The Skeptics in the Pub movement is fantastic. The idea is simple, organize a pub meeting to talk about subjects of a skeptical nature. That's fairly broad, and deliberately so! You'll hear talks about quackery, actual proper science, ROBOTS, technology, politics, sociology, all the -ologies actually. Earlier in the year I took over organisational duties for the Newcastle group with my friend Will. Since then, we've been arranging for speakers for the remainder of the year. Being new to all this, but also tech-heads, we decided that we needed a way to keep track of all the things we need to do to make an event happen.

I've previously written about how I use Trello as a simple to-do list for my house, so I decided to use it here too.

This is our "Event Checklist Template" board.

Newcastle Skeptics in the Pub event template Trello board

For each month, we take a copy of this board. That will give us a new board with all of the cards copied over, so each month starts with a blank slate. Now rather than keeping this as a "to do, doing, done" board, I instead created three categories:

  • Things we need to do before the event can happen
  • Things we need to do on the day
  • Things we need to do after the event

You can copy a board through the menu sidebar:

How to copy a board in Trello

Once everything is marked as done, we'll close the board.

It's admittedly a pretty simple system, but that's why it works in my opinion. It makes sure that things that are easy to forget (such as checking next month's venue booking) actually get done. If you organise a Skeptics in the Pub event, feel free to take a copy of our board and put it to use in your own group!