Transcript
Eberhard Wolff: Hello and welcome to a new conversation about software engineering! Today on the CaSE podcast we will talk about Open TechSchool. My guest today is Martin Stadler. Martin is a UI engineer and web developer living in Berlin. He is very active in the Berlin chapter of the Open TechSchool as an organizer and coach and currently he is also the chairman of the Open TechSchool Foundation, - that’s a German e.V.. Welcome to the show, Martin!
Martin Stadler: Thanks. I'm very happy to be here.
Eberhard Wolff: Happy to have you. We will be talking about the Open TechSchool. Can you say a few words about what that actually is?
Martin Stadler: Sure. We do a lot of things, so it's hard to explain in one sentence, but I would say we are a community and we are about helping people to learn programming or get better in programming. We do a lot of community-based activities.
Eberhard Wolff: Excellent. Obviously, this is about learning to program, as you said. What do you actually provide? Do you have any material? What do you do there?
Eberhard Wolff: Martin Stadler:[00:01:14.22] Exactly, we have some material for workshops. Initially, we did only workshops - one or two-day workshops on the weekends for absolute beginners, for instance. We came up with our own material, how to teach JavaScript and Python for people that never programmed, or Git and teamwork in programming. That evolved into follow-up workshops for people with more experience.
Eberhard Wolff: What kind of topics are you focusing on? Programming is a very broad topic, so what is it that you're specialized in?
Martin Stadler: That's true. Well, we are the Open TechSchool, so we are serious about the "Open". We do mostly web technology in the broader sense, but anything technology. Also hardware - we did some Arduino classes... We had a discussion about introducing web design, and that's where we said we want to be technology, so I think basically everything about technology, but kind of around web technology.
Eberhard Wolff: You gave some examples like Arduino, JavaScript and Python. What are some other technologies that you have material on or that you do workshops about?
Martin Stadler: Yes, actually just because I said web technology - we also have a lot of data scientists in our community, so it's actually a lot broader than what I just said. Currently, what I can think of is JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Ruby, a lot of Python (different aspects), we have some C++ in Zürich. Rust is something that we added to the community. That's a flexible thing, it's coming and going sometimes.
Eberhard Wolff: You said that there is also data science involved - can you give examples of technologies in that field? Because so far it's only programming languages, right?
Martin Stadler: That's true. I have not much clue about that stuff; I guess other people in the community... But I know they did some R and some database like MySQL beginner stuff, but also how to use some Python scientific libraries, something like that.
Eberhard Wolff: Excellent. What's the license of the material? Can I just download it?
Martin Stadler: Yes, it's a very permissive license. It's a Creative Commons share-alike license. We discussed when we started this and said we want this to be really as open as possible, so you are even allowed to use it in a commercial background, because that could enable contributions back to us. We also said that our coaches that usually work for free for the Open TechSchool, why would they not be able to use the material they contributed also in a commercial environment?
Eberhard Wolff: Yes, except that if you do share-alike it means that whoever attends your course wouldn't be able to also share the material.
Martin Stadler: Yes, the material cannot be closed, but it can be used.
Eberhard Wolff: Okay, sounds great. I looked at the website and it said that the Open TechSchool is a hands-on, empowering and peer-driven. Can you explain what that means?
Martin Stadler: Hands-on is kind of the how we do coaching. We believe that it's a good way to learn technology and programming by actually doing it, and we always tell people, "Bring your laptop, or we provide a laptop for you... Just get started, get your hands dirty." In all our workshops and other formats we do involve people actually working on stuff themselves. We don't have any kind of teaching only showing and talking about something to someone else format. That's the hands-on, and I guess it's also explaining the empowering.
Martin Stadler: When people come to our events, we want them to leave feeling more empowered, being able to do something themselves. We want to motivate them and show them that it can be fun, that it's possible for them to do something. A lot of people come as a beginner and they are really afraid that they will never get it, that they don't know; they feel like this technology thing is this big beast that they cannot access. If you give them some kind of, "Hey, you type this line of code and the button will be red", that's kind of the empowering thing that they feel like, "Okay, if I continue here, I can actually learn a lot of things."
