[TOS] What's up with POSSE: Summer 2012 and beyond

[Mel Chua]

I've gotten a lot of questions about the future of POSSE, especially as 
summer draws near and no workshop offerings have been announced. This is 
because we still haven't received funds from Red Hat to run POSSE, and 
can't promise we'll run workshops until we know we can afford them.

It looks like Red Hat will be giving us about $35k for POSSE, but we 
don't know when we'll get that money to spend -- it may be late this 
spring or into summer. Since we can't wait that long to plan and promote 
Summer 2012 POSSEs, and we want to get POSSE into a steady-state for 
infrastructure and process so it can run more efficiently, we're going 
to use these funds to (1) set up that infrastructure and those 
processes, and (2) run the first cycle of workshops with that process 
(as opposed to waiting for the money and then scrambling too late to try 
and run a half-assed Summer 2012 POSSE with it).

Working through this, we realized the ideal steady-state process would 
be an annual workshop cycle, with CFPs for locations announced at FIE in 
October so that the final list of workshops for the following summer 
would be ready for registrants at SIGCSE in March. Working backwards 
from that, we realized that such a cycle means we are preparing now to 
have the infrastructure ready for a CFP in October 2012 so we can 
advertise in March 2013 for POSSE workshops that run between June 2013 - 
June 2014. So that's what's going to happen, and we're going to work 
through and design that process with the TOS community (a first strawman 
for review will be hitting the list shortly).

However, this also means that POSSE workshops between now and June 2013 
-- which includes summer 2012 -- are in what we're going to call... a 
"transition period." In short, Summer 2012 is orphaned and unfunded as 
far as POSSEs go. It's not ideal. I'm not particularly happy with it. 
But it's what we can realistically do well, given our funding situation 
and timing.

I've talked with several people about stepping up to cover our "orphan 
summer" from other places, so we at least have something (even if it's 
non-ideal) to keep the drumbeat going. If you're interested in helping 
with this, please holler. We've got Steve Jacobs's RIT POSSE running in 
June 2012 in Rochester, NY as one definite "foster parent" for the 
summer as was first proposed to the list in February. We're hoping 
others will take this as a lead to follow and fill in the remaining gaps 
they see.

So that's where we're at. Summer 2012 is orphaned and in need of help, 
and we're using the funds we know we're getting to build things so 
Summer 2013 and beyond will be well-set-up and we won't have to scramble 
like this again. More emails on both of these will be along in a moment, 
but this is the overview.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Go for it.

--Mel