[outreach] planning events for newcomers at the Boston Summit

[Marina Zhurakhinskaya <marinaz redhat com>]

Hi!

We are planning to have events for newcomers during the Boston Summit in two weeks and we need a lot of help to put this together. I just created a page with an outline for what the events will be. https://live.gnome.org/Boston2012/Newcomers Please go through it, and follow up if you can help with any of the following:

1) We need as many people as possible helping during the Friday workshop and Sunday fix-your-first-bug mini-hackfest. From my experience helping with OpenHatch events, I know just how effective it is to have many staffers who can help participants get through any stumbling blocks on the spot. For the Sunday event, please try to line up several “gnome-love” bugs in your module that you can help participants fix. Please add yourself on https://live.gnome.org/Boston2012/Planning if you will be able to help with either event.

2) If you have an idea for a session for newcomers, please add it to https://live.gnome.org/Boston2012/Newcomers . So far, I should be able to do the overview during the Friday event and Christian Hergert will run a session about GNOME development in C. It’d be great to have a couple more sessions for newcomers. Please put in a time that you think will make sense for your session, as we should create a schedule for the newcomer sessions ahead of time.

3) We need to prepare a CD or USB with GNOME that we will help participants install. We also need to have detailed instructions available ahead of time for what state should people’s computers be in to be ready to have GNOME installed as a first or second OS on the computer (e.g. backed up, can we do dual-boot with Macs?). Also, we need to have detailed instructions about what distributions have recent enough GNOME for people to be able to just build the development version on their existing system and how people get the GNOME 3 experience with their distributions.

4) We need to prepare a module that the participants will be able to check out, build, run, find (planted) bugs in, file them in Bugzilla, submit patches to fix them, and review these patches. This module should have some basic code that, for example, displays a window with some text misspelled and has buttons that do not do what they promise to do. I think Python or JavaScript would be a most suitable language for such module. We can call this module “gnome-tutorial” and create a related Bugzilla component. We then need to have detailed instructions for each step about what we expect the participants to accomplish. This would be similar to OpenHatch missions covering diff, patch, and git https://openhatch.org/missions , but GNOME-specific. Helping with the OpenHatch event at MIT where participants were engaged going through these missions showed me how important it is to start with basics when introducing newcomers to FOSS contributing.

You can help out with 3 and 4 even if you are not coming to Boston Summit! Let’s use #outreach for discussing the plan for this event. I hope that once we have all the materials in place, we can replicate this event at other universities around the world.

Thanks!
Marina

P.S. I will also forward this e-mail to all people signed up to attend the Boston Summit and will ask them to join this list.