Martin Stadler: Peer-driven means that we want to me on one level; we work together. If we have a workshop and someone is learning to program, we're not teaching, we're coaching. We're sitting together and we're explaining that everybody has difficulties sometimes. Also, we want to motivate people. When they learn something, they can already coach others.
Eberhard Wolff: Cool. What I find interesting about the Open TechSchool is that there are actually quite a few different types of events that you do. Let's talk about a few of them. What about workshops? How do they work?
Martin Stadler: Workshops is how we started this. Workshop means that we have to provide some kind of material, some kind of curriculum and let people know what they are going to be learning. There's a specific target group usually, and a workshop is more extensive, like one day or two days.
Eberhard Wolff: So I would meet with other people who are also interested in, let's say JavaScript, or whatever it is, and then you would just go through the material?
Martin Stadler: Yes, exactly. I should explain this a bit more in detail. There are a few things that we want to make sure that work for a workshop. We want to achieve a ratio of coaches and learners of 1:4 or 1:3 even. It's one of our ideas that it's not so much stress for the coaches if there's many coaches, and also there's this kind of peer-driven thing that you can talk to a lot of people and ask questions, and it's kind of relaxed because there's not this one person that knows everything. So you will have a lot of coaches and four or three times more learners.
Martin Stadler: We get a little introduction at the beginning, what this is about, and then you will have the material on your own laptop as a learner and you will go through it at your own pace, and coaches will help you. Then we try to organize some kind of lunch break or something, make sure that everybody is in the same rhythm, and sometimes also at the end. Then we let people know how they can continue where they are.
Eberhard Wolff: Would that happen on a weekday or on a weekend?
Martin Stadler: That really depends... It depends on your environment. In Berlin we do a lot of things on the weekend because that works for people, like Saturday, Sunday. We also have other experiences where people are not available on Sundays because they don't want to do something like this, and could also work in the evening. In general, most of the things we do are for adults, and the coaches are usually working somehow, so it's more like evenings and weekends.
Eberhard Wolff: What's the target group for these workshops?
Martin Stadler: That depends on the workshop, of course. If we have a beginners workshop, we try to find people that actually never really programmed before, because we want to do this motivation thing to get them started and draw them into the topic. But of course, if there's intermediate or advanced workshops, there are very specific target groups - what you should know already - and it depends on the material if it allows more flexibility. We also have some CSS material with the CSSclasses together, and they open that format in a way that although it's a workshop, it targets a lot of experience levels at once, which I find very interesting.
Eberhard Wolff: Interesting. Okay, so much for the workshops. I understand that they are not really - at least in Berlin - the focus anymore. Is that true?
Martin Stadler: It's more a thing of resources, actually. We would like to do a lot of workshops, but we haven't optimized it in a way that it's almost no work. It's actually a lot of work to organize them. It's always easy for us to find coaches. We have a good network in the community, which is actually our main asset, I would say. But the it can be a bit tiring to organize the workshops, to find the right people that you really want to spend your free time on helping, to find a space and all of these things. There's a lot of stuff to organize.
Martin Stadler: To answer the question "What can I do after the workshop?", we came up with something that initially was called "continuous learning group", and they grew and now we call them "co-learnings" and they are now kind of big on their own, without the workshop continuing thing anymore. We can also turn it around and have people in the co-learnings and then let them know about a workshop, for instance. They are quite successful currently, and they are even more open because you just hang out together, without having to be in the target group; it's open for anyone, any level, and there's not much to prepare. You just hang out, you show each other possible material to work on. The co-learnings are currently happening a lot.
Eberhard Wolff: How does that work? Would I just join that group and then sit there and do stuff?
