[Campus-neiu-staff] hope everything went well!

Mon Apr 28 22:16:27 UTC 2014

I'm glad to hear that you all think it went well!  We've come across the
only-know-Java issue before, which is unfortunate because Java is
underrepresented in the groups we partner with/know about. (On the other
hand, we have an abundance of Pythonists.)   We'll put in some extra effort
towards finding a few Java based projects.

"The activities at the end . . . I wonder if it might be better to have
everyone settle on one project to work on together. Having people working
together on something might have fostered more energy around some of the
later activities."

It's funny to me, because if you give people the option they mostly don't
choose to work in groups.  And we like to give people autonomy.  But yes,
working in groups and pair programming seem to foster a sort of social
energy that's pretty useful when you get to hour three or four of a busy
day.  I wonder if there's a way to more explicitly encourage group work -
do you have any thoughts on that?

"Put all the answers into a big pot, boil, and be inspired to come up with
1 or 2 projects that the group might find interesting.  contact the
project, tell them about the event, and work out details of getting first
class help.  "

This is actually quite a bit of work, so it's not something we generally
ask organizers to do.  Our "affiliated projects" was our attempt at
accomplishing the same thing in a way that's not a burden for local
organizers, but it's not particularly customized to an event.  If this is
something you all are interested in doing if/when you run another event,
I'm happy to try and help you accomplish it!

"I also think it would have been better if the event had been broken into
two days. It was a lot of information for one day. "

We've done two day events, and the primary issue is lack of consistency -
some people will only show up one day, and then you have to catch people
up, etc.  If you're strict about confirming, or if you have a few mentors
dedicated to reviewing/catching people up, this can totally work.  Again,
this is a change we're happy to help you make if you want to.

"As other people mentioned, transitioning from gitimmersion to github was a
big leap."

Yes, this is our fault for the last minute change. I have some hope that
Github will respond to the situation in such a way that we'll feel
comfortable promoting them through out tutorials again.

"The other thing that could be done better is for people to have some time
(30 minutes) to familiarize themselves with the project. So, to or three
maintainers describe their project, we get groups of people interested in
each. They get familiar with the project (and perhaps the bitesize bugs)
and then they go fix them."

This is something that I hope is already happening, but perhaps the lack of
an explicit instruction to do so means it's not. How are you imagining
people familiarizing themselves with the project?  How could we structure
the activity to support that?

"We should do events like this more often."

So happy to hear you say that!  There are a couple of things we've done/are
doing with other groups.  CCSF is planning to run versions of this event
every semester for students in the greater SF bay area.  We would of course
love it if you wanted to make this a once-a-semester event.  Other schools
are following up in different ways.  SUNY Stony Brook is following up with
low key, short events where students pick a topic with online materials and
go through it together, with us guiding them remotely.  We could also
experiment with finding a project or two that would be interested in doing
ongoing events focused around contributing to them.  (If these are python
projects, we should be able to get funding from the PSF for pizza.)

There's no rush to figure out what the next step is, of course.  Just
wanted to throw out some ideas.  :)

On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 10:55 AM, Iacobelli, Francisco <f-iacobelli at neiu.edu
> wrote:

> I thought the event went great.
> As other people mentioned, transitioning from gitimmersion to github was a
> big leap. Also, not having bitesized bugs can trump people. The other thing
> that could be done better is for people to have some time (30 minutes) to
> familiarize themselves with the project. So, to or three maintainers
> describe their project, we get groups of people interested in each. They
> get familiar with the project (and perhaps the bitesize bugs) and then they
> go fix them.
>
> Still, the volunteers were great, we got people from two other schools
> plus some independent developers and the organizers from NEIU (Jeremy and
> Meg) were great.
>
> We should do events like this more often.
> Cheers
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 6:13 PM, Shauna Gordon-McKeon <shaunagm at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi NEIU volunteers,
>>
>> I hope everything went well today.  I did get a few messages about
>> needing bite sized bugs to work on - my apologies for not taking care of
>> that.  (I should have paid more careful attention to the Trello board!)
>>  Hopefully everything else went smoothly.  Regardless, I'd love to hear
>> your feedback about what you think went well, and especially where you
>> think we can improve.
>>
>> There's a google form you can fill out to give feedback.  Also happy to
>> hear feedback in the form of email (or whatever other format you prefer).
>>
>>
>> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1S6iI2y2UZkZQF-Bbl60VKVhTGkvh-9jqJS-PSubwn8Q/viewform
>>
>> best
>> Shauna
>>
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>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Francisco Iacobelli, Assistant Professor
>
> Department of Computer Science
> Northeastern Illinois University
> 5500 North St. Louis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625
> Phone: (773) 442 4728
> f-iacobelli at neiu.edu
> http://fid.cl
>
> www.neiu.edu
>
>
>
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