So we’re thinking about changing the name to the current iteration of the weekly meeting for the Stan community. We would like to poll the community and see what Stan users would like the name to be for the weekly meeting and have a name that resonates better with the Stan community. The meeting is designed for everyone to attend and everyone should feel welcome to attend, the more the merrier. What would would be the best name for the Stan community meeting?
@bparbhu As this meeting has always been a derivation of the local Columbia group, including but not limited to logistical constraints, I recommend working with the @SGB to set up an official open meeting, along with some minimal governance to ensure that it is truly a community-lead effort and not just a community-invited effort.
Happy to put this to SGB’s agenda. To me the weekly meeting has always been a community-led event: announced every week, everyone can join and have voice heard. Every community has a history, and I kind like this gathering has a backstory in room 601. So personally I’d find an official opening and governance too formal.
And unfortunately community history is often exclusionary. I have my own problems with the Columbia meeting, but I have also spoken to multiple people in the community who do not feel welcomed nor comfortable at those meetings.
Fyi, I’ve been attending the meetings (usually silently) for about a year now and have observed only one instance of anything remotely uncivil, and in that instance it was immediately addressed by the meeting mod. So possibly the culture has changed since your experiences?
I’m super glad that this has been your experience @mike-lawrence! I would suggest that it’s worth remembering that your experience of the culture of a particular group do not represent the universal experience for all people (something I always have to remind myself!). That said, I would also find an official opening and governance too formal, but perhaps there’s a middle ground with the meeting listed on the website with a little statement of purpose and link to past summaries (if folks decide to do that)?
One thing to maybe consider is whether this meeting is development (code and community) focussed or help/user focussed? It might sound counterintuitive but I think being upfront about the purpose might make it more inclusive because folks will know what to expect. :)
For sure; indeed, I almost wrote a parenthetical qualifying that my perceptions were contingent on my likely-biased-in-myriad-ways brain. I do invest a decent amount of identity in progressive allyship, so if there were events of harm I failed to perceive I’d be fairly surprised and humbled. Regardless of anyone’s faith in my perception & meta-cognition, I think there should be non-zero weight given to the possibility that things have changed, just as I accept non-zero credibility that I’ve missed something and am more biased than I thought.
But it certainly sounds like dynamics from the early history of the project have caused alienation, and it seems prudent to discuss as a group how we can repair that situation.
I stopped attending this meeting for a while and having rejoined, found it to be greatly changed for the better.
for quite a while now all developer decisions have been made via Github or Discourse discussions - necessarily so because it has been quite a while since all of the stakeholders on any given issue were in the room.
what is the purpose of the meeting? at this point, maybe like the coffee sessions at a conference. kicking around ideas, sounding things out. a bunch of new faces, therefore new ideas, new energy.
admittedly, an IRL meeting is going to be very inconvenient for at least 1/3 of the globe.
@SGB thought it could be a good idea to have a globally pinnend announcement that states there is a (mostly) weekly meeting anyone can join. Then @bparbhu could maybe link up with that pinnend announcement in the weekly invites with agenda threads. Would that work to make Stan: The Gathering more accessible and inviting for even more people?