Workshop

About the workshop

This workshop was written by Will Kahn-Greene and run for the first time at RE Week at Ferry Beach July 11th through July 16 in 2010.

This workshop is contained in a single guide–there’s no separate guide for workshop leaders and a separate guide for participants.

Instead, reading materials, resources, and other things like that are throughout the guide as urls and footnotes.

Feedback

Send any feedback, comments, additional material, changes and all that stuff to:

willg [at] bluesock dot org.

Feedback will be factored into these workshop materials.

Thank you thank you thank you

Many many thanks to Dan Harper for giving me this opportunity, Shelby Meyerhoff for her thoughts and help, and Sadie Kahn-Greene for her thoughts, help and patience.

Thank you to Cindy, Lynn, Karen, Mary, and Louise who took the workshop at RE week for their patience, thoughts, and excitement which helped me flesh this material out. Thank you to Eddie and Alice who sat in, too.

Thank you all so much!

Colophon

The workshop materials were written using Emacs [1] and Sphinx [2].

[1]http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
[2]http://sphinx.pocoo.org/

How to run the workshop

Beginners vs. experienced people

If you don’t specify experience requirements for the workshop in the description text (e.g. “This workshop is for beginners.”), then you’ll probably end up with a broad spectrum of experience levels.

This workshop isn’t structured well enough to handle that effectively: either the beginners will be lost or the experienced people will be bored. That’d be great to fix some day.

Instead, I recommend you run the workshop for a group that’s all around the same level.

Internet connection

I think there are two ways you can run this workshop.

  1. No network or unreliable network

    If you have no Internet connection available OR the Internet connection isn’t reliable, then you’ll have to go the no network route.

    1. Make slide-decks of the Present material.
    2. Do the demos ahead of time and record them using desktop recording software. Then you can show these videos. If you want to narrate while recording, that’s fine. Otherwise, you can narrate while showing the video.
  2. Great network

    If you have a great Internet connection, then you can run the workshop with the activities and demos and everything will be super duper.

Before you run the workshop, you need to go to the location and make sure the Internet connection works and that it’s “fast enough” for demos and activities. One way to do this is:

  1. go to the location with your computer
  2. open up a web browser
  3. go to http://speedtest.net/
  4. run a test

It’ll tell you latency times, upload and download bandwidth. If the tests fail, that’s a sure sign the network connection isn’t good enough and demos and activities will be difficult. If the latency time is really high (> 500 ms), then you might have difficulties–try running some demos and see how it works.

Schedule

I had an intro day and a closing day, then three days of workshop and one day when Shelby came down and did the social media presentation she does for the UUA. So I organized the workshop this way:

Intro introductions, covenant, course outline
Shelby social media presentations
Day 1 communication tools
Day 2 collaboration tools
Day 3 coordination tools; accessibility
Closing evaluating social media, control, dependency handling changes and wrap-up

Slides

I had the great idea of encouraging people to build slide-decks of the Present material using different online tools. It’s a terrible idea and not worth the trouble.

You can use Google Docs, but your presentations will look a bit drab.

You could use PowerPoint or KeyNote and you’ll get a better presentation.

I used Google Docs the first day, then used 280slides.com, and then decided it wasn’t worth it and used the tried and true s5 [3] system.

[3]http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

Projector/monitor

You have to have a projector or large monitor. A lot of these sites have small text–it should be possible to read that from the back of the room.

You could do it all online, but doing the demos with a single big screen is probably the best option.

Changelog

Version 0.6: July 20th, 2010

  • Added chalice lightings
  • Workshop: updated details in based on experiences with running the workshop
  • Introduction: merged introduction activites; clarified text
  • Communication: added material about feed readers; fixed copyright resources
  • Accessibility: clarified some text
  • Miscommunication: clarified some text
  • Safety and Security: added an outline

Version 0.5: July 11th, 2010

Wrote the workshop materials.