This page serves as an abstract scratchpad for an event I wish to help organize at the Rochester Institute of Technology at some point in 2016 to successfully market Fedora, perhaps in joint with other Linux distributions, software, or other relevant topics to gain the most possible interest.
What is it?
This event would be either a hackathon or installfest type of event intended to group several different communities across the RIT campus together to work on projects, share what we're all working on, and subsequently teach the values of Free and Open-Source Software. Depending on the scope of the event, it could be broken up into different areas based on expertise after an initial welcome. Ideally, the event would start with some kind of initial introduction and quick overview on what's on the agenda, and could possibly be split into different groups later on.
Experts
Anyone who considers their self a savvy programmer or experienced person in a particular project, language, or other area would be encouraged to give a short five-minute talk over something they've been working on and want to share with others. These groups of people would be the ones who we would want to share information or contribute to other projects for the duration of the event. An example format of a possible presentation could be:
- (30s) Introduce themselves to the audience
- (2m-3m) Give a short overview of their project
- What does it do
- What language(s) does it use
- Is it for fun? Does it try to solve a problem? Why do you enjoy working on it?
- (1m) Explain a problem you've run into or where you could use help
- (30s) Closing words, tell people where to find / contact you if they want to help
Intermediates
The self-identifying intermediates in the crowd would likely be comprised of those who show up without prior notice or have mild interest in contributing towards projects. They might be set apart from the "experts" part of the crowd by either where they are in terms of their knowledge of a particular language or maybe they work on a large variety of projects and haven't committed to a singular thing to be able to give a presentation on it. The presence of intermediates would be important as they would be the ones who pick a project to work on and help work on improving it or maybe making their own variation of it.
Beginners
The beginners would be formed of people with little to no experience or knowledge in programming, but might have an interest in checking out what's going on, or they might just identify as savvy technology users. This group of users could be targeted by having an installfest going on alongside the event, so users who want to dual-boot their computers with Windows/OS X and Linux could come to get help and support to do this. This group would also be the ideal group to educate about FOSS and why it's important (without driving them away from being forcibly fed information, of course).
Who is involved?
In order for this event to truly be successful on a medium- to large-scale, it would require multilateral action by a variety of on-campus organizations and clubs for planning and organization. Admittedly, this comes with the possibility of club politics interfering with the actual execution of the event, so it would be important to have some kind of decision-making system in place for working with these groups that might have mutual and opposite interests. Such organizations that may be interested in helping:
- codeRIT
- Computer Science House
- Localhost
- NextHop
- RITlug
- And more...?
When would this happen?
Ideally, this would be held at some time in 2016...
Where would it be?
The ideal location would the the Simone Center for Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship. There is a decent-sized room in this building where past hackathons have been run that would likely make a good candidate for hosting this event.
Why do it?
//TODO