Skill sharing groups

This page is for a list of CoTech "skill sharing groups", started at the Newcastle 2019 meeting.

We want to:

Make it easier for people to share skills and knowledge among the coops in CoTech
Make it easier to ask questions from relevant people in the co-ops
Build links and relationships between members in CoTech

Groups are free to start up and organise as they wish; they may choose

their own name (Guild, etc)
their own topics of interest
their own preferred methods of communication (Forum, Slack, and categories and channels, etc)
- (see also Infrastructure and Communication)
their own method of organisation (but the person who proposes a group should organise it to start with)

Requirements for new groups

The topic should be of interest to more than one co-op, and should have an element of mutual aid
There is more than one proposer that agrees on the desirability for the group
The proposers take joint responsibility for organising the group
The group areas of experience/expertise are advertised internally so that any CoTech member can come to them with an issue

Recommendations for new groups

to create a page on the Discourse Forum
to hold a face-to-face meeting to kick-off, and to have this as regular as possible
to have an instant messaging channel to communicate through

Groups should be accessible to everyone, and thus we ask that whatever a group chooses, it makes sure it keeps its details up to date on this page. This way, new people can always find out how to contact them.

See the CoTech Skills sharing category on the Discourse forum.

Established groups

This initiative was started at Newcastle 2019 so groups may take a little time to establish.

When a proposed group has enough members and feels ready to start properly, please move the details to this section, saying in particular what kinds of question you are happy to answer from CoTech members.

Groups proposed or in formation

Junior developers group

See the forum message where Chantelle has posted the invitation, please see contact details below.

chantellerobinson@protonmail.com

Meta-skill sharing groups

Simon Grant (Cetis LLP) will steer the formation of this group. We will act as a resource for starting and managing these groups. Members so far:

Simon asimong@gmail.com
James james@opendataservices.coop

DevOps / Sysadmin

We are probably all using Docker for various tasks, at least three co-ops have their own GitLab servers, most are using Ansible and at least one is using Salt, we had an Ansible session at the CoTech gathering in November 2018, see the Discourse thread for what we might do next.

Political Tech Projects

This is a skills sharing group for organising and running projects for social action, in particular volunteer & open-source efforts for technology deployed for social good

Please see the Discourse thread where this group was born