Spread the word!

[Kelly Albrecht]

Downpayment was made today and the summit is now official for Sept. 12th-14th!

Curious about the best way to proceed with spreading the word about:

http://nerdsummit.org/hackforwesternmass

Hacking on a day, or across the whole weekend, would be amazing!

I have a large room reserved and can add more as needed, let me know what you think makes sense.

CHEERS!

kelly

--

KELLY ALBRECHT 
Executive Director, NERDs 
nerdsummit.org 

FACEBOOK | TWITTER | GOOGLE+ 

NERDs 
78 Main St. Suite 401 
Northampton, MA 01060 

413-813-8755

[Kelly Albrecht]

I'm trying to add structure and automation to acquiring, scheduling, and raising awareness of challenges I hope people will work on during the Summit. I've never helped with a H4WM and don't know what you already have in place for organizing the challenges. Ultimately, I want to be able to promote the challenges and raise awareness and participation at the Summit.

That said, here is what I have so far:

Requests/challenges can be add here: http://nerdsummit.org/node/add/request (you need an account first: http://nerdsummit.org/user/register)

Right now it has fields for title and description. Should there be other fields?

When a request is submitted it goes here: http://nerdsummit.org/summits/sessions/requested

From there it can be scheduled into a room for a day or days.

Does any of this help or hinder making this an H4WM success?

[Andrew Pasquale]

I'm really excited about the potential for the summit, both as an open source gathering and an opportunity for civic hacking.  I'm looking forward to helping organize the event.

A number of volunteers have started working on the "Hack for Western Mass" event that will be held at the end of May/beginning of June.  I imagine most of the energy for finding challenges will be needed for that event, but I think there is a lot of opportunity to find challenges from organizations that might not be ready by May but could be ready for September.

I think it would be useful to have a page where people could submit suggestions.  It takes a significant amount of time to work with the organizations to develop their problems into the format that makes a good challenge for a hackathon.  It would be great to have other folks suggesting potential challenges.  We should have a form on the hackforwesternmass.org site for this too!

There is some structure for the challenges. 

• Title:
  
• Contributed by:  The name and location of organization sponsoring the challenge
  
• Background:
  
• The Challenge:
  
• What the solution might look like:
  
• Target Audience:
  
• Data Available:
  
• Timing: Is this a particularly timely issue?
  
• Presence:  Who from the organization will attend the event.  Any plans to maintain the solution going forward?  
  

See examples at http://hackforwesternmass.org/challenges

I think the current plan is for the Summit to have one day with a civic hacking track.  Certain types of challenges might be more suited to a one day event rather than the two day format for Hack for Change.  

I don't imagine having challenges prepared to be publicized for a while since I'll be focusing on the earlier event.  But some publicity for people to save the date is important.  And it would be good to get other input and potentially time and energy for developing challenges.

Thanks for making this happen, Kelly!  It's going to be awesome!

Andrew

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[Kelly Albrecht]

That makes sense about May/June. I also re-found http://hackforwesternmass.org/submit and don't know how I overlooked it earlier.

Thanks for the response! I'm stoked.

kelly

[Kelly Albrecht]

I created http://nerdsummit.org/submit-challenge, which emails results to hackforwe...@gmail.com.

I think we could collect summit challenge suggestions there first, then as ones are chosen and developed they can be scheduled for the summit.

I borrowed content from http://hackforwesternmass.org/submit

Let me know anything should be different.

[Sequoia]

I don't know if this is off-topic as it's not hackathon related but I want to put on some nodeschool event as part of the summit.  Nodeschool/workshopper is a cool fun framework for learning Node.js stuff!  I've gone thru 3 of the "core concept" lessons on my own but they're designed to be run as an OOTB workshop as well.

site: http://nodeschool.io/

examples: http://nodeschool.io/host.html

There is time to brainstorm about the details (do it as day-before workshop? Do multiple nodeschool sessions? Make it a workshop session?).

Anyway perhaps as plans come together it will become more obvious how to run it- for now I'm just thinking "I want to put one of these workshops in" & I can slot it in wherever it's convenient.

-Sequoia

On Sunday, March 2, 2014 11:26:37 PM UTC-5, Kelly Albrecht wrote:

I created http://nerdsummit.org/submit-challenge, which emails results to hackforwesternmass@gmail.com.

[Sequoia]

A thought:

Last year at the hackathon there were some challenges/projects that could have used some follow-up or a round II of development (a second "code sprint" so to speak).  I wonder if it would be possible to carry some of the July H4WM challenges over into the Hackathon track/day/session/whatever at the Summit.  This could potentially allow the summit to benefit from some of the outreach etc. done for the hackathon (rather than having a separate outreach effort or having to start from square 1 reaching out to partner orgs).  Piggyback on some unfinished h4wm challenges -> multiply force -> reduce effort duplication -> DRY.  Another possibility is, if the Summit hackatrack has slightly less rigorous requirements of partner orgs than the hackathon, that some of the Orgs who wanted to be involved in July 'thon but weren't ready/couldn't commit a person/etc. could get some action at the Summit.

Summary of ideas for Hackathon integration/generating challenge leads for summit (presented above):

1. Follow on "phase II" work on July NDoCH hackathon

2. Pick up challenges from Orgs that couldn't make it to the July NDoCH

-Sequoia

[Kelly Albrecht]

Oh man. This sounds great! It looks like it would make a great day-before session or double session.

You should put it in here: http://nerdsummit.org/node/add/session

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[Kelly Albrecht]

I think this sounds very reasonable.

I love "hackatrack," ha!

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