# CodeRefinery community

Please take a look at these questions and answer as many as you like during the week (feel free to log out to stay anonymous)

## What is the CodeRefinery community to you?

- a place where it feels safe to ask questions around the coderefinery workshop, but also beyond
- a place to get some interesting tips that i didn't know i needed to know (TIL)
- RSE side that likes teaching
- A small group of people that found each other and want to make the (research)world a better place + a slightly larger group of people that find the topics more or less interesting and more or less follow what is happening
- a place to share working experience and interactions with those having similar interest
- i like the brainstroming discussion on varied topics
- place to get feedback and input on ideas and tasks
- place to learn things and ask for help +1
- place where there is a lot of discussions going on
- …

## Do you feel engaged in the community? Why? Why not?

- Yes, because my questions often get answered.
- Yes/No, you get response, but I am not very engaged here.
- No, I do not spend enough time on chat or on issues enough due to time
- I feel welcome, but also don't spend so much time on Zulip – not to mention social media +1
- partially engaged as i have other work to do, but i will take more time for interactions within the community
- No, except for the monday morning hello I do not engage in discussions

## What makes you 'hang around' here (in zulip)?

- following interesting conversations +1
- find colloborators for non-academic ideas
- Coordinating in projects or tasks, +1
- Participate in the information flow +1
- Summary of CR meeting, workshop planning and coordination, +1
- Get updated information about activities
- Monday-morning-hello, it gives a good feeling of community
- Way to tell/hear about other interesting tech stuff: internal social media.

## What makes you not want to 'hang around' here (in zulip)?

- too much happening, partly unstructured
- I would like to see some clean up for the channels, not to mention the topics :dizzy_face:
- information overflow, hard to follow +2
- ...
- Hard to find relevent information quickly

## How could we improve that?

- I don't think information overflow is a big issue, but I just ignore irrelevant threads
- There are some duplicate discussions eg. about workshop, lessons and DRA -> clean up
- Those who find that there is not enough structure suggest how we can improve the structure?
- at least remove duplicate discussions/topics/threads
- Oh maybe we need also some memory refresh on the terminology :D
- Did I mention duplicate discussions? :P
- so is there an expectation that somebody cleans up after others and moves/renames/merges?
- Weekly/monthly digest in a newsletter/blog +1+1
- Specific purpose threads, that are deleted after serving the purpose (e.g. workshop chat for March) +1
- why not solve it with "mark as read" or unfollowing - to simplify search?
- It helps to mark messages as read on threads where one is out of sync - kind of refollowing a thread.

## What do other communities you are a part of do better?

- event sharing
- acknowledging we are a community instead of only work collab or something.
- newsletters
- in CSC RocketChat we have a small set of default channels that everyone gets into when they join.
- If that is not technically possible in Zulip then some other way to introduce the minimum basic channels
- yes we have that in Zulip and we can configure what the min basic channels should be
- we do have that, they are announce general help lessons new-members nordic-rse TIL
- Dedicated admins
- sharing the work

## How could we gain more workshop instructor interest, what may keep them from joining?

- stream format and site of the workshop
- no train the trainer training offered lately+4
- What we have now has worked so far: thus we don't ask around enough for more people as much as we could.
- Simplify workshop complexity
- Ask peopel directly "do you want to be an instructor? I'll mentor you."
- when organising the training event, directly ask who will get onboard to be instructors for xxx session.
- when close to the workshop, ask who will be active helpers for specific sessions (if you ask me about this 3 months before the workshop, it is difficult for me to decide as i may have other activities that I have to be there).
- ...
- What do I get in return ?

## Other than an open chat, weekly team meetings and the workshops, what could we provide to the community to engage more? (as much detail as possible)

- community calls
- They were not so popular were they?
- Could it be a zoom/chat session?
- clear calls for "please do this" (not just teaching)
- Maybe the GH board would function as such?
- Ask MJ for tips in PBI refinement (well maybe in a couple of months)
- recognizing different levels
- levels of what?
- Telling people what to do? Can be hard to step up but maybe people want to do more but don't know what, someone specifically asking you helps.
- microtasking
- regular Q/A sessions to provide support
- ...

## What could make 'community calls' worth ones (random person on zulip) time?

- topical +1
- engagement possibility
- I think this is not enough as such -> a random person needs a reason to engage with someone. What would these reasons be? A need of help at least.
- anyone new that comes can leave with something to do (if they want)
- interesting topics to learn from and not a place to get more tasks to do
- user stories
- sharing experiences about conference/meeting, and other onsite/online activities that are relevant to CodeRefinery trainings
- They also need to know about all the good possibilities beforehand

## Any other thought about communities you may have

- BYOC (bring your own code) sessions could be made a thing? -> "coderefinery garage"
- Connection to RSE can bring people on
- networking with research community ->sessions where we address a particular research community
- presence in events and event organize own events
- ...
- ...