We’ve had a slow start to the Refresh Aberdeen year, so to focus efforts on upcoming events I pushed out a poll last night asking for feedback on our ideas for the coming season. The results so far have been pretty interesting.
With one thing and another the start of the year has flown past and I’ve not been on top of organising as many events for Refresh Aberdeen as I’d like. Partly this has been down to pressures of work commitments, and partly to my work on constraints. Whatever the reason – this weekend is reboot weekend.
One of my favourite things about Refresh is that it has a really open brief. We’ve done code retreats, movie nights, talks at a gallery, pub meetups, javascript competitions, and even sparked a project or two.
I’m keen to keep this diversity alive, but want to avoid putting large chunks of time into organising events that there isn’t a demand for. So I thought I’d throw the ideas out to the community to see what goes down well.
Options options options
So I knocked up a quick replacement homepage for refreshaberdeen.com, with a simple anon poll system. It’s tempting to ask people for their email / twitter etc… to litter the page in smiley avatars, but we’re interested in broad numbers, rather than profiling the group. I also think an anonymous poll is more likely to be genuine, as people don’t feel the need to be seen to ‘eat their vegetables’ by marking the more worthy events. We shall see.
Night Owls
I pushed out the first messages about the poll late on a Saturday evening, and saw a nice flow of votes through the rest of the night. The top runners were all new events we haven’t run before. Creative code, Kickstarter Jam and 36 Hour Startup did notably well.
Does that suggest that those voting on a Saturday night are the workaholic entrepreneurs still at their keyboards, but with a secret hankering to learn Processing?
Early Birds
The vote switched around quite a bit on Sunday morning. As I write this the PVA Talks Nights, and the After Work Meetups are string favourites among this mornings voters – although the creative code is also doing really well.
Presumably these more socially focussed folk were too busy to vote last night, preoccupied with being all sociable.
Meetup
Once we have a good number of votes the plan is to have an after work informal meetup in town in late May or early June. This will be an opportunity to discuss the ideas, gather teams to organise each of the top ones, and start planning the calendar in some more detail. Mainly though, it’ll be a chance to catch up with folk, so everyone is welcome. You won’t get strong armed into volunteering!
As ever, I’d appreciate it if you spread the word about the poll. Anyone in the creative / digital / web space should find something to love in the Refresh Aberdeen calendar, so send them over to RefreshAberdeen.com.
We also have a presence on most of those social network things. So follow / +1 / like / etc… to get our updates in your feeds:
Steven Milne 