[TOS] Fwd: POSSE California update

[Mel Chua]

To keep TOS in the loop; sent to the 3 professors who are planning on 
attending POSSE California so far.

The situation here is my fault, really - the POSSE California ball was 
set in motion early this calendar year, before we had a good notion of 
process in place (we've built that up as we've gone along, as the other 
POSSEs have been noticing - for instance, by the time Karl showed up 
with the idea for a Worcester POSSE, we actually had a list of things to 
go through, and I believe that went quite smoothly) - and we also had 
our original location switch out from under us at the last moment, which 
caused some last-minute scrambling and dateswitching, which has made it 
hard to find attendees - especially now at the end of the US academic year.

Radical transparency is sometimes painful, but it's the only way we'll 
all collectively be able to learn. As someone from the open source 
community without a formal academic background, I've learned a *lot* 
about academic timescales in the past year, and... well, Summer 2011 
POSSEs will start their planning in about a month or so, for recruitment 
announcements to start before SIGCSE. :)

We're still hoping to find 2 more attendees so we can run POSSE 
California, so if you have any 
ideas/thoughts/know-people-who'd-be-interested (professors or graduate 
students responsible for teaching classes), please let us know.

--Mel

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: POSSE California update
Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 12:28:46 -0400
From: Mel Chua <mel at redhat.com>


We wanted to keep you in the loop on POSSE California, since the date is 
rapidly approaching and we've been less transparent than we should have 
been on what's going on (my apologies). This isn't private news or a 
private discussion; we've been discussing it in the Teaching Open Source 
IRC channel (which has public logs of meetings) for several weeks now, 
but the three of you may not be on that list yet.

Everything is set up, and we're all looking forward to the bootcamp -
there's one complication, though. We haven't gotten as many attendees as 
we hoped. We need at least 5 to run a POSSE, and so far the three of you 
are the only professors who are able to attend.

We're doing one last round of recruitment pings, and are making a final
go/no-go decision on June 4th based on whether we can find an additional 
2 professors to attend or not - so it's very close, and any
suggestions/ideas you have on how to help with this would be quite welcome.

Please let us know if you have any questions about the situation; we'll
do our best to keep you updated as things go along (certainly on June
4th!) and will be planning Teaching Open Source events in the Valley
area over the next year in any case. Worst-case scenario: we'll gear up
for an awesome local POSSE next year.

I'll send this note - minus the PS and the names - to the Teaching Open
Source list as well, so everyone there knows what's happening.

--Mel