Martin Stadler: Yes, that's basically a good description. How we do it in Berlin is we have a topic for a co-learning. We have the web frontend co-learning - a long name, but we want to be specific that this is about HTML, CSS and JavaScript from a user interface perspective. We have a Python co-learning, a Ruby co-learning, a Rust co-learning... I hope I didn't forget anything.
Martin Stadler: We also had at least once - and we want to repeat it - an open co-learning, which was like no topic, which also worked really well. The idea is you have some kind of common topic, be it what Open TechSchool does, in case of the open co-learning, or what I just said, all these topics... And you just hang out in the evening, usually after work, in some office or lunch-styled space. If you have no idea what to do, if you're really a beginner or kind of looking for inspiration, you can maybe get some inspiration, or someone more experienced can tell you "This is a good tutorial for you." You might bring your side-project, or you have a question where you're stuck in your portfolio page, or something. You can try to get people to help you, and you can also provide help, but there's no guarantee or anything. It's very open.
Eberhard Wolff: How do you make sure that people actually talk to each other or interact in those sessions?
Martin Stadler: That's a very good question. There's a few tricks you learn when you do this for a while. I'm organizing the web frontend co-learnings since over two years now, and there were good times and times when not so many people came, and when people talked too much or too little... But you try little things and you learn how this works. A really good thing is that we do an introduction round after a while, when everybody's there - it's not so much about being on time - and there's just one simple question: "What are you going to work on tonight?"
Martin Stadler: You don't have to tell your life story, where you are, where you're coming from... Just what you want to do tonight, and you get a feeling about people's levels and what they can provide, actually. If someone's like, "I'm working on this Angular 2 project and I have no clue how to start", someone will say "I can help you with that, I did that before. But I'm working on this API call to get authenticated and I have some issues with that", and then maybe someone else will say, "Okay, I can help you with that."
Martin Stadler: Someone is maybe coming with this portfolio project and it's like, "Okay, I have this fancy idea of animations", and someone else will be like "Can I just take a look at what you're doing, because that's really interesting to me?", something like that.
Eberhard Wolff: Sounds great. Anything else we need to cover concerning the co-learning groups?
Martin Stadler: Maybe what you can do to learn something, because people often ask, "Okay, I don't really know what to do. I kind of want to get to a junior position, but how do I do this?" We have a lot of these kinds of conversations in these meetings. These conversations are usually really helpful, being in a community and not somewhere online... But then, people can recommend each other tutorials or ways to go, which is very helpful. We can provide the material we have, but we can also recommend other material. We're not like, "Oh, this is not on TechSchool..."
Martin Stadler: People do a lot of other online programs while they're coming to the co-learnings, which is a good idea.
Martin Stadler: Eberhard Wolff:[00:16:58.18] Yes, that sounds pretty great. What about learner's meetup? That's another format that you're doing, right?
Martin Stadler: Yes, this one is a very specific one. It is in a way interesting to get new people into the community, and also solve the issue of always having one specific topic. Learner's meetup is specifically not one specific topic, and it usually includes some kind of talk or presentation at the beginning about a technology-agnostic topic. Of course, not completely agnostic, but something like "How does HTTP actually work?" It's interesting for a JavaScript developer or for a Python developer, or for basically everyone doing this kind of things. You get some kind of basic intro to some technology; it can also be social things, like "How can I apply for a job?"
Martin Stadler: Learner's meetup is also about being for any level, because after that talk, we usually do something we call "minibar camp", which is a bar camp for one or two hours. People will just say what kind of topics they're interested in, we put them on stickers on the wall, and we make little discussion groups. Then we come back and present what we discussed about. It's like a community-building open format, which is going on for quite a while now.
Eberhard Wolff: Cool. There are other things that you tried and that seemed interesting... One of them is hackerships. Can you say a few words about that?
