The Solr community currently holds "Virtual Meetups" each month. All are welcome to attend and propose their own prospective topics for discussion. Discussion topics themselves may take many forms: attempts to break logjams and get specific JIRA tickets "unstuck", demos of Solr features or related functionality, user or contributor stories, etc.
Organizer Checklist
Making the meetup happen takes a small amount of administrative effort from a volunteer, who is responsible for organizing and hosting that month. Organizing a meetup typically involves the following steps:
- Start a thread on dev@ to plan to meetup - Usually this thread gets started towards the end of the preceding month, in order to leave enough time for planning. It usually gets created with the title: "[DISCUSS] Community Virtual Meetup, MONTH YEAR". There may not be an organizer for the meetup yet, so this first step may be done by anyone with a mind to (esp. the organizer from the previous month, who may be looking to pass the torch)
- Solicit an organizer - Usually the first goal of the planning thread is to find a volunteer to serve as organizer. If no one volunteers, ping Jason Gerlowski who has volunteered to serve as a fallback/default organizer for the near future.
- Decide on a day and time - The organizer's first job is to suggest a day and time for the meetup. While an effort should be made to accommodate as many folks as possible finding a single time for a global community may not always be possible. So while the organizer should be flexible, they should also feel empowered to preference their own availability in case of any conflicts. They're doing the legwork - they need to be able to attend.
- Create a Meeting Notes page for that month's meetup (Confluence) - The 2023-02-06 Meeting notes page can be used as a template. The page might not have much content until near or after the meeting, but it's important as a placeholder.
- Schedule a video call and get a link for attendees to use - Meetups have mostly used "Google Meet" without huge problems, though that isn't required.
- Beware that the free tier of Google Meet has a hard "kick" at 1 hour. Organizers can work around this by signing up for a 14-day free trial that Google Meet offers, but it's still not ideal.
- Share the links to the meeting and the Notes page - Once there's a link for the meeting (e.g. meet.com) and the Notes page (Confluence), share those on the dev@ planning thread, and invite potential attendees to add any topics they'd like to discuss to the Meeting Notes page.
- Create a Meetup.com event – https://www.meetup.com/apache-solr-virtual-community-meetups/ This is useful both for advertising/awareness, tracking attendee interest, and conveniently creating a calendar invite. Clone a previous event and edit it (Only hosts can do this; ask Ishan to be one if needed). The time is entered in IST even if you don't live in this timezone. Indicate it's an online event and use the proper direct link for attending in the input field for that. In the description, use the rich text features to ensure a link is clickable; it's not automatic.
- Advertise the Meetup in ASF Slack - ASF Slack has a #solr-dev channel which is a great place to plug the meetup and make sure everyone is aware. It may be helpful to do this both when the meeting date has been picked, and on the "day of" a few hours before.
- Attend the Meeting
- Add Initial Summary of Meeting to Notes page - Following the meeting, provide an initial summary of the discussion and any takeaways. This is best-effort, and other volunteers should augment or correct as necessary.