On Mon, Mar 09, 2015 at 02:32:53PM -0700, Daisie Huang wrote:
> To that end: I have a suggestion. For each lesson topic repo,
> wouldn't it be nice to submit, after a workshop, your custom lessons
> via a pull request, one that is not actually meant for merging
> directly? That way, we'd have an archive of what was taught where, a
> discussion location for instructors to leave notes about what did or
> did not work, and a place for us to find (and pull, if we want) the
> changes that we've made for various workshops.

When we were using swcarpentry/boot-camps and swcarpentry/bc I tried
to collect tags for every workshop that submitted their lessons or
otherwise caught my eye.  It was even the officially suggested
procedure during part of the swcarpentry/boot-camps phase [1] and lead
to PRs like [2].  You can still see all those tags in my workshops
repository [3].  However, comparing the tags is difficult, because
it's hard to separate the changes you care about (lesson content) from
the changes you don't care about (workshop location).  I tried to
piece the per-lesson history back together a few times (e.g. [4]), but
it took too much time to be worth the trouble.  Anyhow,
signal-to-noise shouldn't be as much of an issue with the per-lesson
repositories we have now.  In any case, pushing notes like your “I did
something cool but haven't had time to polish it into upstreamable
PRs” [5] certainly sound useful to me.  I'm less clear on whether we
want an official policy of reporting *every* lesson that gets taught,
because:

a. Some folks may be teaching lessons from non-version-controlled
   material (maybe they just live-code the whole thing off the top of
   their head?).  I like version-controlled notes, but not so much
   that I mind people doing things like this in their own workshops.

b. Having instructors self-report their changes makes it easier to see
   the “hey I did something cool” cases without being lost in “I
   renamed Nelle to Sherlock” changes.  Of course, we'll miss out when
   instructors don't tell us about their cool changes, so encouraging
   (but not requiring) folks to ping us about their lessons sounds
   like a good place to be.

If we get a community of folks that consistently teach from an
alternative lesson (e.g. the old hacker-within Git lesson), I think we
should be linking to those alternatives from our lesson list [6].

Cheers,
Trevor

[1]: 
https://github.com/swcarpentry/boot-camps/wiki/Workflow#-post-boot-camp-archival
[2]: https://github.com/swcarpentry/boot-camps/pull/63
[3]: https://github.com/wking/swc-workshop/releases
[4]: https://github.com/swcarpentry/bc/issues/117
[5]: https://github.com/swcarpentry/git-novice/pull/62
[6]: http://software-carpentry.org/lessons.html

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