OTS N E W Y O R K C I T Y... launched! (Join, Help, Learn, Teach, Love)

That was easy.

Looking for all helpers, joiners, teachers, organizers, connectors, artists, learners and you to help any you can.

I’m especially inspired by the not-for-profit belief outlined on the OTS [about page] (http://www.opentechschool.org/about.html) which I’ll paraphrase here:

The best teaching, the teaching that is most moving, inspiring and knowledge-transmitting… the teaching that encourages learners to continue on their own… is teaching that is provided for free, out of genuine commitment to the greater good of the community and the student.

Thanks to @ben and @amelie for the encouragement and everyone for making OTS happen.

Join the conversation here and let us know how you can help.

Initial next steps include:

[ ] Setup “NYC” sub-category on discourse
[ ] Setup an OTS-NYC folder in a forked repo
[ ] Verify locale for milestones/issues of team (github issues ok?, use separate repo on OTS?)
[ ] Establish first bi-weekly meeting date and locale (a pops?). Tuesdays at 7:30am? First on June 17th?
[ ] Create a little survey instrument for interested people and what they can offer along various lines (i.e. teach what, offer spaces, want to learn what, want to sponsor what, skills to offer, etc.?)

7 Likes

I have to imagine there must be a huge number of people with the capacity to be a coach for OTS in NY, and some proportion of them who would be excited by the idea and willing to join. It’s just a matter of being to reach out to them (although easier said than done!).

Often IT businesses love making space available for meetups after hours (or perhaps weekends), in a meeting room or so-on, and they have all the right tools one needs to hold an OTS workshop. You can even ask big guys like Google(rs) or Github(bers) if they’re able to help you out.

I’d advise teaching what the plurarity of coaches have skills in and are passionate about. http://learn.opentechschool.org/ has materials we’ve already devised but go right ahead if you want to teach other things!

Good luck, love to hear OTS spreading around the world! :smiley:

Let me know if you need any help with technical side of things, website, etc.

1 Like

Thanks Matthew, this is fantastic.

Help would be wonderful!!!

Would you be able to create a New York City folder in the OTS repo:


and merge it in? I think having a “web site” for NYC on OTS will be great to have so that there’s a home page to send interested parties too.

Totally agree with both of your sponsorship ideas too.

Do you know if there’s any precedent for sponsorships of OTS by companies like Github and Google or other socially-minded MNC’s? If so, connecting through that connection to say “hey there’s an NYC branch who should we meet with at your company in NYC” would be great.

Thanks again for the reply!

I’ve previously written a tutorial one what one specifically needs to do to add an OTS chapter onto the website, here

You can see what a Pull Request of what doing that looks like here (hope to merge that in soon). The page is likely best written by the organisers of that chapter! If you’re not familiar with git or Github then we can either help teach you or help find someone around your area who can help :slight_smile:

There’s no formal sponsorship precedent as far as I’m aware, I’ve seen Github sponsor other things for git related events (no surprise!), but as far as I know we are not against such things as long as the sponsorship would be inline with our core values. Of course informally a lot of tech businesses have helped out our meetings by providing spaces for various chapters around the world; Google provides us an non-profit/educational account for their Apps.

Finally got around to adding the pages and basic code for NYC and made a pull request here:
https://github.com/OpenTechSchool/www.opentechschool.org/pull/163

Let me know anything I can do to help with the merge process.

@ben
@matthew
@amelie
Anything further I can do to help with the merge?

Thanks!!

Dave

Hey @datadave,

sorry, this came in when way too much came in and I missed it. Sorry about that.

Just pulled your changes and I can’t see any background. Does it work for you locally?

Another thing is that you are linking to a meetup group that doesn’t exist (OpenTechSchool-NYC). Is that just misspelled or didn’t you create it just yet (or should we create it)?