Absentee Sunday / Let's Get Organized!

Hey all, just wanted to drop a note here to say I won't be able to get a lesson together for tomorrow myself. If someone else feels like organizing a teach-in, let me know and I can help promote and get the word out, but I've been too busy this past week to do any preparation.

In general, I would like to put some effort into solidifying the process for getting folks to guest-teach. There were a lot of good ideas around OCSMS on this, but we haven't really moved the ball forward too much since then. I think if we can get just a little more organized, we'll be able to really involve a wider circle of participants, which should take the pressure off individuals who've been doing a lot of the work.

There are some more thoughts along these lines in the extended entry.

Early on in the process, Dojo members contributed great documentation and ideas for how to set up the lesson event, and how to join it as a learner. It's because of that creativity and hard work that we've been able to do everything we've done. I think the critical next step is to do the same thing, but for the lesson teacher role.

We should probably start by codifying our lesson process a little more:

• We have some good stuff already under the dojo-howto tag.
• Webchick's great notes on roles: http://groups.drupal.org/node/3287
• Solidifying the ideal lesson "format":
  • Start by with a lesson plan
  • Collect documentation links ahead of time
  • Give one hour of instruction (save out screencasts), then break for Q&A
  • Documentation/screencast production afterwards
• Needed: Good documentation on how to record a screencast locally
  • Screencap software/instructions for every platform
  • Video encoding instructions: http://groups.drupal.org/node/2448 and http://groups.drupal.org/node/2424
  • Some idea of what kind of processing power is needed
• How to host the skypecast: http://groups.drupal.org/node/3846
• How to host the VNC reflector (forthcoming)
• How to post a screencast (blip.tv, vuze.com, etc)

I think a lot of this is there, but just needs to be pulled together. The screencap stuff does need better documentation, and I'll be trying to remedy from my end to some extent, but we will also need Windows and Linux experts to contribute platform-specific knowledge. Then we'll want to collect all this documentation, edit it into a logical set of pages and get it placed in the drupal.org handbook so that it's all "in one place" for people to find.

Then, we'll need to put together a good page that "advertises" the opportunity for people to come in and teach, and lays out the process for going from "I feel like teaching" to "I just gave a kick-ass lesson; look at my awesome screencap!" I don't really think we need to develop any new technology to do this, just document and zero in on how we can use our existing tools.

For instance, we could lay out the process (implied above) as follows:

• Propose lesson idea/plan as a wiki page on the drupal-dojo group.
• Lesson plan wiki page gains traction, conversation occurs in comments and/or #drupal-dojo, and a time is chosen to give the lesson. Doesn't have to be the usual Sunday timeslot, but it can be.
• All necessary roles are filled, and an event is created on the group.
• The event will go out to drupal planet and serves as the "official" lesson announcement.
• Lesson process runs (as above).
• Screencast is encoded and posted.
• Awesomeness!

So, I'm sorry I can't teach tomorrow, but I would love to get feedback from the group on how this process looks. For me, it seems like a critical step to "throwing the dojo over the wall," because it will allow more people to take leadership roles, and in addition to making the lesson process more repeatable, it should also provide the necessary knowledge for more people to do quicker documentation pieces (e.g. add1sun's quick'n'dirty series, dmitrig01's lightning lesson, etc).