Eberhard Wolff: Martin Stadler:[00:18:45.24] Yes, I wasn't really involved in that, but I'll try to explain what happened there. A really interesting idea was "How can we scale some of the things we do in Open TechSchool and the values we have and live to something more full-time, more serious, more career-oriented?" I hope I explain it correctly - the main idea is that you are already in the industry, and you want to get better; you want to improve your position, you want to switch to a new technology, you want to get into a new architecture, something like this, and you decide to take some time off because your current job doesn't provide you this opportunity.
Eberhard Wolff: It's a three-month idea, and you kind of do something like a co-learning workshop thing full-time for three months, and there will be coaches or hackers-in-residence that kind of give you guidance. It's a mixture of those hacker schools that are very expensive, and the Open TechSchool idea. There was also some kind of donations involved after you go back to work, something like that. Unfortunately, it wasn't really possible to make it sustainable in a financial way, so at the moment it's not active.
Eberhard Wolff: It seems like a very ambitious plan, I have to say. Maybe one of the listeners might figure out how to make it sustainable. What about the mentorship program? That's another program that you tried, right?
Martin Stadler: Yes. Actually, this is the first time we officially talk about that because it's kind of in a beta phase. The idea is to come up with something new in this in our environment; something that's not new somewhere else, but as I said, in the co-learnings people ask a lot about "How can I make myself be able to apply for a certain position?" or "What should I learn until I'm really good in programming?", or something like these long-term things. If you have time to come to a co-learning every other week, maybe you feel like it's not enough.
Martin Stadler: The idea is to provide a one-to-one mentorship thing in a way where you can talk to anyone and say, "Can you be my mentor? Can we meet every other week for coffee?" We provide a good matching of people, and we want to make sure that this works in a way we think it should work, in a healthy relationship. The idea is that we have something that we call mentor-mentor or parent-mentor, so we have a third person involved in the one-on-one thing that actually just makes sure everything works well, the direction makes sense, asking for feedback... If you're a mentee, "Is that working for you? Is your mentor working for you?"
Martin Stadler: So far it's working great. We do it for a few people, we get good feedback, and we're thinking of extending that.
Eberhard Wolff: Sounds really great. So much for how you do it and what you're doing. It's also interesting to talk about how the organization works. First question, obviously, how is Open TechSchool organized? What kind of organization is it, how does it work?
Martin Stadler: We are a community. That's a vague answer, I know. We also have this foundation, e.V., based in Berlin, but this is more like a legal entity to handle certain things, certain payments, donations, things like that, and also maybe to decide where we're heading. In an international setting it's always a bit hard to do this from one country. We are really only a community organized in chapters for different cities. We started in Berlin, and Berlin is kind of big in technology... I think this kind of do-it-yourself community idea is strong in Berlin in general - we are by far the biggest chapter - but we set up a structure where you can create your own chapter, which can be very small or very big, it doesn't matter, and just benefit from the network, benefit from the material, from all workshops, collaborate somehow...
Martin Stadler: We have chapters in different cities. Active ones would currently be Bristol, Brussels, Dortmund. Göttingen - I'm not sure if there's something going on right now, but maybe they are coming back. Hamburg, London and Zürich, and there's a lot of others that are currently rather inactive. We're kind of trying to keep the overview, but it's really hard because people really want to work on their things and don't want to do calls and communications all the time, so we are very unorganized organized...
Martin Stadler: Sometimes we have these community calls where we have a video Hangout and we talk to each other, and we try to make an organizers' meetup in Berlin where we just talk about how our individual meetups are going, because every meetup has a few organizers; we share responsibilities. In other cities it's like that, too.
Eberhard Wolff: Okay, so the formats that we've just discussed, the type of events that you're doing - it's not like every chapter does the same events, is it?
Martin Stadler: No, it's not exactly the same. The learners' meetups are also happening in Dortmund, as far as I remember... Maybe also in Hamburg. Workshops are something that we all share, and usually also use the same material. Co-learning is also popular in different chapters, and then each chapter can also have their own new ideas, depending what their communities look for. For instance in Hamburg there were a few teachers involved, so they were more interested in working with schools. Again, it's very open.
