Talk:POSSE 2009

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One thing I haven't seen yet on any of the wiki pages is what POSSE is supposed to do - what do we (the various participants and stakeholders) hope to get out of it, what do we hope to accomplish during the week and afterwards? Some of this is starting to come out in individual introductions over the mailing list, but it may be helpful to actually agree on and write them down at some point. Mchua 13:38, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Code swarms

Code swarms like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP3JaOFy-qM and http://www.vimeo.com/1093745 may help set expectations on the "open source / community is not a magic wand" thing - it takes time to grow good, deep roots before a plant can go "weeeeeeeee!" and sprout up and have flowers. Mchua 21:26, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Getting your bug fixed

[edit] Template emails

[edit] Incomplete application

Thanks for starting your POSSE application! We noticed you've started but haven't finished your application - is there anything we can do to help?

If you're looking for inspiration, the current applications and admitted professors can be seen at http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_applicants - in addition, the Teaching Open Source mailing list, http://mail.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos, is an excellent place to ask questions. This is where your applications will be discussed once they're complete.

I'd also be happy to field questions via email or IRC (chat). Please let me know if there's anything I can do for you, and I hope we'll get to see you this summer!

Cheers,

[edit] Application received

Thanks for your applications to POSSE - this email is to let you know we have your complete information and are sending it out for community review.

INSERT APPLICATION LINKS HERE

If you haven't already joined the Teaching Open Source mailing list, http://mail.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos has subscription information; it's where the Teaching Open Source community hangs out, and is a great place to ask questions. This is where your applications are also getting discussed.

You can reply to feedback directly on the mailing list (recommended, and where we'll ultimately want to go), or if you'd feel more comfortable talking privately with me before going to the full TOS list, I'd be happy to email or chat on IRC back and forth with you to figure out how to improve it before our next acceptance cycle in approximately a week (POSSE admissions is deliberately an iterative, interactive process) at which point you'll either get an acceptance notification or another round of feedback on how to improve your application.

Please let me know if you have any questions, and I hope we'll get to see you this summer!

Cheers,

[edit] Application accepted

Thanks for your application... and your patience, as we got it community-reviewed. We'd love to have you join us in Raleigh this summer - to confirm you're coming, just reply to this email, and I'll put you on the POSSE cohort's mailing list.

Your application link: http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_applicants#PROFESSORNAME

If you're not already on the Teaching Open Source mailing list, you may want to join it; http://mail.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos has subscription information. It's where the Teaching Open Source community hangs out, and is a great place to ask questions.

Please start making travel plans for the workshop. Some basic information is available at http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE#Logistics, and feel free to contact us if you have any questions about flights, hotel, or the area - or anything else. Looking forward to seeing you in Raleigh in July!

Cheers,

[edit] Application needs revision

Hi there - you're getting this email because your application is in the review queue for POSSE, and we need some additional information from you to move forward. Usually, you'll have gotten a link to some feedback already - but if you're not sure where to find the comments or how to begin, let me know and I'd be happy to provide you feedback (or links to it) right away.

Thanks!

[edit] Application update for TOS

Congratulations to the new members of our POSSE 2011 cohort!

We now have X out of 15 seats filled, and Y new applications. Here they are, with my comments:

Insert commentary here

Comments, questions, etc. would be most appreciated!

If you're interested in POSSE but haven't applied yet, head to http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE#Apply - there are only Z seats left, so send those apps in now! Please holler if you've got any questions.

Cheers,

[edit] Recruitment email

[edit] Recruitment reminder

Hi there! You're getting this email because you've previously indicated interest in being part of the POSSE cohort for this year, or we think you might be interested, but we haven't yet gotten an application from you. More information on the program is available at http://redhat.com/posse.

We've currently got X of Y seats filled, with Z more applications in the review pipeline, so things are filling up fast.

Application instructions are at http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE#Apply, and I'm happy to take any questions you might have.

Cheers, and hope to see you this summer!

[edit] Automating the application process

The current POSSE admissions cycle process takes a lot of time and manual slog on the admin side. Most of it is repetitive and could be done by a robot. So let's make a robot to do it!

If you're interested in helping out, poke Ian Weller for getting started in code, or Mel Chua as the end-customer who's requesting the work and wrote this (very rough) spec.

Here's what we need.

[edit] What it looks like to users

First of all, the current application instructions are <a href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE#Apply">here</a> and the application questions are <a href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_application">here</a> - I'd recommend reading through both of them and trying to fill out a <a href="http://posseapp.limequery.org/index.php?sid=15822&newtest=Y&lang=en">dummy application</a> before thinking about writing any code, so you can see what it looks like from the end-user side.

All righty then.

[edit] Current solution: limesurvey

Right now, we're using the paid <a href="http://limeservice.com">limeservice</a> hosting offered by the creators of open source survey tool <a href="http://limesurvey.org">limesurvey</a> for the POSSE admissions front-end - I'm not married to this solution, but it's simple, cheap, and gives us what we need. To set up an "admissions app" for a particular POSSE event, we create a survey. We get:

A nice survey front-end. Something's got to give people buttons to click in and textboxes to write into - although I wish we could make the textboxes larger, because essays tend to be longer than that. Pretty basic.

