[Events] reflections on Reflections | Projections (UIUC) workshop

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

On October 6th and 7th, we had our sixth Open Source Comes to
Campus<http://campus.openhatch.org/>event at the University
of Illinois Urbana Champaign <http://illinois.edu/> (UIUC), as part of
their ACM's annual computing event, Reflections |
Projections<http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2012/index.php>.
We did a one hour talk on Saturday the 6th on "getting started in open
source", as part of the main conference, and then a day long workshop on
Sunday.  About 25 people came to the Saturday talk, many of whom were
leaving the area the next morning, including a few people from other
campuses who expressed interest in having us come run workshops with them.
20 people came to the workshop over the course of the next day, with most
people coming around lunchtime for the last tutorial, food, and then the
first hour or so of project time.

We started the workshop off a little before 10:30, with a command line
tutorial by Bonnie, followed by a Git tutorial by Asheesh.  Both talks
elicited a number of good questions, although there were some hiccups in
linking to practice exercises.  The Git tutorial was fairly in depth -
going into not just which Git commands to use, but why - and it seemed to
engage the audience quite well, although it's possible that folks were
getting lost/bored but didn't want to say anything.  In the future, we
might want to separate out stuff that people need to know, vs stuff that's
"merely" interesting and relevant.  We also talked about giving folks the
option to either walk through the OpenHatch Git mission, or doing a
separate Git-based bug fix, as a group.  My main worry is that a lecture
format, even with questions, might be preventing users with varying
experience/ability/interest levels from all getting their needs met.
However, over all, the two tutorials seemed to go over very well.

Lunch was from 12-1.  Afterwards, we directed folks to a list of open bugs
in various projects, and they got to work trying to apply what they'd
learned about Git and contribute to projects.  The 4-5 remaining staff
members floated around helping folks, although locating who needed help
turned out to be a bit of an art form.  (Possible solution: encouraging
folks to join the #openhatch irc channel, where they might feel more
comfortable asking for help.)  There were a few people who were
successfully able to submit a patch, but most people had difficulties with
the bugs we'd found.  Klange made up good issues for demoing github pull
requests by having people make trivial changes in his nyancat program, so
folks did get practice that way.  But our system for finding and listing
bugs clearly needs to be improved.  To that end, we brainstormed the
following ideas:

   - annotate bugs more thoroughly, including an annotation of what OS and
   development environments are needed, as well as an estimate of how
   long/complicated a process that set up is
   - get more and better bugs by creating an OpenHatch account on major
   project issue trackers. We could claim bugs for our account and say "We'll
   try to get people to fix these on $DATE and relinquish by $DATE2"

 The number of attendees dwindled slowly over the course of the afternoon,
until the last person left at about 6:30.  By our count, there were three
women at the event, only one of whom stayed for the afternoon to work on
projects.  To some extent, this might be due to the gender imbalance in the
conference as a whole, which also seemed to be pretty skewed male.
However, we definitely need to be proactive with each workshop in
attempting to get more diversity in our attendees.

A final thought - Asheesh and I discussed how to make the workshops more
social.  The group Git training exercise, discussed above, is one way to do
that.  We could also encourage pair programming (the most satisfying part
of the experience, for me, was working with an attendee for almost an hour
to successfully fix a bug and submit a patch).  We're also hoping to set
aside a space at the next event that is explicitly for socializing, making
sure a staffer is there to chat with most of the time.

Thoughts?
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