Eberhard Wolff: How do you make sure that good ideas are actually spread from chapter to chapter? Is there a way to do that?
Martin Stadler: It's hard, actually. The community calls can be a means for that. It's actually an issue we have, because as I said, people don't want to work on communication so much and they just feel like they don't have enough free time to do what they do and also work on organizational stuff. There's some ideas we have for how to do it, but they're not always executed, so having this kind of calls, also having one person per chapter that talks to the others was one idea that's currently not really active.
Martin Stadler: I also would love to do some kind of Open TechSchool bar camp where people actually travel and meet, but it's all not really something that we do on a daily basis.
Eberhard Wolff: I see. Can you talk about how many people are actually involved in this activity?
Martin Stadler: It's really hard to say, actually. I just got this number that we have 130 internal user e-mail accounts involved in the last year - that would be organizers, because you only get that e-mail if you are an organizer of your chapter. Coaches are not necessarily organizers - sometimes you are both, but a coach can also be just someone that "Hey, would you like to come on Saturday? You know about JavaScript, right? I know you're open and a nice person, so we'll give you this coach introductions, how to do it and then you can just do it on Saturdays." We have a lot of people in this kind of network, but I have no idea how many.
Martin Stadler: In terms of participants, it's also really hard to track because we don't write down every participation in one of the co-learnings or something, and we have very varying return rates of people that come regularly, or only once and check it out, and then maybe it's not the right thing for them, or they choose some other event.
Martin Stadler: We do most of our event organization on meetup.com, and there we have members of the groups. In Berlin it's a really big group - I think it's the biggest group, almost 7,000 members. That can be that half of them are not really active and muting all their e-mails - I don't really know. But I think because we have so many co-learnings, we have a lot of people being in touch with the community, so that's great. Also, in the other chapters there's different numbers, but sometimes almost a thousand members, too. I just added all those numbers of the active chapters, and it's like 13,000 meetup group members, but I don't really know what that means.
Eberhard Wolff: Looking at the schedule, there was activity each and every week, and I guess more than one activity, right?
Martin Stadler: Yes, that's also a great thing about the co-learnings, because they are so low maintenance, so low effort... Basically one of maybe three, or co-organizers of one of the co-learnings has to be there and has to have a key organized, which is already a commitment, but because we have multiple different co-learning groups, there's actually something every week. Sometimes multiple things on some weeks, which is also great, to give people a contact point if they want to talk someone, or just check it out.
Eberhard Wolff: Is there any kind of commercial entity? You said there was this foundation, the German e.V., so I guess that's the entity that officially runs everything, right?
Martin Stadler: Exactly. At least the things that need something to be run, and we are gemeinnützig. That in German law means that we can't do tax deductions and stuff like this. We're not for profit, and we don't have any plans to be for profit in any way. Money can be involved - not for profit, but to make possible what we do.
Eberhard Wolff: So the events are all free for the participants, I guess.
Martin Stadler: Yes, exactly. I've mentioned that. For me it's natural, but it really is not... There's never really any participation fee, one of our core values sometimes being discussed about "How can we make sure people actually show up?" Maybe we charge one Euro, and then there's some people saying, "No, things are for free. This is important." So yes, everything is for free, and also there's no plan on paying coaches, because this is what our community is; people actually like to do that, and they also benefit from being coaches because it's a great experience. As soon as we would start one person for this, that would be strange.
Martin Stadler: Currently, we're not paying anyone to do anything, but that's not something we're proud of, because if we find a way to get some money and donations and we could pay people for organizing stuff, that would be great. As I said, workshops are not happening so much because of the lot of work of organizing, and I think nobody really wants to do the organizing, so there wouldn't be any problems. If someone gets paid for this, nobody would be like "Why is that person paid?" Everybody would say, "Oh, thank you for doing it." Coaching and learning and participating is all for free.
