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DoESLiverpool / somebody-should

A place to document practices on the wiki and collect issues/suggestions/to-do items for the physical space at DoES Liverpool
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Run regular training/learn-ins for basic infrastructure #1248

Open goatchurchprime opened 5 years ago

goatchurchprime commented 5 years ago

This issue is intended to supersede #523 and is inspired by the enthusiasm I saw in the take-up for Zarino's Git lesson at Livlug: http://www.livlug.org.uk/2019/09/september-2019-meeting/

We always feel we should do talks on the latest cutting edge IoT inventions, but what people really want and need are sessions on the basic software tools where the learning curve is a bit steep: like Inkscape, Gimp, Git/Github, SSH-keys, Libreoffice.

We could schedule these "looks boring to us but could be a lesson that changes someone's life" talks on a monthly basis on rotation and advertise them informally. The first session on any tool would probably be crap, but when you lead a session on how to use Inkscape the following year, it'll be great. And the lessons are guaranteed to be filled with new people.

And we shouldn't overlook other software services that take experience and some experimentation to do something useful, that a lot of people want to know how to use and would come along for, like the workflow through an eBay sale, an AWS server spinup, twitter account, AirBNB, Kickstarter, peopleperhour, facebook groups/company pages, google page analytics. There are small but extremely valuable insights to be picked up in the operations of all of these services just in terms of the basic mechanism. These sessions may cost money, because accounts will be opened and transactions will be made.

(For example, can you do an entire kickstarter cycle or ebay sale in one evening, including all the ratings and feedback bits?)

Finally, there's product testing of competitive services. For example, there's all the new banking apps (revolut, mondex, etc). Get people who use the different ones to show+see what they all do, and find features and techniques you don't know about, as well as hear about the hidden costs.

Another example: all the different chat-messaging things (telegram, whatapp, messenger, irc). This session would have us setting the account of one of them up from scratch, and working out how to teach it to someone else (eg your gran).

Other ideas: editing a wikipedia article, contributing to stackoverflow, updating something in openstreetmaps, packaging a python module, using qgis to make a printed map of a footpath walk, scanning a document and converting to text.

Proposed title of the series: "Skills for granted."

DuncReid commented 5 years ago

Sounds a good idea to me.

I already run courses on Social Media/Online Visibility for startups with The Prince's Trust so I'd be happy to give my time reprising that and doing stuff around the more common Social platforms, basic SEO or setting up a Wordpress site from scratch etc.

On the other side of the coin, I'd be interested in attending (& paying if needs be) for ones on Inkscape, laser stuff and other interesting stuff. One of the beauties of DoES is that we've got expertise on SO many different things.

DoESsean commented 5 years ago

This is something I've been a proponent of for years - there is real mileage in classes in what we might consider very basic things.

I'm going to assign this to myself to remind me to search out people who could/would be interested in run/ning things, and see if we can get something started.

DoESsean commented 5 years ago

@goatchurchprime has offered to get the ball rolling on this, so now we need to start getting the word out.

I've booked a two hour block in the Events Space (although this can be moved) each Thursday going forward from 4-6 for 'Getting to Know...' events. These will be introductory sessions on various things, including the items Julian listed above, as well as more specific softwares, and other things besides.

If anyone else would like to get involved, then just let us know and we can add you to the roster of teachers.

I'm thinking that, depending on the sorts of subjects we broach, it could be worth advertising these in one-stop shops and at the job centre, as they could be very useful in terms of helping people skill up for work.