README.lrug

LRUG is a London-based community for anyone who is interested in the Ruby programming language, especially beginners.

LRUG provides online and offline opportunities to:

We want LRUG to be a diverse and inclusive community, united by an interest in Ruby, and so we want anyone who is interested in Ruby to be able to participate.

Code of Conduct

It’s of primary importance that everyone who wants to participate feels safe and welcome. When participating in LRUG, either online or offline, at Skills Matter or at the pub afterwards, we expect you to:

On the mailing list, we want to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio and while the organisers will step in as soon as they see poor behaviour, we encourage you to say something if you see it first. So please:

Incident Handling

We want everyone to feel welcome at LRUG, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), or technology choices. Accordingly, we will not tolerate harassment of our members in any form; not at the talks, not at the pub after the talks, or any other LRUG social meeting; not on Twitter or on any other online media.

Harassment includes invasions of personal space, exclusionary jokes/comments, and sexual language and imagery in talks, but this list is non-exhaustive: if you make anyone feel uncomfortable or unwelcome, you will be asked to leave.

If you’re still in need of clarification, there are a number of good resources online which we encourage you read. The main thing to remember though, is that if someone feels harassed or excluded by your words or actions, then those words or actions constitute harassment or exclusion. Your intent is not a factor.

All LRUG participants are accountable for their own behaviour. If you’ve behaved badly elsewhere, that may count against you here, because of the effect it has on other attendees.

If you experience or witness any harassing behaviour, please report it to a member of the organisation team.

Organisation team

LRUG is run by a team of volunteers from the London Ruby community:

Feel free to contact one of the organisers directly using the details above if you have any questions or comments about LRUG. As well as the individual details above, the following group contact details are available that will get in touch with all the organisers:

Meetings

We meet once a month at Skills Matter, usually on the second Monday. There are typically three talks and then we go to the pub. There’s always tea and coffee at Skills Matter, and sometimes there’ll be pizza; beer is limited to the pub afterwards.

To stay informed about our upcoming meetings you can:

Talks

Most of our meetings have talks from community members and we’re always looking for people to give a talk. If you’d like to give a talk you should email talks@lrug.org and suggest it.

Our goal is to accept any offered talk. If your talk is obviously about Ruby there’s no question about it; you can definitely give your talk. If it’s not so obviously about Ruby we’ll have a discussion first to see what the hook is for Rubyists. We’re quite an open-minded group, so the hook doesn’t have to be that clear. In the unlikely event that it turns out that LRUG isn’t a good home for your talk, we’ll do our best to come up with some alternative ideas for places you could give it.

Scheduling

Slots for talks are first-come, first-served. Once you’ve decided to give your talk we’ll let you know when a free slot will be available at a meeting. We usually have two or three talks per meeting, so if there are four people on our list of volunteers when you offer your talk it’s most likely that the third meeting is the one we’d schedule you for. Of course, people drop out or aren’t available for a specific meeting so you might get a slot sooner.

Our hosts, Skills Matter, request a four-week lead time for events. This means we try to arrange meetings about five or six weeks in advance. Combined with the depth of the volunteer stack, this can mean a three to four month gap between you proposing a talk and getting to give it to the group.

If there is a specific future meeting that would be most convenient for you, let us know and we’ll do our best to accommodate that.

Subject Matter

LRUG is a mixed-ability crowd; we have talks from first-timers just learning Ruby all the way up to people that have been using it for years. This means you can pitch your talk at any level and someone will get something out of it. It’s also a mostly technical crowd, so don’t shy away from getting into the nitty gritty of your topic. We’d prefer an in-depth discussion of a single aspect to a shallow overview of the whole thing.

Your talk should observe the code of conduct. Any talks that don’t will be stopped and the speaker asked to leave.

If you are using the projector you should favour large fonts and a high contrast colour scheme with dark text on a light background in anything you show. The default settings for most presentation applications are a safe bet, but you might have to re-configure your terminal or editor if you are using those for anything. Also note that while the projector will cope with most screen resolutions, it works best at 1024x768. Most presentation applications will automatically resize, but you might want to check your slides at that resolution.

Resources for Speakers

Whether you’re a first time speaker or a conference veteran, giving a talk can be a daunting experience. Luckily there are plenty of resources out there to help make your talk great! Searching google for advice for new speakers yields plenty of results, but here are a select few to get you started:

Timing

Our meetings are 1 hour 30 minutes long, with about 5-10 minutes reserved at the start for admin and announcements from the group. To make it simpler to organise filling the remining 80 minutes we offer three standard slot sizes for talks:

We combine these different slots to fill the meeting; for example two 40s, three 25s, or one of each. On rare occasions we use a single 80 minute slot for a panel discussion or practical event. Our February “lightning talk” meetings are always made up of eight 10 minute slots.

