P2PU School of Webcraft Working Session

Session Overview

John & Pippa hosted a working session at the Mozilla Summit. The session started with a brief overview of P2PU, School of Webcraft, and Drumbeat. We asked four questions:

• How can P2PU School of Webcraft gain street-cred with employers?
• What are the soft-skills that a web developer should have?
• What are the technical skills that a web developer should have?
• What courses would you like to see at P2PU School of Webcraft?

How can P2PU School of Webcraft gain street-cred with employers?

Present: Gunner, Adam Hyde, Richard , Gregorio?. Nathan, Pedro

• Tell Stories showing success (eg employment offers, projects begun, internships, contracts received, use as prior learning in formal edu environments)
  
• Be clear about how assessment works
  
• Luddites within institutions – beware of these.
  
• Admin / non teaching staff will be most resistant
  
• Teachers will be supportive
  
• Organise for formal mentoring (i.e. a dedicated mentor)
  
• look at how Red Hat provide cert.
  
• Primary target audience should be employers
  
• Easy to show results with project based work, how to assess theory based learning??
  
• Track people as a way of finding stories
  
• extension of community of practice (community of success)
  
• Look at Comptia?
  
• Try to organise a jobs fair
  
• Mozilla needs to hire alumni  or Redhat – google, major company  (eating the pudding we made)
  
• Look at External Testers and proctor services
  
• LPI.NET (dave sefry)
  
• infrastructure
  
• linux sys admin
  
• Look at Free software – is the freeness of this going to affect our credibility?
  
• Quality
  
• economic transformation (focus on Nathan's audienc)
  
• Need to be able to update their credentials
  
• How do we encourage quality facilitators
  
• measurement? Metrics?
  
• Evaluation help?
  
• Students need to be active about recording what they learn – reflective based practice
  
• blog about it – hash tags
  
  

What are the soft-skills that a web developer should have?

present:
Xander, Noelle, Carlos?, Guillermo

• Delegation
  
• Community Engagement
  
• Communication Skills
  
• Bedside Manners
  
• “onramping”
  
• Managing the politics of a project
  
• negotiation
  
• tie breaking (moving out of deadlock)
  
• Team building - ie the right people at the right place
  
• Asynchronous tasking and communication (*SoW relies on this – they'll drop out otherwise*)
  
• Blogging – evangalism and documentation
  
• Passionate
  
• Able to mentor others.
  

Key Takeaways

• If someone has begun and run an open source project (with more than two people contributing) of their own they'll have done all of this
  
• perhaps this can be a “graduate” course – something longer than 6 weeks which is mentored over 6 months or a year?
  

What are the technical skills that a web developer should have?

participants:  Paul Osman, Tantek Çelik, (Didn't catch the names of other attendees, add yourself!)

• HTML
  
• Microformats
  
• Javascript (jquery, prototype)
  
• CSS
  
• Text Editors
• Server management
• ­Updating a server
• basic server administration (minimal)
  • .htaccess (HTTP)
  • Database Theory – to admin level
• Categories
  • Client side
  • Server Side
• UI Design
• ux / accessibility/ usability
• SVG
• Canvas
• OOP / Functional / Procedural / Layering Best practices
• Web Services
• Adaptive Media (Mobile and Print)
  

Key Takeaways

The most important thing I took away from this was to filter courses that were based on dying technologies / poorly supported tech. eg SOAP, RSS

What courses would you like to see at P2PU School of Webcraft?

participants: Daniela, Austin... who else (hopefully they use the website) Atul

• Web Service Dev w Python
  • Entry level python – basic HTTP, request response
  • REST!
• How to make cool stuff on the web if you never programmed
  • no complications
  • big deal for nondev who need to know it
• Open Software Ethics
  • Community Driven Process
  • Openness all around
  • Be Open Minded
• How to Design the Web – changing websites with stuff you create
  • Photoshop
  • Web Style
• User Experience / Interface
  • The user is important!
  • Happy Users
  • More Users
  • Wise
• Dive Deep into JS Jquery, Jetpack SDK
  • Show what we (mozilla) can do
  • powerful tech
  • developers
  • How to communicate with your manager about technical issues
  • Effective change, less trouble at work
  • Willing to collaborate

Suggestions

We then split the room into four groups and worked on each question for about 20 minutes. After the session each group reported back, this is what they had to say.