[Campus-columbia-staff] for mentors - please read

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

Hello lovely volunteer mentors!


Thank you again for helping us out with the event on Saturday.  This email
is to help give you a sense of what to expect.

The event will run from 9:30am to 5:00pm, with a schedule that looks
roughly like this:

9:00 - 9:30 Myself and our host organizer(s) will arrive at the space

9:30 - 10:00  coffee & pastries appear, students begin arriving (note: this
is when the sched tells students to arrive, but we give them some leeway)

10:00 - 10:30 laptop setup, intros

10:30 - 11:30 open source communications tools (IRC, mailing lists, issue
trackers, version control)

11:30 - 12:30 practicing git

12:30 - 1:00 career panel

1:00 - 2:00 lunch

2:00 - 2:30 finding projects exercise

2:30 - 5:00 projects time with regular check-ins

If possible, we'd like you to arrive by 9:30.  It’s okay if you can’t make
it that early, but please let me know when to expect you.

Basically, as a mentor, you'll be expected to help with activities by
attempting to troubleshoot problems that come up, answering whatever
questions you can, and just generally being friendly and chatting to
students.  For example, I’ve seen mentors trying to help a student figure
out what dependencies need to be installed for a project to work, show
students command line tricks, give advice about applying to summer
internships, or giving book recommendations about being women in tech.  If
you’re stuck when helping a student with something, feel free to call
another mentor over!

So that’s generally how you can help.  Here are some specifics:


   -

   Practicing Git mentors:  Practicing Git is a hands-on exercise we have
   students do in small groups, led by a mentor who feels comfortable with
   git/github.  The project consists of taking a website and editing it
   according to a set of issues listed in the project’s bug
tracker<https://github.com/morris-2/morris-2.github.io/issues?state=closed>.
    Before the event we will create some toy
organizations<https://github.com/morris-2>with the project
   repository <https://github.com/morris-2/morris-2.github.io> and give you
   administrative access, so you can walk students through the process of
   improving the webpage and seeing their changes
made<http://morris-2.github.io/>.
    (Those links are all to an example from a recent event.)  You can see the
   outline of the project here, in the student handout
(wiki-version)<https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/Practicing_Git/Students>.
    There’s also a guide for
mentors.<https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/Practicing_Git/Instructors>
If you can skim through all of this before the event and let me know
if
   you have any questions, that would be great.
   -

   Project leads:  We find students have an especially good time when
   they’re working with mentors who already contribute to (or even maintain) a
   project.  So we need people to be "project leads" during projects time. Let
   us know if there are any projects that you feel especially comfortable
   with, where you can help attendees:

  - set up the development environment

  - navigate through the source code

- walk people through the patch-submission process

  - answer questions about the purpose of the project and how the community
works

You don’t have to be expert at all of those things, but you should be
fairly comfortable with most.

These can include small personal projects, where you're the only person
who've ever worked on them, or large projects where you're a member of a
community - as long as you understand the project well.  Let us know about
these today and we can add them to the list of projects for students to
work on tomorrow.  Don't be shy - we're looking to add as many as we can
get.

   -

   We need people who have ever been funded to work on open source software
   to be on our "career musical chairs".  Students will form small groups and
   mentors will go from group to group for 5-10 minutes each and answer
   questions about how we got started in open source, what opportunities
   exist, different funding models we know of, etc.  If you've ever been
   funded to work on an open source project, and feel comfortable talking in
   small groups about it - again, let us know!


*In sum:*

- please arrive at 9:30 on Saturday.  If you'll be late, let us know so we
can go over everything with you ahead of time, ideally by phone (I’m at
240-483-3555).

- let us know, if you haven't already, whether you're able to lead a
"Practicing git" group, be in our career musical chairs, or be a project
lead for one or more projects.

Looking forward to seeing you all on Saturday!

best,
Shauna
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openhatch.org/pipermail/campus-columbia-staff/attachments/20131017/ad46d7bb/attachment.html>