Welcome to Mozilla Science Lab's Study Group project! From here, we'll set you up with everything you need to start your own study group.
Mozilla Study Groups are fun, informal meetups of your friends and colleagues from around your local institution or town to share skills, stories and ideas on using code for research. The goal is to create a friendly, no-pressure environment where people can share their work, ask for help on a coding problem, and learn and work together with their peers.
Welcome to our Mozilla Study Group! A few things to do & know now that you're here:
_data/members.yml
; send us a pull request with an entry for yourself, or open an issue and we'll do it for you.If anything in these instructions doesn't work or doesn't make sense, open an issue here or email sciencelab@mozillafoundation.org.
The instructions below will help you set up the online tools for your Mozilla Study Group - but if you're looking for organziation strategies, event plans and lesson ideas, check out the Mozilla Study Group Handbook!
Everything you need to set up your own Mozilla Study Group website for organizing events is right here - follow the following steps and you'll be up and running soon, and if you have trouble, open an issue and we'll help you out!
studyGroup
at the top of the page._config.yml
file in your new repository:
_config.yml
;That's it, you're done! You can see your new website at https://yourUserName.github.io/studyGroup/
, where yourUserName
is the user name you signed up for GitHub with. If this is your first time making a webpage on GitHub, it might take 30 minutes for things to percolate through their computers - don't worry, it's all good, check back later and your website should be up and running.
If you'd like to offer your community a calendar of events they can import into their own calendars, try using a Google Calendar. To set up, make a new google account, and update the variables in _config.yml
under the heading 'Setup Google Calendar'.
You can add events to your calendar by hand, but if you'd like to manage it automatically, there's a script to do so in scripts/updateCalendar.py
; instructions for use are at the top of that file.
When you're ready to list a new event for your Study Group, follow these steps, or watch this video where we walk you through event listing.
_posts
directory. It'll be at https://github.com/yourUserName/studyGroup/tree/gh-pages/_posts
- or you can click on _posts
in your repo.Make a new file by clicking on the +
sign beside _posts/
Name it like the following:
YYYY-MM-DD-word.markdown
where YYYY-MM-DD
is the date of your event, and word
is anything you want.
Cut and paste the following into your new file:
---
title: Study Group Meetup
text: a one sentence description of your event
location: Hacky Hour Stadium
link: https://github.com/yourUserName/studyGroup/issues/1234
date: 2016-01-04
startTime: '15:00'
endTime: '16:00'
---
Change all the fields to describe your event; make sure the link
is the address of the issue you created When you're done, click 'Commit Changes' at the bottom.
That's it! Your event is now listed on your webpage, and there's a discussion thread where people can ask questions and discuss the details. Events will be automatically removed from the schedule on the webpage when they're more than a week in the past - but the issue you created will always be there as a record of what you've done.
Event Listing Gotchas: here are a few things to look out for when listing an event:
- Did you remember to include the
---
above and below? The website builder needs those.- Can't find the issue tracker? Remember to turn it on under the 'Settings' menu on the right.
- The seven fields need to be on exactly one line each; some text editors will insert line breaks into lines that are too long; remove these if so.
Now that you're all set up, GitHub provides several ways to stay in touch with the people involved in your Study Group.
https://github.com/yourUserName/studyGroup/issues
.Your website includes a gallery of participants in your Study Group; adding people here is a great way to show off your community and highlight your new friends and colleagues. To add someone to the list, edit the _data/members.yml
file by adding the following section for them:
- name: their human name
affiliation: school, lab, department, business....
github: their GitHub handle
interests:
- list one to three
- different interests