Coaches

RGSOC is aimed at beginners. In order to be productive and not get demotivated students should have active coaches helping them with problems and teaching them about programming and open source. It is established that the coach should be on site and that it should be easy for students to see their coach on a daily basis (ideally).

Feasible and attractive coaching

However this also comes with a big time investment from the side of the coaches. This page is here to gather ideas on how to mitigate this and/or get coaches engaged. And Ideas about the topic of coaches in general.

• multiple coaches per student/pair of students - sharing the load
• a bigger pool of coaches sharing the load. Then one or more of the coaches could meet with all attendees from their city and help them while the attendees also help each other. There will be different skill levels among the students so helping each other is a very viable option. Plus getting to know people and fun. We'd need a place though, but we could find one for every city I'm sure (cafe, co-working place...)
• coaches can hang out in an IRC channel to provide remote help
• sponsors could sponsor developers (well a couple of hours of their time) instead of money. Ideally also a work place.
• developers companies with the 20% rule e.g. you may use 20% of your time for self development, or similar rules could use that time to coach at RGSOC.
• a symbolic amount of money to show appreciation, of course depending on our sponsors

Of course all of those options may be used, not just one ;-)

Finding a coach

For now finding a coach is handled through the Mailing List. I don't know if this is the best way. Maybe we could have a list of free coaches up on the website or somewhere. So my concern is that people might be too shy to write to the Mailing List or if they're unsure won't do it. But if they see that there is a "free" coach in their city, I guess that they're more likely to apply.