Workshop Recipes¶
If you know Rails and have the interest and energy to make it happen, you can create a workshop near where you live. If you have money (or access to a sponsor) and want to make something happen, you can make it so. It could be as small as 15 people in a conference room and still have a significant positive impact not only for the attendees, but also for the community where you live and the wider open source community.
The key ingredients to a workshop are:- a lead organizer or team
- an ecosystem (or plan to create one)
- a teacher (or two)
- a pool of local experts to draw upon (meetup, user group, local companies/consultants that use Rails)
- location
- sponsor(s)
- childcare
The ratio of students to experts is very important. It works best when this is 2:1. In San Francisco, we typically have 50 students and 25 teachers and TAs. If you are short of experts, I would set a max class size of 12-25 (depending on how much teaching experience the teacher has) and make sure there is at least one expert for every 6 students.
The Workshop project can provide:- curriculum
- day of event: schedule and logistics
- sample budgets
- tips for creating online sign-ups
- how to reach out to potential attendees
- timeline of what you need to do to plan the event