We had the second organizers’ meeting for DrupalCampToronto 2009 today. I started a number of Google Documents for keeping track of minutes and tasks, and I also shared the sponsorship letter I’d revised extensively. One of the organizers mentioned that he had already found the letter useful. Hooray!

What worked well:

• Asking someone else to take minutes made it clear that minutes are a rotating duty, which is good because it gets more people to pay attention and contribute, and it’ll help me see other ways of doing things.
• Sharing all the documents through Google Docs made it easy to see changes in real-time and track the revision history. The interface was also more fluid than typical wikis.

What can work even better next time:

• Task management – I’ve set up a Google spreadsheet for quickly capturing tasks, but there should be a better way to do this so that people can easily filter the tasks. BasecampHQ would be interesting, but it’s expensive and probably overkill. Maybe Manymoon?
• Document management – I’ve shared each of the Google docs with the mailing list, and I’ll share more protected documents with individual people. It would be good to put together a central workplace.
• Next meeting – We decided on the rhythm of meetings (every other Monday, same time, same place), but that would’ve probably been better to do earlier in the agenda rather than at the end, after another Drupal-related discussion.
• Food – Gotta get better at nudging David @linuxcaffe to nudge _us_ about ordering the specials… =) He’s a great guy, Linuxcaffe is such a nice venue, and I’d like to make sure it works out well for everyone. It’s easy to forget to order and eat when the conversation’s flowing, but you end up starving when things are done!
• Tables – a gap between tables is a good thing, so people can get in and out easily. =)

Learning more about organizing events… Cool!

I set out to geek the heck out of Toronto's hippest geeks, and I did.
I showed them Emacs as they'd never seen it before—and even that was
a tiny fraction of my config. Lots of cool stuff behind the scenes,
too. When I showed them M-x doctor (the Emacs psychotherapist),
someone shouted out, “Is Emacs talking to you?” I laughed and
continued. What I *really* should've done was break the sequence of my
presentation, hook up the speakers, and tell them about Emacspeak –
presentation sequence be darned. ;) Oh, if they only knew how easy it
was to make jokes reality under Emacs! I remember writing my ‘bot
implants' – the hippie-expand code I used to answer questions really
really quickly on IRC…

Anyway. That was FUN. And it was relatively easy to get through,
especially with the cue system I made (Emacspeak rocks!). I'll talk
about that some other time. It's a really cool hack and well worth exploring.

SO. The democamp.ca folks will eventually get
around to posting a vidcast. In the meantime, I have a 431MB MPEG
movie that I need to either downsample or cut up in order to put
online, maybe on YouTube. I don't have
enough memory or hard disk space to play around with this (have you
seen my computer?!), but I'll happily put the video up if we can
figure out how to go about doing that.

If you enjoyed the talk, missed it, or just want to hear/see me bounce
up and down about Emacs some more, come to the Linux Caffe
on Saturday (Oct 28, 2006) from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. I'll be there,
and we might even see about having some kind of mini-show / vidcast. I wonder if
David has a projector. =)

That was fun! Can't wait to do it again!

Random Emacs symbol: comint-input-sender-no-newline – Variable: Non-nil directs the `comint-input-sender' function not to send a newline.

The hot chocolate at Linux Caffe (Grace
and Harbord Sts.) never fails to perk me up. Yesterday was no
exception even though it was a day particularly in need of hot
chocolate.

David (the proprietor) received a whole bunch of free books and a
number of free T-shirts from Apress. The shirts were adorable! They
read “Every time Linux boots, a penguin gets its wings.” I batted my
eyelashes at David and he very kindly let me have one. =) I'm so
hacking it.

Seneca was there, hacking away as always. Mike Fletcher was at the
same table. Ian Garmaise had briefly introduced us at the other
night's DemoCamp afterparty, but I hadn't really had a chance to
talk to him. It was great discovering mutual friends: Chris and Emily,
whom I know through tango and renaissance dancing and whom he knows
through jazz. He knows a bunch of interesting people, and I'm looking
forward to meeting them at a party at his place on Saturday. Whee!

In retrospect, it was good that I ended up over there for hot
chocolate. =) Life works out one way or another.