With respect to “hack night”, I agree that bounty sessions would probably be very productive and a good use of the person-to-person interaction. People show up, collaboratively come up with a list of issues big and small, and commit to solving those issues either by the time the meeting is over or after. It’s a great way to get quality networking done, offers real opportunities for tutoring that isn’t forced or arbitrary, and affects the community globally, rather than just the people attending the meet up.
A good side effect of this is that whatever you or anyone else comes up with for organizing a “list of issues” is reusable and useful infrastructure.
As for “office hours”, I actually have a different idea that capitalizes on the podium model. I think that in a very internet savvy community like Rust’s, no one is going to wait till a meet up to have their questions answered in person when stack overflow, the forum, and the subreddit all exist. Rather, I think people who have their problems submitted somewhere online and are solved by one mentor or many people can opt in to have their problem be a case-study that is presented at the meet up. Such case specific walkthroughs are usually interesting to a wide range of people, and this is especially helpful to newer users of the language who might not know that they even had a question until they see the situation! As you said, experts walking around asking the less experienced doesn’t actually work all that well.
If these are documented well enough, then we get the added effect of accumulating over time a large collection of example problems and solutions (that might even be indexed by topic), as well as incremental improvement or discussion on previous problems, which is far less likely to happen with a question that is marked “solved” on some medium. Such a compendium of code is also a very good companion to RustByExample, but that is sort of extraneous to meetups.
