[Events] [OH-Publicity] Publicity plan for "In-Person Event Handbook"

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Shauna Gordon-McKeon
<shaunagm at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's worth remarking that, in addition to brainstorming ways to
> publicize the guide, folks should feel free to help improve it.  The guide
> has an issue tracker here:
> https://github.com/openhatch/in-person-event-handbook/issues?state=open.
> One area where more work would be useful is in creating/improving/linking to
> tools that support the steps suggested in the guide.
>
>>
>> To get the ball rolling, I propose the following. During 2014:
>>
>> * We make sure organizers of at least 8 significant events (other than
>> Open Source Comes to Campus) that could benefit from the Handbook hear about
>> its existence.
>
>
> How do you propose to measure this/carry this out?  Is this as simple as
> pro-actively mailing events and suggesting they use it?

Yeah, or (heck) Tweeting at them.

>> * We make sure at least 3 significant events (other than Open Source Comes
>> to Campus) recommend the Handbook as a good way for participating projects
>> to prepare for the event.
>
>
> How official do they need to be in their recommendations?  Vanessa Hurst has
> told me that she's been recommending that projects participating in Coder
> Day of Service use it, and I also vaguely remember Sheila talking about
> forwarding it to SciPy.

I would say, it should be somewhere public in the official
documentation for the event, that participating projects see.

For example, a page like https://us.pycon.org/2013/community/sprints/
recommending the Handbook (which it doesn't do at the moment) is what
I'm thinking.

>> * We document the above 3 events that recommended the Handbook within the
>> Handbook itself, by the end of 2014.
>>
>
> How would we document this?  "Recommend" is pretty nebulous.

The Handbook could link to these public, written recommendations, in a
section toward the end of the document. If the external recommendation
is written and public and on the web, then readers of the Handbook can
click the link and evaluate for themselves how recommended it is.


>> Shauna, I'm also curious what you think with setting these as goals. Once
>> we have them as goals, I would be super happy to see this meta-outreach
>> effort done by you, you + me, or any combination of people, so long as we do
>> it. (-: I think that getting in the faces of organizers of events that might
>> benefit from the Handbook is an essential part to succeeding at making the
>> Free world better at outreach.
>
>
> I'm +1 on this, generally, and on setting goals, but I'd like more clarity
> on these particular goals.  There are also ways to synthesize promoting the
> handbook with more easily-document-able efforts.  For instance, the handbook
> suggests that projects have users test out dev environment setup before an
> event.  We could offer to run pre-event dev environment setup tests for
> projects, and then document that.  That's a fair amount of extra work for
> the community, but I think it would actually be quite enjoyable (esp if we
> didn't run them too often - maybe 2-4 times a year?) and would help us:
> a) gather more information/experience to make the guide more
> accurate/helpful
> b) improve our own process for prepping for OSCTC events
> c) perhaps bring new projects into our community (that is, grow the network
> of affiliated projects)

I think the "pre-event dev environment setup tests" are a great thing,
and we should totally do them, too. I see them as slightly separate
from getting the Handbook used, unless we provide some messaging in
the event invitation to link them together. That's doable. If you want
to set some goals related to that, that's probably great, and maybe if
there are those goals, we could revise-down the publicity goals I
mentioned? Or not, either way.

My meta-goal with these goals is that people who haven't much heard of
OpenHatch will use the Handbook to organize an event. That way, we
have reach into communities that aren't personally connected to us.

> I suggested an informal dev environment setup sprint for Coder Day of
> Service projects to Vanessa, and she seemed enthused, but also overwhelmed
> by all the other logistical stuff she has to handle.  So I don't think that
> will happen.

That's too bad. Maybe she'd be open to someone else volunteering, if
we can find such a person.


Also, feel free to provide a "counter-offer" if you have different
goals in mind. I sent this mostly to get a conversation started, and
only secondarily to recommend the particular goals.