Meeting Notes October 20, 2019

Before you dive into the notes, please make sure you have read the following:

• Chapter's README
• Chapter's Vision

In Attendance

• Project Lead: Quincy Larson
• Timmy Chen
• Fran Zekan
• Jim Ciallella
• Alex Bott
• Jim Cummins
• Cecilia Constantine
• Chris Gonzalez
• Nikhil John
• Vivek Agrawal
• Ariel Barboza
• Dhara Vihol

Vision & Near-term Thoughts

• Introduction
  • Quincy is eager to replace Facebook groups and Meetup.com with Chapter
  • Facebook Groups gets spam and unrelated content & no attendee email exports
  • Meetup.com is expensive & no attendee email exports
  • Quincy said statistics confirm email is the most ubiquitous and frequently checked form of online communication
  • Some fCC Facebook groups have withered or slowed as the conversations were moved to other platforms, like Slack, Discord, etc.
  • Chapter would help organizers by allowing them to access email attendees and not have to rely on a specific communication platform.
  • fCC created a basic prototype of a local Chapter index for local FCC chapters to help with discovery and SEO, but the prototype will be replaced by similar MVP features in Chapter
  • Elastic Search on a Docker instance is used for the fCC Forums
  • Chapter would be used immediately by FCC and other non-profits and free groups
• Replacing Meetup.com will create a "discovery" problem for meetup organizers.
• We will make a best effort to help people find chapters by implementing good SEO practices.
• Chapter will initially be better for organizations that have an existing audience (social media, email, in-real-life) because they will be able to easily invite those people to Chapter versus having to build the audience AND bring them to Chapter.
• Engaging with an audience through a website's forum or messaging system is hard, so Quincy suggested organizers can rely on email to make announcements. Thus, there will be no built-in forum or messaging system for the MVP.

MVP

• MVP stories will be converted into cards on Github Projects
• We confirmed that "organization" is the top-level entity of a running server instance
  • Each organization can have 1 or more "chapters".
  • "Group" is not a term we'll use in the context of describing the user stories, as it has a vague context.
• Chris moved the "Filter Events" user story from issue #83 to #84, as we decided it was not part of an MVP
• Nikhil suggested, and Quincy agreed, to adding an "admin" user to go with the "organizer" and "participant"
• Users will automatically join a Chapter when they RSVP to it. As a future feature, we may allow RSVP by invite, or approval, only

Yes to TypeScript

• A vote was taken and the result of those who voted was 5-5.
• Quincy asking if the existing developers would agree to not abandon the development in the near-term. They agreed, so Quincy broke the tie and said we'll start with TypeScript.
• The initial files will by TypeScript files with mostly javascript inside.
• There will be minimal "typing" and the most active front-end developers said they will help people who have questions.
• Also, it was suggested that contributors could submit JS on a pull request and others can help add any TypeScript.
• Once there are basic examples inside the codebase it should act as an easy way for people to learn it.
• Chris was interested to learn TypeScript via being exposed to it through Chapter.

Next.js

Pros and cons were discussed, but it was suggested the concerns have easy workarounds and/or shouldn't be a problem the scope of the Chapter project.

Pros

• It's the up-and-coming framework with local meetup groups popping up
• Server Side rendering
• Uses styled-jsx out of the box which is not as steep of a learning curve as learning another CSS-in-JSS tool

Cons

• Not as mature as Express or Angular
• Has an issue with trailing slashes
• Style Components require some extra configuration to work

Review of Pull Request #78

• #78 contains the bare bones front-end and back-end setup and needs technical reviewers
• Fran (@Zeko369) will do a technical review of this critical PR.