[Campus-uconn-staff] Confirmed mentors for Open Source comes to Campus event.

[Pariksheet Nanda]

Hello Sean, Daanish and Dillon!

Thank you again for helping us out with the event on Saturday, October
18.  This email is to help give you a sense of what to expect.  In
addition, since this is the first event we're running at UConn I would
like for us to meet (I'm thinking on IRC, #openhatch-uconn
@freenode.net) within the next few days so I can explain some things
in more detail.

The event will run from 9:30am to 6:00pm, with a schedule that looks
roughly like this:

8:00 - 8:30 Coffee & pastries appear
9:00 - 9:30 Main organizers arrive at the space
9:30 - 10:00 Students begin arriving
10:00 - 10:30 Laptop setup & introductions
10:30 - 11:30 Open source communications tools (IRC, mailing lists,
issue trackers, version control)
11:30 - 12:00 History & Ethics of Free Software
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 2:00 Practicing git
2:00 - 6:00 Projects time, with wrap-up at 5:45

If possible, we'd like you to arrive by 9:30.  It’s okay if you can’t
make it that early, but please let me know when to expect you.

Basically, as a mentor, you'll be expected to help with activities by
attempting to troubleshoot problems that come up, answering whatever
questions you can, and just generally being friendly and chatting to
students.  On a given day, you might find a mentor helping a student
figure out what dependencies need to be installed for a project to
work, showing a student command line tricks, give advice about
applying to summer internships, or giving book recommendations about
being women in tech.  It’s okay if you can’t do all of the above!  If
you’re stuck when helping a student with something, feel free to call
another mentor over.

So that’s generally how you can help.  Here are some specifics:

Practicing Git mentors:  Practicing Git is a hands-on exercise we have
students do in small groups, led by a mentor who feels comfortable
with git/github.  The project consists of taking a website and editing
it according to a set of issues listed in the project’s bug tracker
[1].  Before the event we will create some toy organizations [2] with
the project repository [3] and give you administrative access, so you
can walk students through the process of improving the webpage and
seeing their changes made [4].  (Those links are all to an example
from a recent event.)  You can see the outline of the project here, in
the student handout [5] (wiki-version).  There’s also a guide for
mentors [6].  If this sounds like something you could lead, let us
know!

Project leads:  We find students have an especially good time when
they’re working with mentors who already contribute to (or even
maintain) a project.  So we need people to be "project leads" during
projects time. Let us know if there are any projects that you feel
especially comfortable with, where you can help attendees:

     - set up the development environment

     - navigate through the source code

    - walk people through the patch-submission process

     - answer questions about the purpose of the project and how the
community works

You don’t have to be expert at all of those things, but you should be
fairly comfortable with most.  These can include small personal
projects, where you're the only person who've ever worked on them, or
large projects where you're a member of a community - as long as you
understand the project well.  Don't be shy - we're looking to add as
many as we can get.

Unfortunately for this event we couldn't find people who have been
funded to work on open source software for our career panel.  We were
not able to get remote panelists either from the NYC area, so
hopefully we can arrange that activity for a future event.

In sum: please arrive by 9:45 on Saturday, October 18 and let me know
if you’ll be late.  Here is the doodle link to schedule the IRC
meeting: http://doodle.com/8bkr23d33at83eey I will send an e-mail
off-list for us to exchange phone numbers so we can call or text you
if there are any last minute issues (though we don’t expect there to
be.)  And let us know if you're up for leading a "Practicing Git"
group, or being a project lead.

Best wishes,
Pariksheet

[1] https://github.com/morris-2/morris-2.github.io/issues?state=closed
[2] https://github.com/morris-2
[3] https://github.com/morris-2/morris-2.github.io
[4] http://morris-2.github.io/
[5] https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/Practicing_Git/Students
[6] https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/Practicing_Git/Instructors