What is a bootcamp?

A Bootcamp is where we help get community members up to speed on how to contribute.  Most of the participants are fairly new and we understand that contributing to your first project can be daunting.  Meeting with people in Real Life take the fear out of the process.  This event is not just for coders!  Contributors can be helping create documentation, writing use cases, to helping a group get organized, and of course bug reports and fixing bugs.

For existing contributors, WG Chairs, and maintainers, this is the ideal place to recruit more help for your project, lab, or group. 

• Are you a new project that doesn't have a good "getting started.md?"  Come to this event and mentor people to actually get started.  Recruit the new people to write the document as you take them through the process. 
• Are you an older group that needs some help on Use Cases?  Ask for contributions here! Sit down with people and see what it is that they REALLY need.
• Are you a mature project that needs people to report bugs or help you flush out a old bug report? Recruit here!
• Do you need a roadmap?  Ask for a PM or couple to join your breakout session. 
• Do you really just need to onboard a bunch of newbies to your platform or tool?  Try out your new training materials here and see how they work! I promise you will be a very popular session!
• Are you new and want a study group? - setup a session and see who shows!

Maintainers, WG lead and contributors - To get people to attend and help you - Create a breakout session on the Grid for a particular bootcamp.  Be sure to grab as much time I you realistically need.

Who should attend and why?

Anyone that wants to contribute.  This includes: developers, designers, writers, organizers, artists, and of course Project managers.

Anyone that needs contributions.  There isn't a better place to recruit and get to know new participants.  Don't limit yourself to thinking the only contributions you need at first are code!  Most contributors start out by fixing documentation and creating or flushing our bug reports.  Then they often move to fixing small bugs before making larger contributions.  Also an OSS community doesn't thrive if it isn't diverse.  You need writers, designers, and project managers etc.  Include them in your plans.

Can I do a bootcamp?

Possibly -  Please contact the Community Architects team at community-architects@hyperledger.org

Or on Rocketchat https://chat.hyperledger.org/channel/community-architects

But for Official sponsorship of a Bootcamp we will need to start a ticket in JIRA. 

We don't have a large staff at Hyperledger, so the more work you take off of our shoulders, the more likely we are to approve your event.  We will want to see past successful events you have done also.

We only do Hyperledger events.  They need to be Open Source.  The focus needs to be contributing to the existing community.  We like ones that are attached and have the support of a larger event as experience has taught us those have better attendance.

What is does a Typical Agenda look like?

First each of the various targeted Projects, Work Groups, and Labs does a short intro to the entire group highlighting what their sessions are about.

These intros are to recruit contributors.  The presentations need to be interesting and explain what the participants will get out of the next two days. It is ideal to have different groups at different levels.  Some groups maybe working on introductory materials, others maybe bug fixing, and a few maybe talking about use cases for desired features. 

Everyone then breaks out into small groups to work thru the tutorials or getting started documentation.  A few of the Breakouts maybe to talk about usecases or even fix bugs depending on levels of expertise.  If it is a Lab or a new project they may help the group lead create the getting started materials.

Finally,  at the end of the last day, everyone publishes their work and what they have learned to share with future learners.   If they succeeded at getting documentation changes, patches, bug fixes etc accepted, they get a badge or an award for completion.