Pragmatic Book Club meeting 0: house keeping

Before we dived into the actual reading and discussion of the book, I got everyone together to figure some stuff out. To my delight 23 people came to the kick off meeting. I am fully expecting people to vote with their feet if they aren’t enjoying this exercise, which I will be fine about as long as some people stick it out 😳

Are you going to expense the book?

I checked with my man in finance about what would happen if 20ish people expensed a book and he said “that seems fine”. Of course the next issue is that expenses at the FT are run through some very ancient Oracle software that you have to be on the VPN to access. So the first agenda item was me walking through how to expense things. You may be able to omit this step.

Agree a reading schedule

Sorry to immediately get to virtue signalling, but “do things in your free time” is an inclusion issue because some people (me) don’t have any free time that isn’t allocated to childcare or sleeping. So I wanted to set the reading time and meeting time to be within work hours, and I wanted everybody in the team (including non-engineers) to be happy with that. This meant setting out a reading schedule that was one hour of reading a week, and 45 minutes for a discussion slot. This is probably the minimum viable reading time for a book club, and I don’t know how it’s gonna work out. We may need to revisit, you may be able to get away with more.

Agree your ground rules

Some things I wanted to discuss with whoever showed up, but some stuff was literally not up for discussion and so I set that out here.

Here’s what I’ve got, this reflects the kinds of things we go around saying without shame at the FT, a place full of very earnest people, but you should pick your own ground rules to suit where you work.

1. There are no stupid questions 💞

2. Everybody is welcome

3. We’ll figure out the rest as we go

And then I had a discussion with the group on the following:

1. Do you have to have done the reading to attend? — no but please don’t dominate the conversation if you haven’t read the chapter
2. Should be be splitting into smaller groups on weeks where a lot of people come (i think 23 people might be too many..?) — Yes, breakout groups of about six is about right
3. What should you do if you miss a week? — come along but see point 1
4. What do we do about the end of chapter exercises? — these are optional