project are a few of the total events around the project, and are normally open to all public
2-Production gatherings are events for doing tasks, which are many but they are not that much publiced nor attended, so finally tasks are normally done by a small group of the same people.
Promoters-Maintainers tend to feeling the patrimonial contribution they have already done as a hierarchy within the community of people formed around the project and also feel scarcity of human resources (task commiters, helpers) in comparision to the abundant love they are giving to the project and the level of participation in the production in the project’s public events they make an effort organizing (from the task tracker, to presentational documents andor presential meet ups).
Project’s gatherings limitations
When developing a project, there is not only the conflict between maintainers and participants, there is also the conflict of the project relationship with other projects. In this sense, there is an increasing trend of «general gatherings» for presenting your project in a gathering where a lot of other related projects will be also presented. So when someone goes to such a general gathering, we have some additional problems:
– The relationships between presentators and atendees are very stressed due to lack of time for each project and the big flood of information around. Atendees are flooded with simultaneous presentations imposible to attend them all. Organizers may document the presentations (normally through audio-video recording) for a later re-viewing, which is an additional effort to be put. There could be more volunteering flow for doing those tasks because of the larger ammount of atendees. but the meeting as project tends to have the same bottlenecks mentioned above.
– Organisers may merge related presentations in a common room, where shared talks-debates among the presented projects are not publickly organised. These thematic meetings are definetely privately enjoyed, but there is a potential communitty as a project there as well which also tends to have the same bottlenecks other projects have.
– Presentations could be just about re-reading their already published website, something which is not much of an added value to the meeting. In the case of presenting something new about the project, they will link to the documentation generated there from the project website, but very few or none add the link back to the project website where they are referencing their meeting documentation. So if someone finds them through the presentation, has to go to their website and re-check in that meeting documentation is outdated or how old it is and what has been updated. Also, during the meeting itself many updates to the docs shown there could have been made, which are not threaded in the meeting website nor credited.
– Presentators will beg contributions and ask for feedback in a little round of questions at the end of the talk, which they surely may either get a FAQ andor a speech from some atendee who mainly wants to show him/herself off, documents that are uninteresting for the project itself. They could receive some brilliant feedback too there, but this is more rare to happen because who wants to do so will prefer to normally give it more privately in a postpresenation moment.
The presentators may prefer splitting the talk and atendees into groups, leaving them time to talk to each other about the presented content. The more presentational time given to the atendees, the less for the presentation, so people could lack of background for what they should be talking to each other.
An approximate standard payback is: It has been one hour atendance from 50 people, and the presentator gets an average of 15minutes to 1 hour conversation in exchange at the end of it, from 50 to 100% unimportant contribution for the project itself. (S)He invested 100 hours for the presentation, gave 50 hours there to 50 different people and receives 1 hour back from them all.
– Atendees may have many things in common that if they were to find, the project will benefit much of it because of its that role of linker between both. Many atendees would love to have contributed feedback while listening some parts of the presentation, andor leave a message in some board after the presentation, specially if it was a meeting board for that presentation, since his/her addon could trigger a further f2f conversation with some other atendee during the time of the meeting.
But attendees were in the presentation more passive, almost as if they were watching TV. Also, the more hectic ones, may felt frustated because they were not feeling they would have the space for talking meaningfully with the presentator (they don’t want to struggle with others for the presentator attention) and decided not to involve at all instead.
– Communitty gets reinforced with common events within the gathering, but since the gathering relies in a hierarchy between Organizers, project presentators and atendees, these common events don’t get deep in making that community to thrive as a whole as much as it could be. Also despite there is a communitty building effort there, everyone should solve their basic needs individually (transport, food, sleep, etc) so the sense of community is not felt as it could very much more potentially be- This is an important flaw because when generating more meet up spaces within the meeting we are offering more space for sharing interesting pending conversations arised there.
Also, since any communitarian gathering tends to a further celebration, partying is no present or it is too artificialized or separed from the gathering itself.
Since projects need more tasks promotion, relating and tasks commiting and atendees want to add their bit and everyone specially including gathering organisers want to enjoy the experience deeper, we have to intervene in making lovelier standards for a more productive presentational gatherings for projects.
WHAT
Guidelines and tips for forking parties
Easy offer your live multimedia feedback about the presentation in a tidy meeting website url that is also embedded-branched in the project website) where you couldexpect further personal matches, specially if you describe your talents and assign yourself some of the project tasks, which will give you acurrency to get back the entrance money you paid and some projects products that are only sold in the meeting’s partyingarena. Will this not promote to more easily suggest new open tasks for