labs_program_invite_letter_draft.md

Labs Program

• Dear NAME,
• Personalize Customized Sentence.
• We would like to extend an invitation to you to be part of hackEDU's labs program this upcoming fall.
• Before I get into what this means, I want to give you some updates first.
  • In the 2014 - 2015 school year, there were 40 hackEDU clubs in 11 states reached 1300 hackers.
  • The biggest problem, many club organizers told us, was that they were not sure what kind of curriculum to do in their clubs.
  • We weren't sure either so in order to recreate a club, we ran hack camp as a compressed version of a club. We took everything that we learned and put it inside of the Hack Camp playbook.
  • Our job now is to translate the Hack Camp playbook into a club playbook and test it out to see what parts of it work and what parts don't work.
  • This is where we need your help.
• Introducing the labs program
  • For the labs program, we hand picked some of the top clubs / most promising new organizers to venture into uncharted territory and find and create what things work in order to run a club and what things don't.
  • We wrote a playbook which is a guide for how to run your club meetings. The goal is to role out a 1.0 of this guide in Jan 2016, we need to work to make the best possible guide. We have some ideas what works in it but we need your help adding to it, testing out what things work and what things don't.
  • Your job will be to test out what works from the club playbook and what doesn't work in your club and to document it so the playbook can be improved and with our 65 aclubs. Moreover, for all the extra stuff that you do that is not in the playbook that you do, you are expected to document it and share it with everyone else.
  • Being part of the labs program would be
    • For the school year
      • Running your club in the 2015 - 2016 school year
      • You must have a co-leader
      • Your club must meet at least once a week for at least 2 hours
        • Bonus if your club can meet 2x per week for 2 hours
      • A club must have at least 2 main leaders
    • Before a club meeting
      • [1-3 hours] plan for what you're going to do in a given club meeting
      • [30 mins] be on a call with us to share what your plan is for the club meeting (this is like a checkin before your club meeting)
    • During the club meeting [2-4 hours per week]
      • record video footage
        • demo footage will be uploaded
        • hacks will be uploaded by school as well
          • wow, I can see an entire instructables like community being created here...
      • record data
        • attendance
        • feedback forms
    • After a club meeting
      • upload and share video footage
      • record the data
      • [1.5 hours] do a post mortem of what worked in the club and what didn't work in the club and any bugs in the playbook
      • [2 hours] for anything new that you did, document it in a way that is reproducible for someone else
      • [30 mins] be on a call with us to talk about what worked and what didn't work
      • [60 mins] be on a group call to recap your experience for what worked and what didn't work
      • 5 minutes, a weekly feedback form for us
    • We understand that you're busy and you have a lot of things going on, but these expectations are clear, we are expecting you to go above this base level of commitment. But if you are not able to meet this level of commitment, we will have to ask you to leave the labs program.
• You will not only be running a CS club, but you will be paving the trail for thousands of other students across the world (we're currently in 4 countries).
  • Our vision is not to just teach computer programming to every student, but for people to have access to the hacker ethos: the mindset that you create what you see missing in the world and is not afraid to break the status quo.
  • We want to do this by bringing a coding club to every high school in the nation.
  • Imagine if every student in the world had access to the hacker ethos, I think the world would be a fundamentally different place.
• Should you choose to accept your title as hackEDU officer, we would like to welcome you onboard.
• Extras
  • You will be invited to a retreat in SF dates of Jan 1, 2, and 3
    • Transportation will be provided
    • All discuss together what is working at hackEDU
    • Shape the direction of where the organization could go
    • They are part of a thing, this will be amazing.
    • https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/1056688?checkin=12%2F27%2F2015&checkout=01%2F01%2F2016&guests=14&s=wLNB
      • $400 a night
  • You will be the club leaders that lead how other clubs run in 2016.
• Thoughts
  • Clubs should be writing this playbook with us.
    • They will have ideas we didn't even think about, we should capture all of them.
    • If a club wants to try their own lessons, we should highly encourage that. That will give us a lot of data.
    • 6 clubs at a time, at least 3 are on playbook
    • 2 are clubs we run ourselves
  • There will definitely be clubs we invite that don't have that kind of time commitment. There will be clubs who are interested but we did not ask. Looking at the time commitment now, I think we should do applications...
    • We can invite them to apply otherwise it will be the same problem as hack camp...
    • We want people who are going to be extremely involved
  • We also don't want to silo organizations and "own" them, we are trying to create a network.