[OSCTC-planning] Giving Ben (at washington.edu) a tour of OSCTC

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi Shauna and all,

A few minutes ago, I finished giving Ben at University of Washington a
tour of OSCTC materials. I wanted to share some notes about the
experience.

The purpose of this email is:

* Give Shauna a sense of what I talked with Ben about, so that she
knows what he knows, and

* Give people interested in Open Source Comes to Campus some sense of
what our mentor training is like.

OK, so:

* At 8pm, I tried to ping Ben on Google Hangouts, but it turned out I
was pinging his uw.edu account, not his gmail.com account. I dug up
his phone number from his website and called him, which he answered,
so I knew he hadn't flaked out on me, so I kept trying to make the
tech work.

* We had some problems getting Google Hangouts audio to work on both
sides, so we reverted to using our phones (but still talked via Google
Hangouts on our phones for some reason). That worked fine.

* Ben and I both joined #openhatch-osctc (which I created at the start
of the call) on freenode to share links, which seemed to work well.

* I hadn't prepared much for the talk, so I talked with Ben and got to
know him a little bit, and got to learn his degree of prep:

** He had watched the "Communication tools" training video by Shauna

** He had (co-?)created the http://washington.openhatch.org/ website
for the event

* The conversation was one-on-one, which seems like it might be a poor
use of volunteer resources (namely my time), but I think it was in
fact a really great use of volunteer resources for all the following
reasons:

** I had a huge amount of fun talking to Ben. I thought the
multi-person training session last weekend was fun, but this was even
more fun!

** I think Ben's ability to ask me questions inline made the
conversation very easy, by contrast with a one-on-many conversation.

** Ben has some experience with Software Carpentry, so we could
discuss that similar experience without feeling like we'd have to
explain it to someone else who was on the phone with us.

Here's what happened on the phone:

* We introduced each other, and I asked Ben how he found out about the
event and about OpenHatch. I talked a little bit about the history of
the organization.

* I asked Ben what degree of familiarity he had, and he remarked on
the training video I mentioned earlier. I asked if I should go in
depth into the git+github exercises, plus the contributions workshop,
or first give a general tour, and he opted for the general tour, so I
went with that.

* We traced through the schedule at http://washington.openhatch.org/
and I remarked on what resources OpenHatch for each of the points on
that schedule. (You'll see that, as well as get a sense of the timing
of each section, in the logs that I've pasted below.)

* I made sure he knew how to use the presenter console feature of the
slides on http://openhatch.github.io/open-source-comes-to-campus/ , by
using the "Communication" slides as the example.

* One question Ben asked was, is the git material the only hands-on
part of the day? I remarked that the contributions workshop is
definitely also hands-on!

* We talked for a few minutes about different ways to do the career
panel, and what students seem to get out of it, and how I'm a fan of
the rotating career panel, and that I usually set the rotation time to
15 minutes.

* We talked about the git teaching material, first by me giving links
to ccsf-1.github.io and ccsf-2.github.io etc., and then by me
showcasing closed issues at
https://github.com/ccsf-1/ccsf-1.github.io/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed
and talking about that, and then explaining the content at
https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/Curriculum/Git
, first the part for the "Activity organizer" then "Instructors" then
"Students", including me talking about printing out the "Instructors"
handout and marking it up with the specific github organization each
mentor-students set would use. (Related -- we spent a moment going
over the fact that each mentor-student set has to have a separate
github organization, and they can't re-use the oh-washington github
organization they already created).

* We then talked for a while about the Contributions Workshop part of
the day, including a variety of things that make it risky, and the
ways we've done something to address some of those risk points. I gave
him a pretty thorough tour of everything within
http://openhatch.github.io/open-source-comes-to-campus/lessons/index.html
's "Contributions Workshop", as well as a lot of commentary that was
probably interesting and/or useful.

* Ben asked me where we usually find attendees, and we talked about
this for about 5 minutes. Ben also discovered that reddit.com/r/udub
exists, and then I learned this a moment later.

* Toward the end, Ben asked me how the planning work usually gets
divvied up. I remarked that there's often sort of a logistics lead and
a separate teaching lead, and that you need to do things like allocate
the logistics lead to carefully monitoring lunch in the 30 min before
the scheduled lunchtime.

* He asked me what the usual size of these events is. I said I've seen
as small as 6 and as large as ~80. I mentioned that it's OK to expect
a 30-50% no-show rate, but also that it's wise to cap signups at the
level you can actually useful handle.

* I also attempted to instill in him the importance of getting more
local mentors, so he'll now ping Mako on that front.

* Ben seems on pretty good footing to handle questions from mentors as
they show up, which is good.


Things I didn't cover in depth:

* The slides for
http://openhatch.github.io/open-source-comes-to-campus/lessons/what-is-open-source/
have up/down as well as left-right navigation. (For Ben's edification
-- up/down navigation is for when the presenter is typically demo-ing
something. Up/down navigation lets you use screenshots if you're
having trouble with the demo, or if you just forget what you're
supposed to demo. Once you're done with that demo, you can go right.)

Other meta-remark: I did ask Ben if it was OK if I published my
conversation notes to the public osctc-planning list.

Other other meta-remark: This was super fun. If I did this pretty
often, like once a week, it'd probably still be fun for me.

-- Asheesh.

Appendix. Full IRC log of #openhatch-osctc

[20:27:08] <paulproteus> https://openhatch.org/wiki/Communication
[20:27:41] <paulproteus>
http://openhatch.github.io/open-source-comes-to-campus/lessons/index.html
[20:27:51] <paulproteus> =>
http://openhatch.github.io/open-source-comes-to-campus/lessons/what-is-open-source/#/
[20:31:31] <paulproteus>
https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/Curriculum/Career_Panel
[20:31:33] <paulproteus> "Career musical chairs"
[20:32:44] <paulproteus>
https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/Practicing_Git
[20:33:15] <paulproteus> http://ccsf-1.github.io/
[20:33:20] <paulproteus> http://ccsf-2.github.io/
[20:33:24] <paulproteus> http://ccsf-3.github.io/
[20:33:40] <paulproteus> https://github.com/ccsf-1/ccsf-1.github.io
[20:57:38] <paulproteus> https://openhatch.org/wiki/First_Tasks
[20:59:30] <paulproteus>
http://openhatch.github.io/open-source-comes-to-campus/lessons/index.html
[20:59:36] <paulproteus> "Contributions Workshop"
[21:05:38] <paulproteus> "Sign-in sheet and stickies" at
http://software-carpentry.org/workshops/operations.html