"Follow Along" as a pattern for technical gatherings
Rob Baker demonstrated the reskinning of a Plone site using only CSS and a paperclip (er, DIYPloneStyle) at last night's Boston Plone meeting. The content of the presentation was interesting, but what really struck me was how well the meeting format worked, despite some technical glitches.

Context

We had eight or so attendees, with varying levels of experience working with Plone and with CSS.

Goal

Everyone present was interested in learning or sharing experiences about altering the appearance of a Plone site. In addition, there was interest in the end result of the exercise: a design for what will be the Boston Plone website.

Solution

Rob had already developed a design, and taken notes on the steps he went through. At the meeting, he walked us through those steps, starting from a stock Plone installation. Nate had previously encouraged everyone to bring their laptop and follow along with the reskinning process on their own, so attendees had a chance to replicate Rob's work in their own environments.

How it worked

I've participated in two extremes of this sort of technical gathering:

1. everybody watches one person give a presentation
2. people break into groups and work together on some technical task(s), meeting up at the end to compare notes

The approach used at meeting was a nice mixture of structure and personal exploration. Since Rob had a clearly defined task to walk everyone through, we stayed mostly on-track, but actually getting things running on people's various OSes, software versions, and existing Plone installation quirks really brought out a bunch of the issues. Even though I personally missed Nate's message and neglected to bring my own laptop, participating in the communal debugging process left me feeling much more confident in my ability to launch a similar process on my own. The hardy crew who made the post-meeting trip to Boston Beer Works (the oatmeal stout was excellent) agreed that working through the glitches that popped up was much more educational than a seamless walkthrough would have been.

Big ups to Seth and Optaros for hosting, and to the labor union upstairs for partying down.
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