Eberhard Wolff: Let's take a look at the history - when did you start Open TechSchool, and how did you do that?
Martin Stadler: The history actually starts with the JavaScript user group in Berlin and Rails Girls. This was at the end of 2012, I think. In the user group we had people from Rails Girls having a talk about what they were doing. Rails Girls is basically doing roughly the same thing, based on Ruby on Rails and focusing on women.
Martin Stadler: They did that before Open TechSchool was born, and we learned about it; the JavaScript community back then was kind of small and very strong, so we were like "We also want to do something like that, but we also want to use JavaScript or other languages, and we want to just support this idea on a broader level."
Martin Stadler: There were a lot of people in that group saying, "Okay, let's meet, let's talk about how we can also do something like that." That's how the first JavaScript for absolute beginners workshop happened. Some people just sat down and wrote material, and we just did this workshop. There was a lot of energy and it was great.
Martin Stadler: At the beginning of 2013, this foundation was founded. Then we included other languages and other people, and it grew from there.
Eberhard Wolff: What is your motivation? Why are you doing this? It's all for free, so obviously it's not about the money. What's the reason for people who are involved in Open TechSchool to actually do that and spend all the time on this?
Martin Stadler: Yes, this is a very interesting question. Sometimes people don't really get that we just do this without directly benefiting from it. There's a lot of answers to that, because we have a lot of different in our community. I'm trying to think of some... I know a lot of people want to improve our community - this is one of the main, common motivations. We want to have better gender equality, we want to have more diverse people in the community, so we just want to enter one more entry to the industry, to the community.
Martin Stadler: We focus on doing it in a way that you feel welcome, that even if you're kind of scared, that you have a nice, safe environment to do this. People spend their free time showing other people that they can do it, that they should be part of that. And there's people that just like to hang out with like-minded people, and spend their free time without any pressure from their boss, doing fun things.
Martin Stadler: Personally, I experienced that coaching helps me a lot in my own profession, being a software developer or architect, because I have to explain concepts a lot. Not only that, because that's also something you do in your job anyway, but you also get a lot of questions, and it's very interesting to think about all these questions and find answers to them. You see that people have different perspectives on things, and that makes you a better engineer; you learn how to explain things, how to document things, how to see things from different perspectives.
Eberhard Wolff: I found it interesting that you said that this is also about raising diversity... With a group like Rails Girls, where the name already sort of says it's about diversity, this is not too obvious if I look at Open TechSchool, so do you see that happening? Are people attracted to a profession and to a field that otherwise wouldn't attract them?
Martin Stadler: Yes, Rails Girls are focusing on that more, that's true. But we are taking this "Open", again, really seriously, so we're open to everyone; we're not focusing so much on certain groups. But I actually do see this happening, and we're trying to transport that in way... We post pictures from our events, where it looks really nice, and then sometimes - this personally makes me very happy - I get this feedback... Sometimes someone is like, "Okay, I'm leaving the co-learning for tonight, thank you so much. And by the way, I didn't expect it would be so nice." That means we're doing something right; people were a bit scared, and they found it appealing.
Martin Stadler: Our gender ratio is not 50/50, but compared to most of the industry, we have a much better ratio, so that just shows us that we're doing something in the right direction, I would say.
Martin Stadler: Let's talk about some groups, although I don't really like it... We have some Syrian refugees sometimes working on projects; we have people recommending our events as a place where you can go and just hang out and feel safe and work, and we try to make this happen by the rules we have, how we deal with each other, that we always have multiple organizers or coaches so that someone is doing wrong, even if it's not bad intention, someone else can tell them, "Look, this is not how we want to do it."
Martin Stadler: We have some rules for coaches for the workshops. Whenever someone wants to organize something just on their own, we say "No, sorry, we don't want to do this because you have too much personal influence, maybe. This should be community, and the community should fix some problems." We also talk -- if there's individuals that have problems, we have a lot of other organizers and participants to talk about it and solve the problem. These are the things we're trying to do to achieve that.
