Open Stack

On 08/02/2015 08:51 PM, Cindy Pallares wrote:
> On 07/30/2015 03:25 AM, Sylvain Bauza wrote:
>> Le 30/07/2015 04:23, Stefano Maffulli a écrit :
>>> On 07/29/2015 01:29 PM, Tim Freund wrote:
>>>> I started a Google form to collect information.  What am I missing and
>>>> what should I change?
>>>>
>>>> http://goo.gl/forms/qAr3N8rdYs
>>> I would add business title below organization, so we know if we're
>>> dealing with developer, operator, product/project manager, etc.

Good point!  I added a title field.  For anyone just joining the thread, 
here's the form URL:  http://goo.gl/forms/qAr3N8rdYs

>>> I also collected the salutation (and gender), so we can address the
>>> person in their favorite pronoun.

I started adding a gender field, and I did some research on best 
practices for creating an inclusive field.  It seems like the general 
consensus is to skip collecting it if it is not strictly necessary. 
Unless we are tracking gender diversity of our students, I'd lean toward 
leaving it off the list entirely.

>>> We also asked in the past (but I wonder if we really need them):
>>>
>>>   - What is your level of proficiency with Free Software in general and
>>> its development processes?
>>>   - Have you ever attempted submitting patches to a Free Software
>>> project? If so, please describe how it went:
>>>   - Please summarize your professional experience, as a developer or
>>> otherwise:
>>>
>>> and to set the expectations:
>>>
>>>   - What would you like to learn from this training program?
>>

I have added the following three questions to collect this experience 
information:

- Please summarize your professional experience
- Tell us about your past open source experience
- What do you hope to gain from this training?

>> Here, I just wonder if it would maybe be better to either ask for a
>> certain level of technical proficiency before the Training, or split
>> people in groups based on mutual skills ?
>>
> I really like these questions, they're insightful and I think it would
> be a great idea to split people into mutual skills. I think mentorship
> works well when you have a mentor and have someone someone at your same
> level who you can encourage and grow with. It would also be good to
> mention that the questions are just to determine technical skill
> placement in a group and not discourage people from attending the training.

I've clarified our experience questions to let potential attendees know 
that we accept all potential contributors, and their answers will help 
us tailor the class to their needs.

>
>>>> Concerning mentors:  should the automation automatically assign a
>>>> mentor
>>>> based on student interest area and mentor load?  (Perhaps allow mentors
>>>> to say how many students they are comfortable working with, and
>>>> auto-assign up to that number.)
>>> That's the biggest area of concern: we don't have a culture of mentors
>>> already established so for all the people who expressed interest in
>>> helping, they need to be trained to read this mailing list, be on IRC
>>> (which channel?) and follow the trello board and more.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure how to best manage the volunteers who have expressed the
>>> intention to help.

I've created a separate form that could help us collect more information 
from potential mentors:

http://goo.gl/forms/fczq3NZ16g

The form collects information that will allow us to avoid overburdening 
mentors with too many students, and assign students with similar interests.

The form asks mentors to subscribe to openstack-community and join the 
#upstream-university IRC channel.  Should we have an OpenStack specific 
upstream channel?

We should engage potential mentors right away, just like we engage 
potential students.  If that form looks good, I can post it to the 
openstack-dev mailing list to request volunteers.

>> I'd rather try to consider what mentors are able to propose, and give
>> that information to students so they could pick one, like we do for GSoC.

Does the form collect that information?  Sorry, I'm unfamiliar with the 
GSoC mentor/student process, but I'm happy to learn more if you can 
point me in the right direction.

>> Sometimes, picking low-hanging-fruits is really hard and leads to
>> confusion, I'd rather make a call to volunteers to see what they can
>> give time for mentoring.
>>
>> -Sylvain
>
> Have any of the previous participants volunteered as mentors (or perhaps
> co-mentors)? It would be really beneficial to have some co-mentors that
> are not as experienced and completed the program. It would certainly
> take a load of current mentors. I'm not sure what the retention rate for
> the program is or if we keep track, but how does adding a question to
> the survey asking if they'd be willing to mentor or co-mentor someone in
> the future upstream training sound like a good idea? It would make the
> program more sustainable and encourage a culture of mentoring beginners.
>

Definitely!  I think we've had assistants from each previous class join 
subsequent classes to help students, although we haven't fully utilized 
them in the weekly mentoring that follows the classes.

Other work:

I started working on a script that will use gspread[1] and mailgun[2] to 
collect student and mentor data and start the student communication. 
I'll report back when I have a demo working (later today, if there are 
no emergencies).

[1] https://github.com/burnash/gspread
[2] https://mailgun.com  (free under 10K messages a month, and our 
Rackspace volunteers can probably find us help if we run into issues)

I'm also going to work on a proof of concept system that would allow us 
to track student achievement before/during/after the training.  We 
talked a little about this idea in our debrief from last time: students 
and mentors will be able to go to a page and see past progress as well 
as potential opportunities for future progress.

Request for assistance:

I have a virtual host that will redirect to the registration form:
http://openstack-upstream.freunds.net/register

We can change the target of that redirect when the class is full. 
What's the best way to implement a redirect on a openstack.org web host? 
  Alternatively, I configured mine to accept requests as 
upstream.openstack.org if we want to create that CNAME.

I'd like to get registration opened by the middle of this week.

More to come - questions and comments are welcome, as always.

Tim

-- 
Tim Freund
913-207-0983 | @timfreund
http://tim.freunds.net