[Events] Adjusting duration and schedule for campus.openhatch.org events

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi all,

While planning the next round of Open Source Comes to Campus workshops, 
I've been thinking about the combination of different things we spend time 
on, and making sure we make the best use of time for students who attend.

When reviewing exit surveys and my own notes, I've come up with the 
following thoughts:

* We lose a lot of people (33-50%) between day 1 and day 2.

* Laptop setup could be shortened with no problem, based on UMD and RPI.

* Michael Stone suggests we could add a "Careers in Open Source" panel 
during the event.

* In exit surveys, all the various teaching sessions have had some people 
like them the most. The most popular seem to be the Sunday Projects Day, 
the history+ethics lecture/discussion, and the git+project org workshop.

* People who like the introduction to the command line either appreciated 
the total intro-friendliness and seeing basic commands explained and 
demystified, or for one person at a higher level of experience, enjoyed 
learning some new keyboard shortcuts.

I'm especially interested in reconsidering the schedule because of some 
new constraints related to computer club event scheduling. (They're not 
necessarily hard constraints.)

* One of the computer clubs I'm looking at visiting has a regular Thursday 
1 hour lecture-style meeting. So I wonder if we can do a 1-hour pre-event, 
and jam the projects day into Saturday with the lecture portion.

* One of the organizers of the Rackspace/HackersAtBerkeley "How To Open 
Source" event (Lucy Mendel) suggested that two full days on a weekend 
might generally be tough for the other organizers, which is something I'd 
say we've seen in terms of organizers not being able to atten

* Hackers At Berkeley say they haven't done a 2-day workshop before, and 
competing for both days on a weekend might be hard.

The part that I think can be extracted most successfully is the "Communicating
as a user" section of the curriculum.

So... here's what things might look like for JHU ACM or other computer 
clubs with regular meetings we could plug into:

Thursday, 5:30 PM (optional): Laptop setup time

Thursday, 6 PM: One hour lecture on "How to communicate with open source 
communities, as a user" (derived from 
https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/Curriculum/Saturday/User_communication 
and Jessica's http://web.mit.edu/jesstess/www/FOSS_communication.pdf ), 
with Q&A.

Saturday, 10 - 6, we could do a somewhat compacted version of the formerly 
Sat+Sun curriculum:

* 10 - 10:10 AM: Welcome and introduction

* 10:15 - 11:05: Choose between "Command line basics", or more advanced CLI
                  discussion including GPG verification and playing with "patch"
                  (People who haven't done laptop setup can do that during the
                  exercises time for whichever of these they attend)

                  Format: 12ish students. 25ish minutes of lecture, 30ish minutes
                  of exercises.

* 11:10 - 12:00: History and ethics of open source, plus a discussion
                  by various invited panelists who talk about how open source
                  has been a part of their careers

                  Format: 20 minutes of Asheesh lecture, similar to before;
                          30 minutes of other panelists chatting with audience,
                             including Q&A and self-introductions.

* 12:00 - 1:00 : Lunch. Also, students get a chance to talk to career 
panelists in small groups.

                   (After lunch, any panelists who can't stay for the 
afternoon are free to go!)

* 1:00 - 1:55   : Full-group discussion of project organization, and how git works

                   Format: Full-group lecture

(Editor's note: Because we've compressed the content down, we've mostly 
lost the small group break-out nature of other campus.openhatch.org 
events. Maybe we can make up for that by having really excellent TAs 
roaming the room, asking people for help during the excercise portions.)

* 2:00 - 6:00 : Project time!

                 Format: 30 min of discussing various project options, and
                 then lots of TAs wandering around, helping people get
                 started with things.

* 6:00: Event officially over. Dinner arrives at this point, and if you 
want to eat and keep hacking you may.

I think that's the compressed version that makes the most sense to me.

I'm slightly concerned that the projects portion is too short, but maybe 
3.5 hours is long enough for people to try to do something. I'm also 
concerned that 10-6 is too long a period. (Although that's partially 
mitigated by the dinner at the end.)

It seems like an improvement overall.

I'd be curious to hear what other people think of this "1.25"-day version 
of the campus workshop, especially past staffers.

-- Asheesh.

P.S. I'll also pass this along to JHU ACM people to see what they make of 
it.