Call for Volunteers - Become a Dojocho!

Dojocho is not always the chief instructor or highest ranked person, but reflects an administrative or ownership role.

Hello everyone, today we discussed how we can make it easier for guest teachers to teach Dojo lessons. The goal is twofold; first to make it easy and painless for guest teachers to schedule, plan, and implement a fabulous Dojo lesson, second is to facilitate capturing and documenting the impromptu mini-tutorials that are becoming a staple of the Dojo IRC. We came to the conclusion that volunteers, or dojocho are very important to making both of these goals a reality, and this is a basic outline of what we came up with. Please feel free to edit/add to it.

Make it inviting to teachers

• Create a sticky note on g.d.o. for teachers to click on and go to a sign-up page. Squidgy has already come up with this page on drupaldojo.com (Uncle Drupal rocks!) as a way to advertise to prospective teachers.
• Create a sign-up page, preferably on g.d.o., that would include a way for prospective teachers to schedule a lesson. A custom node is called for, so ideally it should be designed on dd.com to show to Moshe with the idea that he might be able to add it to g.d.o.
• Offer link-backs and/or banners to those who volunteer to teach (exposure is good).
• Have a page of documentation and links to software resources neccessary for setting up a Dojo class, however documentation should be considered secondary support to help from dojocho.
• Have teams of dojocho, or dojo volunteers, possibly organized by platform, i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux, who would be able to help an instructor get the technology up and running smoothly to run a dojo lesson with a minimum of fuss. Three types of roles come to mind:
  • Setup - folks that can help an instructor set up the software days or weeks ahead of a scheduled lesson
  • Tech - folks that can help an instructor test the technology, both the day before and in the hour prior to the lesson
  • Testers - folks that can be online to help by participating in the above. Anyone, even brand new users, can participate in this role.
• A custom node for prospective dojocho to sign up would make it easier to manage a number of volunteers.
• Ideas for lessons - Primarily, the theme here is flexibility; making it easy for prospective teachers to approach the Dojo. Lesson ideas can come from:
• Requests from Dojo members.
• Instructions from project managers on using/helping various projects (an example would be Jeff Robbins doing a dojo on the upcoming Zengine project-hint, hint).
• Lessons that evolve from Dojo mini-tutorials that continue to confound users (menu-callbacks was cited as an example).
• Etc.?

Mini-tutorials

It seems if you hang out in the drupal-dojo IRC channel long enough there are occasions for impromptu mini-tutorials that need to be captured and shared. This can be facilitated by:

• Creating documentation specific to new dojo users on how use screen and/or audio capture software and encoders to share with the dojo.
• Have a place on dd.com to post mini-tutes.
• Encourage documentation of these mini-tutes as well; call for volunteers.
• Etc.?

We need you!

The above cannot be accomplished without having a healthy pool of dojocho to do these jobs. Given the (growing) size of the Dojo community, it would be nice to be able to rotate dojocho in and out of roles so that no one has to do one job all of the time. There is a need for users of all levels to step forward! If you are interested in fulfilling any of the above roles, please comment below.