[Events] Planning for UMD: some thoughts, and a request for feedback

[Asheesh Laroia]

(Context: We have a http://campus.openhatch.org/ event at UMD College Park 
coming up in a week. If you're in the DC area and/or able to travel to 
College Park and are willing to help out, reply privately to me and we'll 
figure out the best way to hook you in.)

Hey all (especially Jessica McKellar, who's also coming to the DC area for 
it),

I am working on finalizing the planned Saturday event for UMD. This may 
get long; I'll try to keep it focused.

Saturday is a tough day to schedule. We aim to give a *lot* of 
information, hopefully enough so they can make sense of any given FLOSS 
community when they run into it.

* Overall curriculum goals: 
https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/Curriculum/Saturday

* My current draft schedule: 
https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/UMD

Here are the guiding thoughts behind my current plan. I'd love thoughts.

Laptop setup time can drag on
-----------------------------

At Penn, many students took some of the first hour of the event to install 
Ubuntu on their machines. If that works, that's excellent. However, if the 
resulting install doesn't, there's not really time to fix it.

Plan: Learning from Boston Python Workshop, I will create a 
cross-platform, play-tested, and fairly minimal dependency checklist for 
attendees. This does mean we'll have to make sure that the teaching 
material can be properly experienced on Windows, Mac OS, and Linuxy 
systems. A lot of this coming week will have to be spent play-testing and 
documenting for that.

10 AM to 5 PM is a long, exhausting time
----------------------------------------

At Penn, we saw some substantial mid-day attrition. I think this was due 
to 3 factors: (1) the day falling behind its schedule, (2) the day 
actually being comprised of a lot of hours, and (3) inconsistent laptop 
setup experiences among attendees, accidentally favoring those with more 
experience.

With regard to #2, I think we should actually aim to shorten the event. 
This schedule has wrap-up starting by 4PM.

Not enough time during the day for all the modules to be an hour long
---------------------------------------------------------------------

If we add explicit time for laptop setup, something else has to give. I've 
been considering what it should be, and I think that we should shrink two 
things: "History and ethics of free, open source software" and 
"Communicating as a user: finding the community and getting help".

Command-line skills have to be taught early
-------------------------------------------

At Penn, not everyone had command line skills. The quickest way to teach 
the basics is probably to use the Boston Python Workshop's quick CLI 
tutorial, as part of Laptop Setup Time.

Over the course of the day, instructors got better at their module
------------------------------------------------------------------

This schedule makes the modules have decreasing lengths: 1h, 50 min, 45 
min. The content doesn't change, but two things will change over the 
course of the day: (1) the quality of delivery will increase, and (2) 
students will already be familiar with more of the content because little 
bits were introduced in previous modules they attended, so the instructor 
can go a little faster.

Lunch should be flawless
------------------------

Luckily we're ordering food in, so we don't have to worry about people 
getting lost to and from the location of the event. Still, we should avoid 
losing time and/or having lunch be late.

People moving around causes disruption
--------------------------------------

At Penn, students rotated between rooms. That caused a lot of disruption.

So, in this schedule, only staff rotate (like the Boston Python Workshop).

Dependencies between modules should be avoided
----------------------------------------------

This one will take some careful education engineering, but I think we can 
make the curricula for the remaining 3 modules pretty separate. I'll work 
on that.

That's it
---------

Okay, that's what I have for now. The weekend will see serious work on 
these modules. Jessica especially, feedback and/or parts you're interested 
in driving?

Again -- if you're in the Baltimore or DC area and are interested in 
helping teach students how to get involved in FLOSS, speak up! (-:

Similarly, if you contribute to some FLOSS project, and want to mentor new 
contributors on Sunday, you could just come to that day, which is reserved 
as a hackathon/project day.

-- Asheesh.