[Philly-chix] Inviting Phillychix to teach how open source works

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hey Phillychix,

Lyz (whom I know from PLUG) pointed me y'all's way. I'm a (male) Debian 
developer, I maintain a community website at http://openhatch.org/ , and I 
lived in Philadelphia for a year until two weeks ago. :P

In ten days, I'm running (with Yuvi Masory -- CC:d) an event where we try 
to teach U Penn students how to participate in the open source + free 
software community.

We're mostly targeting computer science undergrads and Digital Media 
Design <http://cg.cis.upenn.edu/dmd/>.

We put a simple website about the event at http://penn.openhatch.org/. My 
question for this community is -- do any of you want to teach small groups 
of Penn students?

The structure of Saturday is that groups of five students rotate from 
module to module. They spend an hour each thinking about four different 
topics:

* Open source person-to-person communication -- IRC, wikis, and mailing 
lists.

* Tools and essential skills -- version control, build automation, test 
suites. Things that a college student has likely never seen.

* Open source project organization -- what forking means, bug tracking, 
patches, documentation, and normal workflows.

* *NIX and the command line -- many students haven't played around enough 
with it, and projects often assume people are familiar with command-line 
tools.

The idea is to give these students enough background with the culture and 
tools of the free software community so that they don't feel hopeless, 
lost, and confused -- instead, like the rest of us, they should feel 
productively lost and and have someone to turn to when they're confused. 
(-:

Any of you want to:

* Teach the students, on Saturday?

* Attend the open hack session on Sunday?

* Try to lure students into becoming a contributor (code or otherwise) to 
a project you work on, on Sunday? (-:

* Reply on this mailing list with feedback about the event?

Also, to promote attendance from women, we're going to email the society 
of women engineers asking them to specially invite women. I'd love to hear 
other ideas, too.

(We also have our own random scratchy notes about the event on my personal 
wiki for now -- http://asheesh.org/scratch/Penn_open_source_hackathon .)

-- Asheesh.

-- 
Q:	What do you say to a New Yorker with a job?
A:	Big Mac, fries and a Coke, please!