In order to build a community, we occasionally hold workshops for the NYC area. The vary from things for total beginners, to users of Debian, to advanced topics. Check below for information.
Our next workshop is Friday through Sunday, Jan 29th through 31st, 2010, ?The 2010 NYC bug squashing party
Workshop Index
Introduction to Debian packaging, October 15, 2009. Presented by Daniel Kahn Gillmor and Micah Anderson
Packaging concepts and worksession, followup to #1, November 12, 2009.
How to squash bugs, summary of #1 and #2 about how to locally modify packages (and fix bugs). Preparation for the BSP listed below., January 21, 2009.
?The 2010 NYC bug squashing party isn't exactly a workshop, but related and has many of the same people. There will be some mini-workshops here.
An Introduction to Secure Digital Communications using OpenPGP, March 24th, 2010.
Advanced packaging tools wasn't really a workshop, but a talk by Richard Darst at the New York Linux User's Group on September 15, 2010.
What's in a package explains many of the details of packaging and compares various packaging systems. October 27, 2010.
Other workshop ideas
- Introduction to chroots/VMs/pbuilder and other similar kind of build/development tools.
- Lightning talks about projects/teams in Debian, to help people find areas they like and mentors.
- Custom kernel basics for extended hardware support
- Linux Audio: why it sucks and how Debian helps it suck less
- How to build packages from scratch
- BSPs
- Development parties
- General work/brainstorming time (barcamp kind of thing)
- Team-joining parties (or, forming locally-organized teams to maintain certain things)
- Usability brainstorming
- Installation help (probably this could happen at any of these)
- DD sponsorship and requirements-doing workshops.
- Lightning talks: best obscure {user, development} tools, intro to all VCSs,
- Backporting
- How to report bugs
- Tear apart a package, learn what all the bits do
- Explain how to use lintian to find packaging errors using a package with many errors as an example
- Advanced packaging tools
- Boot process
- Network engineering, security, VPNs, IPSec
- Cloud APIs. Introductions to Rackspace and Amazon, plus lightning talks about cross-platform Cloud APIs.
- Building a Debian AMI (Amazon Machine Image) from scratch. Can be combined with the above-mentioned "Cloud APIs" workshop.
Possible workshop locations: CSdept, Lime, ABCNoRio, IBM, Google, NYPLs, eyebeam, SFLC
We should try more targeted outreach, instead of mostly targeting towards people already in the free software world as we have been doing.
Space considerations
- Room arrangements:
- all one room? Several conference rooms?
- Projector?
- Whiteboard?
- Seating:
- How many table spots are there? (most people seem to prefer tables)
- How many free seats are there, couches, etc?
- Can we rearrange things? (of course, we'll put it all back and clean up)
- Seating to see the screen?
- Enough power in the room for 15-20 laptops? How many power strips do we need to bring? Extension cords?
- Network:
- How stable/fast is the uplink?
- Do you have wireless we can use?
- Is it possible to set up wired connections for some seats?
- Somewhere to plug in our Debian mirror (wired preferable)
- Time: Earliest time attendees can arrive? When do we need to leave? Organizers arrive early to set-up?
- Access: can people show up last minute and come in?
- Food: allowed?
Lessons Learned
- Make your plans on the wiki here, right on the workshop page. It's ok to be messy there. Having public drafts and outlines is important, since other groups are interested in running workshops, and we want to make it easy for them to learn from us and use our work.
- Make sure the mirror works, and everyone can use it (the NFS mount didn't work so well for everyone)
- Net connection did go slow when everyone was using it
- Get stable and testing? I bet some didn't use it because it only had unstable.
- Problem during introductions: computers were distracting from us getting to know each other.
- Plan on 15 minutes at the beginning to get computers set up.
- Expect it to take longer than you planned.
- Have a firm introduction, focusing people.
- If you want to make announcements, you have to try hard to make sure everyone is paying attention. You should do it at the very beginning, or right after the lecture portion. Don't forget to make your "we want you to give back" and stuff announcements here.
- If you want the second half to stay on track, you need to take decisive action.
- Don't forget to bring: List of names of attendees.
- Boot from a Debian Live system, so that you don't have lots of things pre-installed and it looks like attendee's computers
- Consider that every tangential thing that you discuss confuses some more people! It's hard to know what you need and what you don't need to know when we do that.
- Perhaps say something, physically go around and make sure everyone gets it, then continue, instead of talking the whole time.
- Ask for advanced questions to be said on IRC, perhaps...