When proposing a talk think about the slot that it might best fit into. A slot isn’t how long your talk should be, but how much time you will get in front of the group. You can fill that time slot as you see fit (talk + questions, talk only, &c).

You shouldn’t feel like you have to fill the slot you pick. If you think your talk naturally lasts 15 minutes don’t feel like you should add another 10 minutes just to “fill” a 25 minute slot, nor should you attempt to compress it down to fit in a 10 minute slot.

To leave plenty of time for you to over-run, answer questions, and faff about with a laptop at the start we recommend a 30-35 minute talk in a 40 minute slot, a 20 minute talk in a 25-minute slot, and a 5-8 minute talk in a 10 minute slot.

After The Talks

When the talks are finished, usually around 8pm, most of the group head over to Singer Tavern. This part of the meeting is your opportunity to socialise with other LRUG members and speak with the presenters about their talks.

Just because we’re in a pub doesn’t mean you have to drink alcohol. If you do choose to drink alcohol we encourage you to explore the food menu and drink responsibly.

Although the venue for this part of the meeting is a pub and therefore feels more informal, be aware that the code of conduct still applies.

Sponsorship

LRUG is hosted by Skills Matter who provide the venue; make tea, coffee, & water available during the talks; film the talks; and handle registration. We don’t currently need venue sponsorship or an alternate venue.

We welcome sponsors of the meeting itself. In return for your sponsorship LRUG will:

  1. put your logo in the sponsor side-bar on the relevant meeting page on lrug.org
  2. mention the specifics of your sponsorship in the main details of the relevant meeting page on lrug.org
  3. mention the sponsorship in the meeting announcement email on the mailing list
  4. tweet about the sponsorship from @lrug at least once to announce it and once on the day as a reminder
  5. mention you at the start of the meeting, and make sure you have 30 seconds or so during our announcements section to talk to the group

LRUG is not a legal entity and we don’t have a bank account. So if you decide to sponsor a meeting we’ll leave it to you to arrange and pay for things directly. We’re there to help with any questions and suggestions though. We have three types of sponsorship available at each meeting, and you can choose to provide any or all in combination:

Running a give-away is a real favourite among attendees and allows you to control the budget you have to spend as you see fit. For example in September 2016 we ran a give-away of 20 books and in May 2016 we gave-away 5 tickets to a popular conference. We will run the logistics of the give-away through the mailing list and announce the winners on the night. You arrange to pay for the prizes and deliver them to the winners.

If you’d like to feed LRUG attendees before the meeting we normally suggest Pizza - it’s a safe bet for all tastes and easy to arrange in vegetarian and vegan options. We get around 60-100 attendees for an average meeting and it’s sensible to budget £400-600 for pizza. We’ll get some preferred vendor details from Skills Matter (we’ve used Firezza pizza in the past). You pay the vendor directly and arrange to have it delivered to Skills Matter on the day in time for the meeting. We’ll make sure Skills Matter know to expect it.

Skills Matter run a licensed bar that’s open until 10pm. A good number of attendees like to have a drink there after the meeting, and we will put you in touch with Skills Matter who can set up a tab at the bar in the venue for the amount you specify and invoice you afterwards. It’s worth budgeting £400-600 to provide drinks and we ask that you make this available as a bar tab to allow people to choose non-alcoholic drinks if they prefer.

If you would like to provide sponsorship you should email sponsors@lrug.org to find out when the next available sponsorship slot is and arrange the details.

About this document

The first draft of this document was written by Murray Steele, Tom Stuart and Aanand Prasad, drawing on a number of sources and discussions on the LRUG mailing list. Github provides a full list of contributors following the initial draft.

While it contains some information that is uncontroversial and unlikely to become rapidly outdated, it is intended to be a living document. Contributions and discussion about this document are very welcome. There are a number of ways of contributing:

  1. By opening an issue, or suggesting your changes in the form of a pull-request at this document’s Github repository
  2. By proposing or suggesting your changes on the LRUG mailing list.
  3. By privately contacting one of the organisation team.

All contributions can and will be discussed by any members of the community, and can be incorporated into this document when consensus has been reached.

License

This text is licensed as CC0; in summary, it is in the public domain and can be used and modified with or without attribution.