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

Wed Apr 30 03:40:11 UTC 2014

On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 5:16 PM, Shauna Gordon-McKeon <shaunagm at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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?
>

The issue was mainly caused by the fact that we found out that we couldn't
do MediaGoblin about 1/2 hour before project time began because most of our
students were running Windows and Asheesh thought setting up VMS would be
too much. I spent the next 1/2 hour trying kind of frantically to find bugs
with Asheesh and looking at the setup for alternate projects but the whole
issue kind of threw me.

>
> "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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>>> Campus-neiu-staff at lists.openhatch.org
>>> http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/campus-neiu-staff
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> 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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