Meeting Notes May 13, 2022

Before you dive into Chapter, please make sure to read the following:

• Chapter's README
• Chapter's Vision

In Attendance

• Quincy Larson - Dallas, TX USA
• Oliver Eyton-Williams - Brussels, Belgium - Full-time with freeCodeCamp and some time is now allocated to Chapter
• Jim Ciallella - Greenville, SC USA
• Tom Mondloch - Wisconsin USA - works with the learn platform and curriculum
• Naomi Carrigan - Vancouver, WA USA - works with fCC on curriculum
• Muhammed Mustafa - India
• Devin Lane - San Francisco, CA USA - Dev and Musician
• Christopher Ehrlich - Vienna, Austria
• Rafael D. Hernandez - Virginia, USA - works with fCC on Spanish translations
• Phil Sawatsky - Woodstock, Ontario Canada
• Brad Taniguchi - Los Angeles - Typescript developer
• Eliot Sanford techieEliot Jackson, Mississippi USA - Leads fCC Study Group and Developer
• Illenia Magoni - works with fCC
• Ismail Tlemcani

Project Updates

• Quincy talked about the desire to deploy Chapter to serve meetup groups, like freeCodeCamp (fCC) study groups, to decrease the cost and friction of coordinate events. In the case of fCC, this could be thousands of groups and the cost of hosting these on traditional platforms isn't sustainable for fCC or many other organizations around the world.
• Oliver said the user interface (UI) is in good shape and there aren't any major gaps in the UI.
• The authentication libraries are in place, but the application has yet to implemented authorization (roles and permissions).
• The MVP Issues are up-to-date and provide a solid list of issues for contributors to review.
• Event changes are currently only send over email. There's still a desirable feature to update Google calendars automatically. We went back and forth on this issue and it's still going to be explored for MVP.
• The target it to have an slimmed-down MVP application that 5 or 10 selected freeCodeCamp chapters can test out by the summer.
• Thanks to gikf (sanity on chat) and Oliver for getting the schema up to date via #958

Review of MVP Issues

• There's currently no user interface for banning users. Tom asked if this is an MVP worthy issue and Oliver said it's easy enough and there's already some things in place to make it happen.
• We moved the Demo video feature to the Roadmap issues since Oliver already did one for the fCC July 2021 Summit
• We moved the [Search bar feature to the Roadmap since there will initially be about 10 fCC chapters testing the first iteration of the application.
• Closed issues on the Roadmap are for future consideration, after the MVP, and we will re-open those issue as needed.
• We talked a good deal about updating calendars, particularly Google Calendar, automatically using .ics file sent with emails. We have previous research that suggests Meetup.com and Eventbrite .ics files do not update calendars when an event changes, or when a new .ics file is sent. However, Google Calendar uses .ics files with a METHOD:REQUEST that do automatically update events on a Google Calendar when an updated .ics file is received in a Gmail inbox.
• Quincy suggested about 90% of freeCodeCode newsletter recipients use Google / Gmail and he believes a focus on Google Calendar API is warranted and he shared concerns about if the .ics/iCal/webcal file direction is the most usable and reliable way to keep calendars up to date.
• The fCC team talked about trimming the initial scope of role-based authentication to lighten the MVP. The organizer role may not be implemented until later to cut down on the somewhat duplicate needs of owners, administrators, and organizers
• Any future meetings will be announced on chat if/when they are necessary.