Fine-grained survey-viewing permissions. I can create groups, add users to groups, and give users, groups, or both permission to view, export, or edit any aspect of any application. This is great - I can make accounts for individual POSSE staffers, then create a "teaching team" group for each POSSE workshop that consists of the instructors for that particular event and give that group magic admin access to the admissions surveys of their workshops only.

So, even though I've just talked about access and locking information down, I want to point out that nearly all of the text submitted by applicants instantly becomes publicly available under a creative commons license - our application review process is <a href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_applicants">public</a>, more on this later. The reason we keep confidentiality is because we let professors add an (optional) private note at the end of their application in case they want to talk about things like the financial situation of one's department, the support (or lack thereof) of one's administration, a grant proposal that's not public yet (because of blind review processes or whatnot) - things that obviously can't just be splayed out on the web. And I've got to say that 9 times out of 10, professors either don't put anything in the "keep this private" box or write something like "nothing private, share it all!" so we're about as radically transparent as we can get.

Anyhow.

Export survey answers. Not really that useful for viewing or reviewing submissions, but very, very nice for sharing them - for instance, giving instructors a printout of everyone before the workshop begins. I usually export CSV or (slightly ashamed to say, but) Word document.

The ability to clone surveys. Seems like a small thing, but saves a lot of time in not having to set up every event's questions from scratch.

Email notification to a specified email (as far as I know, you can only specify one) when a new response is posted. (You set this for each survey in "edit survey settings.") Handy - I don't need to check incessantly to see if something new is in.

[edit] When a new application is submitted

What happens when a professor submits an app? What's the manual process we want to automate? Here's what goes down.


  1. I get an automated email response containing the results text.
  2. If it's an incomplete application, send the applicant http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Talk:POSSE_2009#Incomplete_application - if it's complete, keep going.
  3. I do some manual reformatting of the text - usually including:
    1. the insertion of paragraph breaks
    2. the fixing of links to include the full http:// url so they'll convert properly to hypertext when pasted into a wiki
    3. breaking out sentences into bulleted lists where appropriate
    4. inserting bolded wikitext to separate individual questions from each other (see entries on http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_applicants and you'll see what I mean).
  4. Then I paste it as a new entry into the open for community review section of the wiki page for that workshop's "applicants" page. (Note that what to automate from this step is going to have to be a smart decision - there may always need to be manual clean-up here, but perhaps it can automatically stick the text into the wiki and the first reviewer can clean it up.)
  5. The applicant gets the http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Talk:POSSE_2009#Application_accepted">this easy-to-automate email</a> - note that each application contains a field for email address and another for name, and that the prior step creates a section on the wiki with the URL of http : // <application - page - for - that - POSSE - workshop >#Firstname_Lastname, so this is very automatable.

This concludes the new-applicant steps. I usually do a review of existing applications at the same time and the public update message at the end, so keep reading.

[edit] Review of existing applications

Moving on to existing applications - each of the "applications under review" gets the following treatment.

  1. Examine the application - does it look good to you? Have you gotten at least one external response confirming this (either as a comment on the app, as a comment on the TOS mailing list, or privately?
  2. If yes, accept. This means:
    1. Send the automated http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Talk:POSSE_2009#Application_accepted email to the accepted person.
    2. Move their application (wikipage subsection) from the "open community review" segment of the page to the "accepted" segment of the page.
    3. Add {{admon/note|Accepted.|~~~~)}} to the top of their application (wikipage subsection) to timestamp the acceptance.
  3. Otherwise, more review/discussion is needed; send the person http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Talk:POSSE_2009#Application_needs_revision.

That's all.

[edit] Public update message

Finally, the TOS mailing list gets this message, with appropriate variables filled in: http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Talk:POSSE_2009#Application_update_for_TOS

It would be great to post this to a POSSE blog and then just send that link - with the updated stats in the message body as well - to the TOS list.

This ends the process that needs to be automated. As I look back on this, I realize we'll need to come up with subject lines for emails, etc. but I think that can be done as we go along - this is a first rough writeup to make it possible to start.

[edit] Useful code snippets

You may want to look at http://docs.python.org/library/csv.html for the csv parser class. I used that to read in the file, and then (being a lazy bum and not immediately grokking how to manipulate the csv class) dumped that object into a list (called "applications" in the code below).

For generating wiki page syntax: 

outfile = open('/home/mchua/Desktop/rit-contact.txt','w')
for app in applications:
     outfile.write("=== " + app[4] + " ===\n\n* " + app[4] + "\n* " + app[6] + "\n* " + app[5] + "\n\n'''The class now...'''\n\n" + app[8] + "\n\n'''Flash forward to Summer 2012...'''\n\n" + app[9] + "\n\n'''What needs to happen in the meantime?'''\n\n" + app[10] + "\n\n'''Other notes?'''\n\n" + app[12] + "\n\n")
outfile.close()

For grabbing emails: 

outfile = open('/home/mchua/Desktop/rit-contact.txt','w')
for app in applications:
     outfile.write(app[4] + " <"+app[7]+">\n")
outfile.close()

For grabbing private notes: 

outfile = open('/home/mchua/Desktop/rit-private.txt','w')
for app in applications:
     outfile.write(app[4] + "\n"+app[11]+"\n\n")
outfile.close()

[edit] Advisory board

Per institution:

  • 1 current student
  • 1 recent grad
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