[Campus-purdue-staff] Welcoming Mel Chua

[Asheesh Laroia]

(looping the staff list)

On Thu, 5 Sep 2013, Mel Chua wrote:

> Oh yes. I'll be coming from Illinois on Sunday so I won't be there much 
> beforehand, but l'd love to get the openhatch spirit into this place 
> (lt's lonely here!)
>
> What's the best way to get in the loop, and is there anything specific 
> you had in mind for my role? It's your show, but I'm hoping my 
> experiences both with teaching open source and being at Purdue can help.

So great to hear from you! It's been too long.

I've just added you to our staff planning list; if you'd send a 
self-intro, that'd be awesome.

How you can help depends on how involved you (want to | can) be!

I know that we could use help finding attendees. Do you know any women in 
CS or not in CS who are possibly interested?

I've also added you to a Google Docs group/folder of publicity template 
emails and the like that you might enjoy. We should move those out to the 
wiki... the reason they're in GDocs is that it makes copying and 
organizing (through subfolders) easier.

Beyond that, we'd love to have you as a prospective staffer. 
https://openhatch.org/wiki/OSCTC_Resources contains our curriculum, as it 
stands today. You could decide to be a lead teacher for one of these, if 
you like.

If you're feeling really excited, you could rewrite the way we introduce 
free software ethics and history and economics. I have a dream for how 
that would work; ping me if so. The overview is that it involves finding 
some great stories about why people chose free/open source software, 
either as a user but mostly as a contributor/project lead, and making a 
nice-looking website with some summaries of these stories and links to the 
full versions. We'd ask students to pick a story (maybe by asking them to 
pick between two that we'd randomly pick for them) and talk about it to 
the person next to them, say. We could use Purdue as a test school for 
this revised version.

And... I have a question. Should we have students do the 
anti-stereotype-threat writing exercise suggested by 
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/11/25/15-minute-writing-exercise-closes-the-gender-gap-in-university-level-physics/ 
?

Same story for another element -- I have a dream for how we can make the 
"How open source projects communicate" lecture more interactive, too. 
That's probably hard to work on remotely, though.

Whew.

Oh and if you feel like reorganizing the wiki or making other suggestions 
or joining the general osctc planning list, feel mega free to do so here: 
http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/osctc-planning

-- Asheesh.