Racket meet-up Saturday 1 April at 18:00 UTC 
At this meet-up:
Meet-up time at your location: 2023-04-01T18:00:00Z / timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter
In the 'Racket Room': https://gather.town/app/wH1EDG3McffLjrs0/racket-users
Racket meet-ups are on the first Saturday of EVERY Month at 18:00 UTC
30 minutes but can overrun (it usually lasts ~1hr)
EVERYONE WELCOME 
Stephen 
Racket meet-up tomorrow at 2023-04-01T18:00:00Z in The Racket Room (gather.town)
See you there
Stephen
Firstly: my apologies - I set the wrong time on the discord event.
We effectively had two meet-ups;
The first included Sage @slg giving a demo about his work innovating in software distribution & package management space.
As I got the time wrong I’d appreciate it if the attendees could reply with a short summary of the first half of the meet-up for the record I’d really appreciate it.
(I missed most of the demo and don’t know what else was discussed)
@slg mentioned that he would be setting up a site https://typeand.click/ but in the meantime was happy to be contacted.
Also discussed was the influential poet Owen Barfield and The Muse in the Machine by David Gelernter.
The second session included discussion of Racketfest; a higher number of Racketeers (in a very nice venue) enjoyed excellent presentations. Not least was Untitled Maze Game (Pacman) by Jens @soegaard. (I had a first go at making a level - it was fun and easy so have a go)
@dominik.pantucek got us very excited by sharing that there is a possibility to hold next years Racketfest in Prague
These was also discussion of text interfaces (Plan9!) with the Expeditor (Terminal Expression Editor) and Unicode Tables packages being called out as enabling building-blocks if someone wanted to build a full Text User Interface in Racket.
Finally, we have identified that Gather is now blocking more than 10 attendees to the meet-up (we have previously had many more)
…so we need to find a solution.
PS please let me know if I’ve omitted anything
Firstly: my apologies - I set the wrong time on the discord event.
So. It was a discord event, not a discourse event. I attended neitherm and went to gather as usual, where there was a mention of a discourse event.
The event on gather town had fewer attendees than usual.
I had heard of neither a discord event nor a discourse event. I guess I missed the announcement.
Where should I go next month?
And would I need an incitation to join on discord, if that's the location?
And if it's discourse, how to join? Is that where this mailing list is held? I access it only by email,
-- hendrik
We effectively had two meet-ups;
The first included Sage @slg giving a demo about his work innovating in software distribution & package management space.
As I got the time wrong I’d appreciate it if the attendees could reply with a short summary of the first half of the meet-up for the record I’d really appreciate it. (I missed most of the demo and don’t know what else was discussed) @slg mention
Looking forward to the summaries,
-- hendrik
The second session included discussion of Racketfest; a higher number of Racketeers (in a very nice venue) enjoyed excellent presentations. Not least was Untitled Maze Game (Pacman) by Jens @soegaard. (I had a first go at making a level - it was fun and easy so have a go)
@dominik.pantucek got us very excited by sharing that there is a possibility to hold next years Racketfest in Prague
These was also discussion of text interfaces
That sounds like the half-meetup I did attend.
Please go on posting times in UTC (or UCT, ehichever language you make the acronym from.)
-- hendrik
There is only one meet-up and it happened one Gather, but I failed to account for the change to British Summer Time(BST) when setting the meet-up event reminder in the Racket Discord.
That is a good question as the free Gather service is no longer sufficient for our needs.
I'm looking for suggestions. This is what I have so far:
The constraints are
Given the constraints we are down to Google Meet, Discord, Jitsi, or Zoom - unless there are other options I am not aware of?
I also don't want to be administering a server. (does Jitsi require a server?)
Anything we choose needs to be accessible to as many Racket users as possible.
As this stage we need suggestions about what will work for the next meet-up.
I generally like to have the meet-up details confirmed about 3 weeks beforehand so we only really have a week or two to work out how to do the next meet-up.
Best regards,
Stephen
PS
Racket is discussed widely across a number of forums and chat platforms; including but not limited to
I try to spread the word to as many as possible. This is often when I am going for a walk. (I consistently fail with IRC as it is just too hard to use from a phone).
PPS IMO there is no point telling people what forum or chat to use - people have their reasons and I am unlikely to be able to make them change their minds
PPPS I also occasionally try to reach out to other PL design and implementation communities including
Stephen, thanks for collecting this information! 
Another option is BigBlueButton (Wikipedia article). Like Jitsi, this is open source software. BigBlueButton is used by schools and universities. We used the software for several Python barcamps for, as I remember, 40 participants or so. But in principle, the software is usable with many more participants.
Personally, I'd prefer an open source solution, but if a service doesn't require registration with any personal information (like email address or phone number), that would be kind of acceptable for me.
Same for me. 
Yes, Jitsi and BigBlueButton require a server. There are public Jitsi servers. One I know of is https://meet.jit.si , but I guess there may be more. I can't tell how well they work with, say, 20 participants in a meeting, so we'd have to try it.
Since BigBlueButton is used by schools and universities, maybe Racketeers who work there could reach out to their institution to host our meetings for free. Just an idea.
I think the meaning was
I don't have any experience in either so if you do have a preference please vote
0 voters
s.
I’ve successfully used a self-hosted installation of Jitsi Meet in the past for large gatherings of 100+ people, so I assume the public installation should work well for Racket meetups (assuming we don’t hit some artificial limit).
I voted for Jitsi as I think the user interface is a bit simpler. BigBlueButton (BBB) is more complex since it has additional features that we most likely don't need for the Racket meet-ups. Still, I had wanted to mention BBB since it might be a fallback if we don't find/have a suitable Jitsi server.
I'm a regular jitsi user.
jitsi is free software. I don't have the bandwidth to run it; otherwise I already would be doing so, instead of using other peoples' servers.
the free service is provided at https://meet.jit.si/
You pick a conversation name, such as
Jitsi Meet
and everyone that connects to the URL is connected together.
There's no password or registration for their free servce. Just make sure your participants know the URL and the time they should join.
The jitsi site will suggest random names, but I suspect we'd be better off chooseing one we can remember easily. Such as the one I provided in my example.
I seem to remember a limit of about a hundred simultaneous users for the free service, but now it seems to be 25. (not sure about this, though).
If you don't want to use the free service, there are instructions how
to set up your own server on the site. Or you can pay them for larger meetings.
I've attended jitsi meetings with about tn particilants. I find it more convenient tha zoom.
It does seem to remember when I've had meetings on the public free kitsi server, so it's not completely anonymous. I do provide it with my name when I connect, for convnience. Some of us users don't, and are labelled as 'jitsi user' instead. For all I know, it may store cookies on my machine or remember my IP number. I have never told it my email address.
The Devuan developers have a weekly chat on jutsi, but we use our own server.
Service on the jitsi free server has usually been excellent, except once when the server seems to have been down. My meetings on it usually have about four or five participants, byt I've attended one with about eight. We'll have to try it and see..
I've never used BigBlueButton.
I have used discord for video chat lasting about three hours. I don't know what the limit is.
I have used facebook messenger for video chats lasting more than two hours, but with only two participants.
-- hendrik
Thanks all
lets try Jitsi
If anyone has a moment to help me test jitsi please click this link I'll be on for about 10 minutes from now
TEST Video meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/Racketmeet-up
If it goes badly at the next meet-up - but I don't think it will - the fallback plan is to use the discord voice channel - confusingly named because it also supports video - it does require a https://discord.com account with a verified email address.
s.
