[Events] MS Nerd room request blurb

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2011, Jessica T McKellar wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Below is a room request I'd like to send to my contact at MS Nerd 
> <http://microsoftcambridge.com/>, Leah Brunson <lbrunson at microsoft.com>. 
> Amendments are welcome, but in particular do the times and the number of 
> attendees jive with what we want?
>
> I'll introduce myself and our goals in addition to this request.
>
> I'd like to send this in the next 48 hours.
>
> One thing I think is important: there's the opportunity for an event 
> URL. We should probably have one that we can give to people anyway, with 
> a description of the workshop and some ethusiasm-inducing videos/images 
> of the kinds of projects you might complete.
>
> Who can host this URL? (I'm happy to, but 
> jesstess.com/boston-python-workshop is not all that legitimate sounding) 
> How about something on openhatch.org?

Would it work to make it a wiki page "for now"? If so, that would be great 
by me.

In the past, I made this page: http://penn.openhatch.org/old-index/. It 
seemed really effective, and was really simple to set up.

I would be totally up for hosting (preferably static, but if not, that's 
okay) content for the Boston Python Workshop event on an OpenHatch 
subdomain, too, if that would be better than a wiki page and worth putting 
together.

(As a side note about the name: I really really like these "$CITY 
$LANGUAGE workshop" names, because they sound sort of unassuming.)

Specific feedback inline:

> Name: Jessica McKellar
>
> Organization: OpenHatch (https://openhatch.org) and the Boston Python Meetup 
> Group (http://www.meetup.com/bostonpython/)
>
> Email: jesstess at mit.edu
>
> Phone: 615-714-6058
>
> Event Title: Boston Python Workshop
>
> Preferred Dates: March 4th (evening) and March 5th (day) 2011
>
> Times:
> - March 4th: 5pm - 8pm
> - March 5th: 10am - 6pm

I think the times make sense. At first, I thought, "Man, that would end so 
soon!" but then I thought, "Ending at six p.m. is probably reasonable."

> Alternate Date: None

(-:

> Description: Dive into Python with this 1.5 day project-driven Python 
> workshop.
>
> Our focus is on encouraging participation from female programmers of all 
> experience levels. A laptop is required. On Friday we'll install 
> dependencies. On Saturday, after a brief introduction to the language we'll 
> all hack on projects.

Feedback:

I do like the "Dive into Python" book, but since we're not using it, it's 
a bit weird to use the same (recognizable) name as Mark Pilgrim's book.

So I'd suggest changing that first summary line to, "Learn Python with 
this 1.5 day project-driven Python workshop".

> Audience: Female programmers of all experience levels, open source 
> contributors.

Men can be a woman's plus-one! Assuming we're sticking to what the SF Ruby 
Workshops do, which I would like to, but we can discuss that if people 
don't want to.

So maybe:

"Audience: Women and their friends, of all programming experience levels."

I also really like the phrase "Women and their friends", maybe because I 
also find it simultaneously unassuming and powerful.

> Cost to Attend: Free
>
> Approximate Number of Attendees: 30
>
> Preferred Setup: Classroom
>
> Event Website: None
>
> How you heard about NERD: DevOps Boston meetup, MIT

That's my thoughts. Thanks for this!

-- Asheesh.

-- 
If you learn one useless thing every day, in a single year you'll learn
365 useless things.