Campus outreach 2011-2012

Here are the things that are planned/true about campus outreach events in the 2011-2012 school year:

General overview
A year ago, we ran a really successful event at Penn.

We want to do more of them. This document suggests a timeframe for that.

Doing a P2PU run
It has been suggested that the curriculum be available as online videos. Also, I want the co-instructors for in-person events to be able to base their lectures/instruction on online videos, so they know exactly what I would teach in their situation.

One thing we've learned is that practice makes perfect; with the Boston Python Workshop, for example, the more we run it, the more we know how to run it well.

Therefore, I think we should do a run of the course on the web -- let's say on P2PU, since that's everyone's favorite online learning place.

We would plan the P2PU course to use the curriculum materials used by the in-person event. This way, we're forced to write them, and we also get feedback before we use them in the in-person events.

I estimate the course would take 7 weeks (with 8 "meetings", due to the fencepost problem):


 * Day 0: Introductions (why people are here, what they expect to get out of the course)
 * Day 7: Linux and the command line (tar, cd, ls)
 * Day 14: Communication tools (IRC, mailing lists)
 * Day 21: The ethics and history of the movement; and the economics and licensing that support it.
 * Day 28: Getting, modifying, and verifying open source software (getting code; local patching)
 * Day 35: Project organization (bug trackers; git format-patch; github; people's roles in a project)
 * Day 42: Practice contributing to a project
 * Day 49: Wrap-up

Suggested time-line: New course items get published to P2PU on Tuesdays. We could go by a timeline where day 0 == Nov 15. In that case:

>>> import datetime >>> day_0 = datetime.date(2011, 11, 15) >>> day_0 + datetime.timedelta(days=35) datetime.date(2011, 12, 20)

The final real lecture would be on December 20, and the "Practice contributing to a project" component would take place right around Christmas, and people could keep doing that for as long as they need/want during winter break.

Probable places we can take the tour
Part of the plan is to have Asheesh roam the country/world running this course.


 * 80% probable: Dartmouth, through Hacker Club. Requested date: mid-Jan.
 * 80% probable: JHU ACM

Possible:


 * NYU ACM
 * CSC Waterloo
 * Berkeley, through CSUA and everything else

Possible sponsors
In this section, I will speculatively list companies and organizations that might want to help make sure the event can take place.


 * Mozilla?
 * Red Hat?
 * Python Software Foundation?
 * WordPress.org?
 * Debian's usual funders?
 * Ubuntu-ish funders?

How to get involved

 * Join the events mailing list and say who you are and how you want to contribute. We'll get you plugged in.