What’s your flow?
How do you welcome people to the space?
How do you provide an intro to the night? (ppt? no ppt?)
If you have any materials to share, that’d be amazing!
Our brigade goals for the intro:
At OpenOakland our format is roughly, 5 minute presentation about what OpenOakland is, do a quick round of introductions (of projects, and people), and then announcements for the room.
We try to break out into groups to work about 15-20 minutes from the start of the meeting. Our goals are the same as yours - a balance between helpful for the newcomers without being too repetitive for the oldcomers.
Here is the intro presentation we use:
Most of the good bits happen during a subsequent onboarding presentation. One of us (usually @ramymik) takes the time to meet each newcomer in more depth and give them advice on how to engage.
For in-person meet-ups, we usually have about 30 minutes before we start to eat, mingle, network. We usually use this time to welcome new folks and explain the brigade / Code for America relationship and mission. Our agenda usually includes:
Here’s our meeting agenda/template
After introductions, I’ll give a 2-4 minute of what open cleveland if there’s multiple new attendees (which are most hack nights) and I had been concerned that it’s not really useful for the regulars but after hearing from the regulars, they see that the short intro is worth doing for the new attendees.
I also purposely try to get there 15-20 minutes before the meeting starts and personally chat up each of the new attendees and find out what they’re interested in; why did they come; what did they hope to get out of this event. This is also helpful since we don’t have any permanent sign-age at our meeting space and new attendees can find out where to go at our venue