[mlpack] mlpack weekly video meet-up/meeting time survey

[Ryan Curtin]

Hey everyone,

As discussed in the NumFOCUS summit thread (quoted below), I think it's
a good idea to try the weekly informal meeting, but we need to find out
times that work for everyone.  Since we're all globally scattered,
probably we should switch up the times.  So I set up this Google Forms
survey to see what works for different people:

https://forms.gle/vzZEmcKs3giL9eiH9

If you are interested in participating and want to fill out that
document, that can help us find a good time.

While we wait for the survey responses to come in, we can have the first
"video meetup" on Thursday, Nov 21, at 1800 UTC (to do a little time
zone mapping, that's 10am PST, 1pm EST, 7pm CET, 11:30pm IST, and 3:00am
KST).  Sorry if that doesn't work perfect for everyone (I think this
will be especially bad for SangYeon unfortunately), but we'll have to
try different times now and then.

The meetup is informal: we don't have a specific agenda.  We can all
just show up to the zoom room below and talk about things that are on
our minds (which actually doesn't even need to be mlpack-related,
technically):

https://zoom.us/j/3820896170

Some topics we might end up discussing could include:

 - how our days are going :)
 - discussion of PRs to be merged before a release
 - help debugging some issues
 - discussion of general development directions
 - interactive PR reviews?

Anyway, I don't want to focus too much on an agenda, because the idea is
that it's freeform.  In fact, if some others wanted to put on meetups at
certain times, it would definitely be okay for us to have more than one!

On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 07:56:34PM +0100, Marcus Edel wrote:
> About the informal weekly meeting, should we schedule something, maybe for the end of the week?
> 
> > On 8. Nov 2019, at 00:10, Ryan Curtin <ryan at ratml.org> wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, Nov 07, 2019 at 01:37:16PM -0500, Marcus Edel wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >> 
> >>> mlpack video meetings:
> >> 
> >> What about we create a shared document (e.g. google docs) and use that to manage
> >> the meetings, if someone has a particular question or topic they like to discuss
> >> they can write it down before the meeting. This allows us to prepare for certain
> >> topics. We can also keep track of what was discussed in the meetings.
> > 
> > That sounds good to me if you want to set it up; alternately we can just
> > send an email to the list beforehand and people could respond to it with
> > ideas.  Either is fine honestly.
> > 
> >>> giving talks on mlpack:
> >>> 
> >>> mlpack talks/workshops - this is a very good point. I've been doing some of this
> >>> and it really pays off. The amount of user conversion you get by doing this is
> >>> superior to opportunistic discoveries of the library. And I truly believe we
> >>> need more users and more engagement. After all, that's why we build mlpack,
> >>> right? I would add that we also need talks and workshops that are *not* super
> >>> technical. For new users (consumers of the library I mean), metaprogramming is
> >>> not really attractive. Instead, these users are looking forward a
> >>> simple-useful-easy "Hello World" that delivers instantaneous value. Take a look
> >>> at scikit-learn for instance, it's all about examples and ready to consume
> >>> snippets.
> >> 
> >> Agreed, maybe we can put a list together with events (local/global) as a
> >> starting point.
> > 
> > Sounds good---I'll see if I can compile a list of events I'm interested
> > in in the near future and we can share it here or somewhere.
> > 
> >>> C++ notebooks:
> >> 
> >> I have a setup running that I can make accessible, Sylvain used Binder, which
> >> has some limitations like 1-2GB of memory, kernel shutdown after 10 minutes of
> >> inactivity. If I'm thinking about running neural network examples, we might run
> >> into the mentioned limitations.
> > 
> > Sounds good---we can also use some of mlpack.org's resources for this,
> > and NumFOCUS might be able to help with the resources also via
> > connections to large companies or something?  I'm not sure.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Ryan Curtin    | "Wha' happened?"
> > ryan at ratml.org |   - Mike LaFontaine
> 

-- 
Ryan Curtin    | "Hungry."
ryan at ratml.org |   - Sphinx