Eberhard Wolff: That's a great message, that if you have proper rules for the community, it helps with issues such as diversity, so that's great.
Martin Stadler: Yes, of course. Now we also have a code of conduct, and we take all these things very seriously. We need to communicate this even more, so that we don't have people being surprised anymore that things are actually nice and safe. We really focus on that.
Eberhard Wolff: We already sort of covered it, but you were talking about core values. What are the core values of Open TechSchool? Can you give a short overview?
Martin Stadler: Yes. Of course, we start with openness, which basically means we're open to people, we're open to technologies, and all these different things. Also, it includes accessibility, I would say... Being open in the sense that you don't have to pay a lot of money. Empowerment - again, we want to focus on helping people be able to do something themselves, that they type, they have it on their machine, feel that they can do it, that it's possible to learn more if they are motivated.
Martin Stadler: Hands-on - we talked about that. Welcoming learning environment - there's no reason to feel like, "Oh, I ask stupid questions" or "Everybody else already knows things, because these programmers just know how to do it. I will never be able to do it." There's all these things that people are feeling even when they come to us, and we do our best to reduce that.
Martin Stadler: Transparency... Also something with multiple organizers and cultures - everybody can know what we're doing. There's no hidden motifs or goals. We're not for profit; we have a foundation where everything we do with the money can be seen. And yes, not for profit - we're not doing this to have a big financial benefit from it.
Eberhard Wolff: Can you share a few success stories from attendees, what they learned and what the impact of that was for them?
Martin Stadler: My personal favorite story is one girl, Jessica - she came to the web frontend co-learning first, and then she also came to a workshop for JavaScript for beginners. She's a biologist, but she wanted to get into technology somehow, at least a little bit. She continued to come to our co-learning, which is great because often people are coming a few times and then they leave, and we never know why. She was progressing a lot, she was learning Ember.js, so we asked her if she wants to be a co-organizer so we can split responsibilities a bit more. Also, very important for me, having an organizer that's rather a beginner is great, because that makes people not feel like "Oh, everybody's an expert - the organizer, the coach, they're professionals, and I am the learner." It should be more like on the same level. In this case, having an organizer being also kind of a beginner is great.
Martin Stadler: She kept learning and learning, and then she actually found a job as a developer for a biology JavaScript thing, it was perfect. This is my personal favorite success story. But I also hear of others saying, "Oh, we have someone in the Python group and he just got a job", and he was saying thank you because we helped a lot. Stuff like this happens quite a bit.
Eberhard Wolff: So it's actually really something that helps people to start a career in programming.
Martin Stadler: Yes, or just helping understand how technology works. Sometimes people come and say, "Well, I don't want to be a programmer, but I work with programmers and I want to understand more how that works." Or also for a hobby, saying "I really want to build an Arduino doing something at home." If people actually achieve that goal, I call that a success story.
Eberhard Wolff: That sounds really great. There are probably similar organizations, I guess... Can you give examples of some of them?
Martin Stadler: We've talked about Rails Girls already - they are a really important and big one. It's actually really hard to keep track of all of these organizations. We're just one of many, and I'm always torn between "Open TechSchool should include everyone", which is never going to work, because that is not how it works. Or partner more... It's a lot of organizational work, but we like to partner. This is actually what turns out to be more productive than talking to each other about "Hey, you should become part of us, or the other way around."
Martin Stadler: We do partner with Rails Girls. When they have a Ruby workshop, sometimes they ask us to provide some HTML, CSS coaching and some material, because that's what they don't focus on... Which is great. We started being inspired by Rails Girls, and then we started partnering with them. It's a good story.
