[Systers-dev] Whew!

[Jennifer Redman]

Hi Gloria,

Very sorry tomorrow turned into Thursday.   I'm back in Portland for an
extended stay and have more time to focus now.

This is GREAT news!

See comments below.

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 5:01 PM, Gloria W <strangest at comcast.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have some really exciting, and maybe even a bit scary, news. I
> volunteered to teach an intermediate Python tutorial at pyArkansas in about
> three weeks (One day, Nov 14th). This is an event for college students in
> the entire region of LittleRock and surrounding areas.
>
> During our planning, I asked out of curiosity how many female students
> there would be, and if a women-friendly code sprint was in order on either
> Friday or Saturday night (possibly both). One professor who likes the idea
> and is willing to work out local logistics is helping me get this together.
> He wants to blast this announcement over a wider area, which is very likely
> to draw many many more students than I anticipated.
>
> I have two code sprint ideas. I may try to run them at the same time if the
> group is too large, letting women choose between the back-end intensive one
> (your Systers mail server enhancements), or the web app w/Google map
> interface (my project from pyOhio).
>
> So, I have two questions and one request:
>
> (Q1) Do you have a list of relatively small, quantifiable assignments I can
> give to students and manage over the course of two nights? I imagine some
> will want to work in groups, some will not. I'll let them work in any way
> they see fit. They are Comp Sci majors with no prior Python experience. I
> have no idea how theory-heavy their coursework is, and how much exposure
> they have to real programming languages, but we will find out, won't we? :)
>

I think we can build off of our existing list from the GHC09 code sprint.
 It seemed like Anne's approach of walking students through a bug report and
then looking at the code was really effective and interesting (she had
several spell-bound participants who seemed to be learning a lot).


>
> (Q2) Can someone be online to help during this time? I know this is asking
> someone to sacrifice their weekend night time, and this may not be a fair
> request, but I figured I would give it a try anyway.
>

I'm happy to hang around on irc for a least part of the time -- maybe we can
work out some shifts.



>
> (R1) Help!!!! This is getting bigger exposure than I planned! Does anyone
> on this list live nearby, and feel like helping out? This is going to be a
> bit insane, and an extra set of hands would be fantastic. I could bribe you
> with my honorarium money, if necessary, by paying for your transportation,
> and sharing my hotel space. You'd have to arrive on the afternoon of
> November 13 and stay until some time Monday morning. Let me know if anyone
> here is interested.
>

I would love to come out but I'm so traveled out at this point that I need
to stay put for awhile.  Let me think about any other suggestions.  I may
also ask on the Google Mentor list to see if there is anyone in the area
that could swing by.

I think these Code Sprints are an incredibly positive way to start reaching
out to and encouraging women to become involved in open-source development
communities.  I'm going to start another thread -- so we can begin
brainstorming around some permanent resources (task-lists, dev environments
etc) that would allow anyone from the Systers dev team to run a Systers Code
Sprint so I can get out of the way of progress!

Jen