Growing lunch.js and LA.js

[gr2m]

Follow up to #435 (comment) @jarrettch @anguspiv @trillium

We discussed at lunch.js today what we could do to grow the JavaScript community in Los Angeles. What we all agreed on is that people miss in-person meetings, and we want to do something about it.

We discussed 3 main topics

1. A possible vision for the the future of JS.la
2. Reduce maintenance of lunch.js
3. Promote lunch.js

A vision for LA.js

The LA.js meetups have been some of the biggest I know. I remember events with over 300 attendees. I've been to conferences with fewer attendees. But like many other meetups, LA.js got hit by COVID and never fully recovered. I think it's time that we give it another go.

During the heights of the LA.js meetups, we had monthly events that were well attended, but mostly took place in just two parts of the city: Santa Monica/Venice or Downtown. That reason is that it's hard to get Angelenos all in one place, especially during the week during the evening rush hour traffic.

We have a vision for a different approach: have smaller meetups spread across the city's neighborhoods. Then come together once per year for a bigger event, either a Los Angeles city-wide meetup, or a real conference where we all meet but also invite the rest of the world.

This vision is very much inspired by @jed and the wonderful New York JavaScript community:
https://github.com/jed/building-brooklynjs

I had the pleasure to attend and speak at multiple NY borough JS meetups and it is one if not the most amazing community I have ever experienced. And it shows: a large number of internationally renowned speakers and leaders from the JavaScript community emerged from one of of NY's local meetups. I think we can follow their example, but LA style 😎🎬

Maintenance of lunch.js

A while back we already invested some time to automate some aspects. The upcoming events in the README are automatically updated based on issues with the lunch.js event label. But since we created the automation, GitHub published a new useful primitive: Projects. Projects can act as a form of database. They can be used to add structural information to issues. In our case, assuming we keep using one issue per lunch.js events, we could use a project to add information such as hosts, location, date/time, etc.

Our conclusion was to create two projects

1. Locations
2. Events

Locations would be a database of all current and past lunch.js meetups, with their locations, hosts, and a flag whether they are currently active or not.

Events would include a reference to a location, date/time, hosts, signups, attendees.

Once populated, we can use these projects to

1. Update the current automation to keep the README.md file updated
2. Automate the creation of the "Calling all champions" champions issues (example)
3. Automate the creation of lunch.js event issues for all active locations

Promotion

While we automate the overhead of running the lunch.js events, we plan on growing it as well. I don't know what the highest number of parallel lunch.js events was, but I think setting a goal of 10 would be a great first milestone.

For promotion, we talked about different aspects

1. lunch.js.la website - show all the active locations and events directly on the website. Ideally include a map showing them
2. Social media - think about how we could utilize Bluesky and Mastodon to promote the events more.
3. Lower barriers - make it simple to become a host and to find like-minded people

For 3. we had the idea to let folks just sign up to express interest in any LA.js events, with just a github login and a vague location or maybe a list of neighborhoods. The goal would be to start building out a database of interested LA.js-ers (we need a better name) that we can help to get together, maybe by encouraging a lunch.js event or in the future bigger events like meetups or workshops.

Other ideas

• topics / ice breakers - maybe give each lunch.js event a common theme for people to discuss, or a list of topics. But also let the hosts report back what folks are interested in, so that we as a community can get a feeling of what folks currently care about.
• website: use the website as the primary way to find events, sign up for events, learn how to host one, comment, etc. But keep using GitHub as a backend. @anguspiv volunteered to help with the front-end efforts, @gr2m offered to help with the backend integration to GitHub

[gr2m]

👋🏼 we were talking about finding a good data set for neighborhoods, I found this one: https://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/

[gr2m]

the data is available under creative commons! https://maps.latimes.com/about/index.html#the-data

[anguspiv]

Hey @gr2m,

I created the issues to separate out the website improvements, but I quickly noticed that the Call for Champions and the Location issues for next month, can quickly get buried in the other issues. A quick solution is that we create a Project and Board to display the current/upcoming Call for Champions and Lunch.js Events, and update the links to view the board instead of the list of open issues.

I was also thinking of creating a ticket to update the issue templates to use the Issue Forms to make it easier to create issues and the issues more consistent for the work going forward. Is this going to conflict with anything you are doing?

[gr2m]

no go ahead!

I quickly noticed that the Call for Champions and the Location issues for next month, can quickly get buried in the other issues

Maybe we can pin the latest issue for "Call for Champions" as well?