Community Feedback Session at #ChiHackNight

hacknightfeedbackAt last night’s ChiHackNight, the group went through a community feedback session in order to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion. It’s the first time that Chi Hack Night as had a community feedback session in it’s three and half year history.

It was a great way for the group to listen to the community and to better understand what people want to get out of the group.

Chi Hack Night is organized by Derek Eder and Christopher Whitaker along with a volunteer leadership council. The average attendance has been upwards of seventy people. Every week, the group breaks out into smaller breakout groups led by a over a dozen volunteer leaders.

The Leadership Council meetings are open to anyone and publicly documented. They generally happen at least once a month.

For this hack night, the goal was to see how Chi Hack Night could improve. To do this, four boards were set up with the following questions:

  • What do you like about Chi Hack Night?
  • What would you like to learn from this community?
  • What kinds of presentations should would you like to see?
  • What could we do differently or better with this community?

Breakout leaders were named to help lead the discussion (Genevieve Nielsen, Rose Afriyie, Cathy Deng and Karl Fogel) and each led a group around the four boards. At each board, people were encouraged to write down on sticky notes what the answers to each of the questions. After five minutes, each group would rotate.

After all four groups have had a chance to answer the question, each group leader called out the top five ideas. The boards were then rolled into the Leadership Meeting so they could jot down all the ideas. Here’s the highlight reel:

You can check out the Leadership Meeting notes for the full results and here’s a writeup by