suggestion: volunteer coordination

[shawndrost]

I run a volunteer-driven coding education program (for prison inmates) and I have gotten a lot of mileage out of the following format for volunteer coordination:

• weekly meetup for ~2h
• meetup cycles between "hackathon" and "demo/feedback night"
• "hackathons" are new-volunteer-friendly and consist of 1) pairing up contributors 2) doling out a repo from the course map 3) circulating and making sure people know what they should be making.
• "demo/feedback night" is where you demo the repo/lesson that you built, get feedback, and implement it.

It works because there is a clear, recurring point to integrate new volunteers (dead easy, "just show up") and you give people a small, discrete chunk of work to tackle between the two events.

I'm @shawndrost on twitter if anyone wants to meet up in SF or oak this week -- I have a million ideas and would like to share ideas about what I have seen work in the past (although I have limited bandwidth as an individual contributor).

(I also help run Hack Reactor, which may be useful perspective for you to draw from even if it is the evil empire.)

[mk30]

hi shawn, thanks for the suggestion. do you have examples of the kinds of lessons that your volunteers built up somewhere?

i'm not available this week or next because i have a family member in town, but i think that we may have volunteer meetups sometime in november (probably at some of the oakland.js meetups: http://oaklandjs.com/ ). we'll post any planned meetups here.

[shawndrost]

those repos are all private at the moment, unfortunately.

thanks for the pointer! dang, cool event... never seen a family-friendly coding meetup before.