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

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

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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