Thanks David, I agree there is a great deal of overhead. My hope is that we can leverage an existing org to manage the overhead. Ideally all we (ComDev) will do is some internal marketing. If all we do is send 5 volunteers to TEALS it makes a difference and we can all be pleased with ourselves.
Note, TEALS is in the Microsoft YouthSpark Incubator and thus the folks who do the organizing are mostly on campus with me here. I didn't know this when I opened up discussions with them, but it does mean the communication lines between the two orgs are shorter. As for timing, it's now. But if you only have time to show up at the BOF and share your experience that will be appreciated. Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation -----Original Message----- From: David Nalley [mailto:da...@gnsa.us] Sent: Wednesday, January 7, 2015 12:24 PM To: dev@community.apache.org Subject: Re: Volunteering in schools On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Ross Gardler (MS OPEN TECH) <ross.gard...@microsoft.com> wrote: > I know we have a bunch of people who already volunteer to teach in schools. I > know that this has a great deal of impact at many levels. I'm looking for > volunteers to help with a potential new initiative. > > In the run-up to ApacheCon Sally will be running a campaign around the 15th > Anniversary of the foundation. It will look at the legacy of the ASF and to > the future. It will focus on the ASF as being a place of innovation and > excitement. > > I've recently had confirmation that a representative of TEALS, an > organization that trains volunteers to teach in high schools in 20 states. > These students take a rigorous college level CS class (UC Berkeley CS10 or UW > CSE142/143 AP) in schools that might otherwise have no IT component at all. > > 40% of the schools are Title 1 schools (as a Brit I had to look this up, in > short it's about improving academic achievements of the disadvantaged [1]) > and a dozen or so are in very rural areas. Furthermore, 25% of their students > are girls and 25% are from minority groups (in other words this has an impact > on diversity). > > My ask of the ComDev PMC is for us to run a BOF at ApacheCon to figure out > how we might enable ASF community members to assist with the work that TEALS > (and similar) organizations do. I'm happy to help drive this, but ideally > there will be a couple of volunteers here who are interested enough to take > ownership. > > I'm working with Sally to find other valuable folks to participate and hope > to have more than just TEALS represented. What I would like to do, in a > perfect world, is announce a partnership at ApacheCon. Failing that I would > like to develop the outline of a partnership at ApacheCon itself. > > So, please step forward if you are interested in volunteering (there's no > need for you to be present in Austin, though that would be great). > > Ross > > > [1] http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg1.html > > Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. > A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation > I've done similar work with high school and college students in Fedora; and it's challenging. Particularly it's a lot of overhead, especially if the instructor is not very plugged in to the open source group. That said, having seen the normal statistics, I'd say that the ASF does a far better job with things like GSOC than most open source groups do. The level of retention seems much higher. I'm tentatively willing to participate, conditioned on me having time when this comes around. --David
