Meeting notes: General Meeting, 1 April 2014

Action items

ACTION on shepazu: create blog post draft about progress on compat tables
ACTION on JenSimmons: Create a blog post about home page improvements
ACTION: on Doug to send mail to opera
ACTION: each attendee of Fluent to send piggyback mail about what should be in a blog post about the Fluent Doc sprint
ACTION: on Julee to send out a 3 question survey about why people didn't show up
ACTION on Eliot to verify the content of the JS pages and sending out a request to the list or blog

Minutes

Eliot tells Renoir that there are errors on the server. Renoir goes to investigate.
TOPIC: static site infrastructure
shepazu ...landing page, home page, etc.
...Jen ask for changes in repo
Renoir found a NodeJs static stie genrator, mirrored it on Github
Jensimmons: looks good
Shepazu: need to make it easy and obvious for someone helping
Just go to the repo with a similar URL to the live site, and make a pull request
...Ppl have aasked to be able to help via GitHub. Yay, Renoir! and Jen!
Shepazu: Jen has pushed out the front page. Write a short blog post?
JenSimmons: yup
shepazu: add a little about pushing changes with GitHub, too.
...Renoir can help with details, too.
TOPIC: Compatibility Table Project
shepazu: Renoir's completed the code infrastructure
...and has an instance running
...running on test
...will generate tables.
...Jen, can you look at the tables and do the minimum work to make them look nice?
...The compat table extension is working
Jen says yes.
...takes the data and puts it on the web page in a way that also caches, and caches properly.
...Critical moving forward, since only some data will change and we don't want to refresh it all every time
...on top of the MediaWiki extension
...So, we can generate the tables.
...But we can only generate the data.
...Fro's solution had a problem with timeout with Kuma
...Renoir talked with Pat Tressle to make a crawler that wd get all the data from MDN
...so now we have the infrastructure. We just need all the data.
....Not a challenging part of the project.
....Eliezer or Renoir can put it into templates, too.
...we need to figure out how to call each data thing.  Should be template-driven.
...You'd only have to put the name of the feature in and it goes off and grabs the compat table info,
...so that's tremendous.
...Goes far to completing CSS!
RenoirB: on /test, I put implementation on the pages.
* eliezerb is following the meeting on IRC
...We need to find a way to work around the block on MDN.
Shepazu: MDN is still unable to give us a dump of the compat data
...it would be good for us to prepare a blog post about the tables' progress.
ACTION on shepazu: create blog post draft about progress on compat tables
ACTION on JenSimmons: Create a blog post about home page improvements
TOPIC: Recap Doc Sprint Fluent Conf
shepazu: I was a mess, b/c I had to present next day.
...Jen, too?
julee: About 8 people showed up out of 80 who signd up.
...2 of those were "not really engaged"
...123 changes to the docs. Pretty significant.
...Good thing: Scott Murray
JenSimmons: Even though there weren't many people, they stayed all day and participated.
...They were engaged.
....even though there were 8 people, there were 2-3 women who were enthusiastic.
julee: May have been "meet-up junkies"
jensimmons: still OK, though.
...there's an assumption that if we're open source with a lot of volunteer hours, the only way it's going to be successful is with serious cheerleaders.
...."Yeah!!!!! Welcome to Nerddom" and that energy helps to keep people coming back.
....OK, so we didn't have a lot of people, there was something happening that I wouldn't call a failure.
...even though it didn't go the way we wanted, it went well.
...and this must be a conscious thought. It doesn't happen by itself.
shepazu agrees
julee: Do we want to associate with conferences?
...people like Carlos--in the bay area--and PAul V, too.
...by the data, European doc sprints are more predictable about who shows up
....maybe we support them more?
shepazu: observations: planning a sprint when people have other things to do or have expended or are about to expend a lot of energy, seems counterproductive.
....we should be overt that we're learning this.
....maybe we can have a different event than a doc sprint at these things.
eliot: like bof sessions or meetups about how to get involved (for an hour) and mention another full doc sprint
shepazu: ...we talked to Opera and identified the right person from Opera about getting more involved.
shepazu: Head of dev rel from Opera was there.
...Scott Murray (D3 expert) showed up. Good talk about SVG.
ACTION: Doug to send mail to opera
ACTION: each attendee of Fluent to send piggyback mail about what should be in a blog post about the Fluent Doc sprint
JenSimmons: do we know why 70 people didn't show up?
ACTION: on Julee to send out a 3 question survey about why people didn't show up
shepazu: we just want (politely) to know why people didn't show up
jensimmons: How did they find out about it? Why did they sign up? And then, why not show....
shepazu: We should follow up with this discussion on the list
...how'd you hear about it? Did you show up? If not, why? Or something like that.
TOPIC: Web Platform Wednesday
julee: JS docs didn't get good response, and it's documented elsewhere
...do we want to do something we have more impact in, like SVG?
shepazu: YAY!
ACTION on Eliot to verify the content of the JS pages and sending out a request to the list or blog
shepazu: Regarding SVG: I can a) follow up with Scott Murray about having a doc sprint at an SVG conference in England
...b) ask the SVG and d3 community --a small community--to help out with SVG
julee: we should pull in SVG designers, too
shepazu: MediaWiki doesn't let you do SVG on its pages. Looking for a workaround
...love the idea of designers making attractive tutorials
...2 main uses: data visualization and icons. We need several tutorials for those.
julee: sprite sheets, responsive SVG
...what containers you can put SVG in
...if Dapple doesn't work well, we could use Code Pen or something else
shepazu: Dabblet is fine.
sd/Dapple/Drupel
shepazu: scripting SVG, too