[Wylug-discuss] Two Ideas for Meeting Sessions

[Dave Fisher]

Hi All,

Phil Driscoll wrote to me earlier suggesting that we run an 'ask the audience'
slot.  The idea's been raised before (by me among many others) and I think it's
something we should actively consider implementing soon.  When speakers are
sparse, it could replace an 'empty' session, but it could also have a regular
slot in a lengthened half-time break.  What do you think?

These are Phil's thoughts on the matter:

> How about a regular (i.e. every meeting) slot which is just an 'ask the
> audience' session.
> 
> I often find I'd like to ask around to see if anyone has any better ideas than
> Google on some issue (last night, I would have liked to know if anyone had
> had a play with IP video cameras as I've been tasked to set something up for
> our neighbourhood watch). However, the time to bring up such matters always
> feels like it should be after the speakers have done their stuff. The problem
> is that that is precisely when people are itching to go to the pub. The pub
> is probably a good place to ask the question, but some of us can't get there
> due to family commitments etc, and there's always going to be less than a
> full house anyway.

Along similar participatory lines, I wondered if anyone was brave or reckless
enough to consider running mini-usability tests during the odd meeting?

I was inspired by today's reference to the Better Desktop project
(http://betterdesktop.org/blog/) on slashdot.

It occurred to me that many of the non-programmers among our membership would
be quite capable of running a 15-30 minute test on a popular application that
we all use or would like to use.

It also occurred to me that many inexperienced or 'newbie' members might enjoy
being test subjects, e.g. being able to contribute to the improvement of open
source software without being expected to reach 5th Dan in shell-scripting
first ... or merely being able to test drive an application with help at hand? 

I also thought that this might be a 'sneaky' way of getting people to demo apps
in a way that that doesn't require them to pose as experts and face being
shot-down by know-it-all members of the audience.

We might even film the tests and send the videos off to relevant project teams.

Of course, I realise that such tests would be completely 'invalid' and
'unreliable' by academic criteria, but I don't think we need to bother too much
about that.  Providing the audience can restrain themselves from interrupting
the course of the test itself, we aught to turn up some interesting/useful
results.

In my experience, multiple 'cheap, quick and dirty' tests are just as likely
to turn up the 'big issues' as one very rigorous (i.e. expensive) test and
(more importantly) will do so at a sufficiently early stage to affect the
overall direction of a development project.

So how about it?  Is it just a mad-cap idea with no intrinsic merit at all, or
could we make something of it?

Dave