Open Source Comes to Campus/Meta-organizing

From OpenHatch wiki

About this page

This page (and the pages it links to) are a proposal for how meta-organizing (a concept we're borrowing from Railsbridge) could be blended into Open Source Comes to Campus.

Roles and responsibilities

Here's how we think about the people who make an event possible.

  • Attendees: These are the people, typically students, who come to the event to learn about the event's topic, open source contribution.
  • Organizer(s): This is a person, typically also a student, who handles local logistics like ordering food, reserving a room, and contacting attendees. They also are the person in control of the event's schedule. They might have experience attending or running other Open Source Comes to Campus events, but it's OK if they don't. They're likely to need help, and that's OK, because they are supported by a meta-organizer.
  • Volunteers: These are people who want to help make the event a success. Typically the organizer tells them how they can be most helpful. Most volunteers are mentors, teaching students at the event, perhaps by helping students get involved in an open source project, or by helping students learn in a curriculum module. Other volunteers might help with logistics like picking up food or checking people in.
  • Meta-organizer: This is a person, located anywhere in the world, who is the main contact point for the Organizer(s) to help them answer questions. What should the curriculum look like? How do we find funding for food? What possible mentors live nearby, and how do we contact them? This person might be an experienced volunteer who's run other Open Source Comes to Campus events, or might be a board member or staff member of OpenHatch itself.

Read more

Acknowledgments

A huge amount of the writing here is derived from Railsbridge's wiki, particularly their Meta-Organizer Cookbook. Lillie Chilen is the author of much of that text, and we're immensely grateful for the ability to learn from their great work.

We're also grateful to all the people who have attended, organized, volunteered at, advised, and simply heard about OpenHatch and Open Source Comes to Campus over the years. You are all too numerous to name. It's always a struggle to think about how we can improve the events because it is a reminder of all the ways that past events could have been better. It's heartening to know that many of you are still a part of free & open source software, and that many of you are still active within OpenHatch.

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