For people new to this conversation - the context is that a team at Olin College is preparing for the Etherpad FAD (an activity day dedicated to getting Etherpad deployed within Fedora, which implies building up a lot of software engineering infrastructure and possibly hacking its code along the way; it's close to abandonware at the moment) and I'm helping them make sure they're ready for the event, because it includes an unusually high percentage and large number of brand-new FOSS contributors who'll need a lot of scaffolding and guidance.
Ccing the logistics list because this may make a useful way to think about preparing for FADs in the future - Fedora people, see the link at the end of this email. Also Ccing TOS, because I'm curious if this is a useful way to think about preparing hackathons for students and vice versa.
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All right, folks (meaning the Olin team). You have homework to do before our meeting.
Make these things as best you can. I've tried to spec in deliverables as best I could, and explain the results I'm trying to accomplish by each one (if you can think of an alternative thing that accomplishes the same results, feel free to do that instead!)
You should ''finish'' these, but not ''polish'' them (get all the content in, but don't worry about typesetting or putting stuff in a shiny pdf yet). You should try to complete them, but also know they won't be done before our meeting - they won't be final, they'll still need tweaking. Think of it as bringing your complete first draft in for review. We'll spend our conversation time hacking on the rest of this and making sure things are clear to you on how to get them the rest of the way ready before the event.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Etherpad_FAD#Resources
If you can send me links to the completed resources (you can make them right in there on the wiki page) at least an hour before our meeting time, that would be excellent, because then I'll have a chance to review them and queue up commentary ahead of time, and we'll be able to get a lot more done during our actual call.
Feel free to send questions about this stuff at any time, and to push back if things don't make sense or if I'm being an overbearing dictator. :) These are all suggestions you can choose whether or not to take - I won't be offended if you think you've come up with a better way to do things (heck, I'll want to learn!) I'm here to help you make the FAD the kickass success you want it to be, so *you* tell me how I can help you... this is just my initial offer.
Send me a ping letting me know you've read this message and whether the instructions in the "Resources" page make sense - enough for you to start working on it, at least.
--Mel