Plans: October workshop, learners meetup, varying the hours

[Angus Gratton]

We had a quick strategic coffee/tea drinking session after today's
workshop and talked about next steps. Here's my recollection from that
discussion. Please correct me or comment in general!

* We want to start a regular (monthly or fortnightly) weekday evening
"Learner's Meetup" for people to drop in. Modelled on Berlin. This
creates an ongoing community connection, and a way for people to get
help on projects or catching up with workshop material. Matt's going
to reach out to someone he knows at York Butter Factory and see if
they can accommodate us.

* Next month's workshop will be "HTML & CSS Beginners" based on the
work in progress in Europe[1]. Matt is keen to do some writing for
that, Lily & I as well, to have it ready in time for late October.

* Looking further into the future we're going to focus on web things -
pencilling in the 4 hour JavaScript workshop for November then
perhaps re-run Python Flask after that to create a
progression. Early next year we may be in a position to combine some
of these into an intensive beginner's weekend web workshop.

* For the next workshop we're going to try shifting the hours, approx
10:00-16:00 with a one hour lunch break in the middle. This gives 5
hours of learning time with a break for people to socialise and
declutter their brains. Lots of people seem to get tired about the
3-3.5 hour mark and head off.

* There's a brainstorm page for other workshop ideas up on Google Docs.[2]

Did I miss anything? Anyone who wasn't present please feel free to
comment/ask/suggest. :)


- Angus

[1] https://github.com/OpenTechSchool/html-css-beginners

[2] https://docs.google.com/a/opentechschool.org/document/d/1Edrzp_XigHbFul1bqRFEi7QrHXJjvApIdIDgpGn6dJw/edit?usp=sharing

[Steven Farlie]

Pamela Fox has CC licensed all of the GirlDevelopIt workshop material. It looks like some really good stuff!: http://www.teaching-materials.org/

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Steven

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[Matthew Iversen]

Hi there, sorry for being late about getting back to y'all.

A) The York Buttery Factory would indeed be amenable to hosting learners meetups for OTSMelb. I can get their community manager's email as soon as we'd like to make a proposal. I think writing a semi-formal outline / document of the meetup goals, style, restrictions, terms (a formalish plan for how and when they'd run) would be a good idea to be able to present to them.

B) http://opentechschool.github.io/python-beginners/en/index.html has some new fonts! So it looks spiffy! I've also added quite a few alterations to language as well, and intend to add a page at the end. I've been wondering about writing an updated style guide for OTS-international using all free materials. At the moment the publicly viewable one on the website chooses a non-free font, but we use Monserrat anyway...  There are lots of OSS/Free Heading fonts these days and choosing a good body font like open sans (main thing having lots of glyphs so works for european languages) would be a good idea imho

C) There was a large pull that went through, needed editing, for html-css-beginners. I might have to go and edit it myself, just spelling out things out loud.

Steven's link looks cool, but it is mostly presentation style instead of self-learning. We'd have to adapt the style of workshop to use them, which I'm not fundamentally against, but it would be something new.

[Matthew Iversen]

Here's a document we can fill out-

https://docs.google.com/a/opentechschool.org/document/d/1odWvgzq6ZXX9KI7mfyqw80Gc_23EEoLB5OTgZrNYXl4/

Feel free to add anything for now

[Steven Farlie]

Yeah the presentation style is unfortunate for us. It seems like our scene started with the split presentation/workshop format and so everything followed. I don't see anyone else doing at-your-own-pace workshops.

However they are also CC licensed so copy-paste at will :)

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[Matthew Iversen]

I recently remembered OpenHack[Night], which is very similar in aims to 'Learners meetups'.

Maybe we could think about collaborating with this group of people sometime, or sharing their umbrella.

http://openhack.github.io/

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