Hello Operational Members of Meet.coop, #organizational-operations would like to schedule two workshops to help our work in Meet.coop. These workshops will take place in August, and we will use this thread to coordinate time for those interested.
Workshop 1: Sociocracy
@aaronhirtenstein will be hosting a workshop focused on circles and the consent process for 6-8 people. The time for this (including prep) will be 7.5 hours, which can be in one day or split over two days. The workshop is offered through Outlandish and the cost is covered by the Open Co-op, so it is free for those who would like to attend.
Workshop 2: Jekyll
@benhylau will be hosting a free workshop for 4-6 people on Jekyll and markdown-based static website generation. This will be a 2 hour sessions with 1 hour of prep time.
We currently use Jekyll for the Meet.coop website, so this session will first introduce relevant concepts, followed by interactive hands-on time where we will all publish our own Jekyll blog on GitHub Pages.
There is a limit to the number of workshop participants. If too many of us are interested, we will have to prioritize based on our roles in the Meet.coop circles and to make sure we cover members across different circles.
Iām not sure that Iāve joined as an organizational member ā yet? (That means I would commit to X hours of labor, right?)
But I am very interested in the Sociocracy workshop!
I have Jekyll experience already, bu if it would be helpful to have a āTAā in order to provide more backup support for attendees ā LMK. Otherwise Iāll skip that one.
Iām interested in both sessions. Iāve done some sociocracy stuff so have a general idea of the approach, so Iād be willing to not do that one if there is strong interest from others and we hit capacity. Keen to understand how to drive Jekyll so that I can contribute to the website.
In this session, we will author content in markdown, compile a static blog website using Jekyll, and publish the code onto GitHub with the website hosted on GitHub Pages.
Preparation:
Follow this guide to install Jekyll on your system (if you run into trouble donāt worry, just come to the session and we will figure it out, this is the hardest part of the process believe it or not)
If you cannot attend, we will do another one in the near future. We realized many people are on vacation, so we are moving the Sociocracy workshop to September.
@caseyg if you can help as TA thatāll be great! Need help getting all these ruby versions to work on everyoneās system!
oy! looks like Iāll be on the road, now so will unfortunately miss this. but down to join future workshops & the sociocracy one when it gets scheduled.
If we could do it on GitLab, or even on git.coop, the gitLab server by Webarchitects, that would allow us to work on a more commons-oriented git platfiorm. The workshop itself would be the same mostly Iād figure?
Heh I knew someone would complain about GitHub, but I specifically need the easy integration between GitHub (git repo) and GitHub Pages (static website hosting with a compile step in between).
GitLab seems to have an equivalent, with a more complex setup which would distract from the purpose of this workshop (not trying to learn ci setups here), and itās asking me to spend many hours learning a new platform and adapting the workshop, which I donāt have time for at the moment. I am only planning 1 h prep for this workshop
I think itās actually useful that people get to learn the basics on GitHub, then carry that learning to a new platform to see the portability of what they have learned on multiple platforms.
@jdaviescoates I think everyone who is interested in the Jekyll one can attend. Itās pretty casual, more like a learning group to get started on producing low overhead static websites, and we can easily organize future sessions for those who arenāt available in August like @wouter.
People with experience like @caseyg and maybe @petter can pop by when they are available to help each other. I am myself by no means an expert in jekyll, but have used it enough to introduce it and help get through the starter problems.
Quick update. Last Friday @Graham@osb and I had a productive workshop to learn about Jekyll and GitLab.
We started off polling everyoneās goal from the 2 hours, and decided to spend first half discussing the concept and process of static site generation (author -> build -> host), tools and platforms involved (jekyll, git, build bots, github pages, basic web server, etc.), did demos creating our basic jekyll blog and walked through the directory structure and important files in a standard jekyll repository.
In the next hour we focused on Meet.coopās jekyll repo on git.coop, to publish this page together. We took the source content from our nextcloud that @osb and @melissamcnab drafted, then used the gitlab web interface to put the content text and image onto our website repository. We learned git branching and the merge request process, how the build pipeline is configured, staged -> verified -> deployed the updated website together.
At many points I also demonstrated parallel processes that use command line to quickly preview a website on localhost, publishing to alternative targets like github pages, using the basic minima theme.
The overall result is:
We now have Guides live!
We all learned about the basics of jekyll (workflow, _config.yml, naming conventions, blogging, metadata, etc.) both theoretically and practically
@osb@Graham and I can independently use the gitlab web interface to publish content (including images and embeds) following the process pipeline moving forward
I am happy to do another one in late-September or October. @melissamcnab@wouter@jdaviescoates already indicated interest, so I will send time polls in September for this and the Sociocracy training.
Perhaps itās best to just pick a monthly standing time, one day where internal trainings take place? For example, every last Saturday of the month is Meet.coop Skill Share, we hold the spot in our shared calendar so people can plan for it.
Thanks @benhylau - I found the session really helpful, not least in terms of helping me to improve my understanding of how git, and gitlab are working as a key part of the workflow, but also giving me a grasp of how to use Jekyll.
I did get an email - helpfully - from a site visitor after weād published guides.html to let us know that it included a broken link (the guides.markdown file had a link to āgetinvolvedā (i.e. the name of the markdown file), but this was generating a 404. I think this is because weād edited _data/menu.yml to set the url to āgetinvolved.htmlā? Editing the link in guides.markdown to āgetinvolved.htmlā solved the problem.
For same reason @osb had to change the navigation links in this commit, the content body also needed the same change, which I see you did in this commit. Thanks!
I am going to archive the 'Schedule sociocracy training workshopā card in the deck - as it seems to have stalled and I have not heard much interest about taking up The Open Co-op on this offer - so we are going to reallocate the funds.
