What should Code4Lib NorCal Do?

Discussion led by Eric Phetteplace

• What do we call ourselves?
  • Several suggestions, but Code4Lib NorCal won the vote

• Locations:
  • Sonoma might be an option.
  • San Luis Obispo would be good for NorCal SoCal meetups.
  • UC Berkeley and Stanford might be good hosts.
  • California Library Association meeting is in Oakland this year, November 7-9. Samuel Merritt University in Oakland could host something for Code4Lib NorCal.
  • Internet Archive? Maybe a tour or a hackathon there?

• Frequency:
  • SoCal group has met twice in the last six months.
  • Twice a year to start for us might be good.
  • Times that don't conflict with National Code4Lib, so fall and summer.

• Organization:
  • We need people to handle some basic organization. Eric P. will coordinate a meeting to figure out those questions on Google Group.

• Outreach:
  • Our group is almost entirely academic libs. Should we do outreach to public libraries? Patrick Newell would be willing to work with someone else to do this outreach.
  • Aaron Collier will reach out to the SoCal people to find out if anyone would want to do a joint meeting.
  • West Coast representation at National Code4Lib tends to be light. How can we make west coast libs more aware? Outreach to tech librarians.
  • Could we sponsor a diversity scholarship to National Code4Lib meeting? In conjunction with SoCal group. $500 should be enough to help get someone there.
  • More outreach to the non-profit open access, open data, hackerspace communities. Big presence of these in the Bay Area. The Common Crawl Foundation is one that immediately comes to mind, as does Code for America where I've attended meetup events in the past

• Types of events:
  • A Hackathon meeting, something hands on. The ALA Midwinter hackathon was a good model. It was structured, and focused on 2 specifc APIs. One was more guided (showing people how to work with the API) and one was more free form (people who already knew how to work with APIs).
  • If we did a hackathon it would be good to combine it with a meetup over a two days span to make travel easier for more far-flung folks.

• What next?
  • Eric P. will start to get discussion over the Google Group list over next steps.
  • Aaron will see if we can configure an RSS feed for the Google Group.
  • We should advocate for more capacity at National Code4Lib (although it's tricky to find a balance between being open to people who want to come and maintaining a small conference)
  • If we want to start thinking about hosting National Code4Lib in California we should start taking as a group. Might also want to collaborate with SoCal to find a good location.