[Campus-morris-staff] Working together again in 2015

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

Hello all,

Just following up on this email to see if you're interested in running
another event this semester.  No worries if you'd rather wait, although if
the issue is that folks are too busy or on sabbatical, I highly recommend
asking if any past attendees would like to do the organizing.  We've
started doing that (why weren't we doing that all along?!) with amazing
results.

Just thinking out loud here - given how cozy your campus is, you may also
be worried that repeating the event every semester might be too repetitive
for your students.  If you're interested in mixing things up and developing
some more advanced activities for people to work on, I'd be excited about
helping you do that too.

Anyway, hope you're all well.  We're getting a ton of snow here in Boston
lately but I bet you Minnesotans are not impressed.  :)

best
Shauna



On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:51 PM, Shauna Gordon-McKeon <shaunagm at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> It was a pleasure working with you last year, and I wanted to email you
> and see if you’re interested in continuing the collaboration.  We’re
> starting to plan out our winter/spring 2015 semester, and we’re very
> excited about it.
>
> Let me preface the wall of text below by saying that I very much
> understand if you’re not interested in running an event, or if you’d like
> to wait until next fall to run another one.  I still encourage you to read
> about the changes we’ve made below, as part of our goal is to make it
> easier for folks to stay up to date about what’s happening in their area.
> If you would like to run an event next semester: fantastic! Read on.  :)
>
> We’ve made a few infrastructure changes that should make organizing and
> running events much easier.  The first change is that we now have a
> Discourse instance at <http://discourse.openhatch.org/>.  Discourse
> functions as both a mailing list and a forum, allowing us to communicate
> via email but giving us the organizational and community building aspects
> of a forum.  It’s pretty neat!  One of the main things we’re doing is
> trying to create “Chapters”, that is local groups of people interested in
> open source and OpenHatch events.
>
> Even if you’re not interested in organizing an event, I encourage you to
> create a chapter for your area and introducing yourself as a potential
> mentor and/or someone willing to give some advice on the organizing
> process.  Then, if someone else in your area wants to run an event, they
> know they’re not alone.  :) You can request a new chapter be made here:
> http://discourse.openhatch.org/t/new-chapter-thread/35
>
> Another major infrastructure change is that we’re now using Bridge Troll,
> an event planning software project: https://events.openhatch.org/   This
> site is going to make planning events a lot easier. Creating and updating
> an event website is as easy as clicking a button.  The site also handles
> mentor and attendee RSVPs, confirmation emails, reminders, and more. It
> even summarizes dietary restrictions for you when ordering food!  And as we
> go on we’ll add even more features.
>
> One more change worth mentioning: in previous years, we’ve tried to pick
> dates for events where members of OpenHatch would be continuously
> available.  We’ve found that you actually need us very little on the day
> of!  We think it’s more important for you to pick dates that work for your
> community, when mentors can come and when there aren’t competing football
> games, tests, or hackathons.  We also want to encourage you to adapt our
> workshop to suit your needs.  Maybe you’d rather have one or two short
> evening workshops, rather than a full day one.  Maybe you’d like to run
> something more social, or more unstructured.  If you want to try something
> new, let us know and we can help you do it.
>
> So, what does this mean for you?
>
> If you’re interested in staying involved but don’t want to organize
> another event this winter/spring, I encourage you to create and join a
> chapter for your location on Discourse.  Once that’s set up, you’ll be able
> to receive email notifications if anyone else is planning an event with us
> in your area, and you can decide whether or not you’d like to mentor, help,
> etc.
>
> If you’d like to organize an event, go ahead and make a chapter, too.
> From there, we can start discussing dates and locations, and invite
> potential co-organizers and mentors to join us in the planning process.
>
> Please let me know if you have any questions!  There may be some bugs
> and/or confusing language on Discourse or on OpenHatch Events - they are,
> after all, brand new.  Please feel free to send feedback, report issues,
> etc.
>
> best
> Shauna
>
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