Martin Stadler: There's a lot of things online... Free Code Camp is something I can think of. It's still on my list to really get into it and understand how it works, because I think they are doing an amazing job and they're growing fast, but so far it's focused online, so what we do is we say "People can come to our events, our co-learnings and do the Free Code Camp stuff online." We're kind of merging with them in a way.
Eberhard Wolff: That's something that you would usually do online, the Free Code Camp?
Eberhard Wolff: Martin Stadler:[00:46:11.26] As far as I understand, they have a curated list of online material even from other sources, so they solve the problem of where to start, what to do next, and it seems like they're providing more and more things, but I should really look into it more, I don't really know.
Eberhard Wolff: They also have these online communities where they encourage people to meet in person. Actually, I got in touch with them once and said, "Hey, you can come to our events because this is a great match. We don't have the best material available, but we have a great community. You have a good list of great material - we can just do that together."
Eberhard Wolff: Okay. What about the App Summer camps?
Martin Stadler: As far as I understood, it's something that happened in the Open TechSchool Hamburg community. As I already mentioned, there were some teachers and I think they grew and they got a lot of funding now and they're doing amazing stuff... Showing students in schools how to do apps and also do the same thing, motivate them to learn more, to make it accessible, say like "Look, you're using these apps all the time. It's not magic, you can do it yourself."
Eberhard Wolff: And that would happen during the summer vacation, I guess, as they are called App Summer camps.
Martin Stadler: Yes, exactly.
Eberhard Wolff: They also have these IT labs, I believe...?
Eberhard Wolff: Martin Stadler:[00:48:03.24] IT labs was happening in Berlin, from Technologiestiftung Berlin. They try to connect the industry and the universities and the schools... Mainly school. Open TechSchool was involved sending coaches and organizing some things. It's currently not happening anymore. We had a few things getting in touch with schools, but it's a bit of a different story. Most of those things we talked about are for adults. We are Open TechSchool, so we can try these things, but I think we are mostly for adults.
Eberhard Wolff: What about the Node School?
Martin Stadler: Node School is also one of the things that you could compare a little bit. They're really focusing on Node.js. They have a lot of material that you do on the console, and have some fun responses when you do exercises. One of the organizers of Node School Berlin also came to our co-learning once and we kind of got in touch and said, "Hey, what you're doing is great. We are Open TechSchool - we don't want to focus on Node, but why not add it? We can help you with promotion, because we have this huge Meetup group; you can just be part of that." We just said, "Okay, we're partnering. You can keep the Node School brand, but you can also use the Open TechSchool brand" and we're kind of cross-promoting. We just make sure that our values are the same, which in this case really works out.
Eberhard Wolff: What about the CSS classes? I think they're also similar...
Martin Stadler: Yes, CSS classes is actually what we do in Open TechSchool, but focusing on CSS. It's coming out of the CSS Conference Group, but actually these people also used to be founders of Open TechSchool, so there's a lot of family style. They don't want to spend too much time in Open TechSchool organizational stuff. I discussed with them a lot, so we accept that they have their own brand and they are focusing a lot on this conference + workshop thing. Again, we're partnering. We have a few people that are active in both groups, who are cross-promoting, and we are always recommending their material to people who want to do CSS, because it's really great.
Martin Stadler: Their workshops are also kind of an evolution of what we did so far in Open TechSchool, being a mix of a workshop with a fixed set of material and some kind of curriculum, and these open co-learnings where you basically can do whatever you want to do. Their workshops are one-day workshops, but for every level, which is great.
Eberhard Wolff: That sounds really great. Given that this is quite an active group, still the question is how do you sustain that? How do you make sure that it stays around?
Martin Stadler: That's a very good question for this kind of initiatives. The co-learnings are an answer to that, because you don't have to do so much. People kind of burn out fast in this kind of initiatives, because they organize a lot of things and they create a website and a branding and everything, and then after doing it three times, they feel like "Okay, it's a lot... How do I sustain this with my job?"
Martin Stadler: You see a lot of these things happening, and then they disappear again... We have the same problem in Open TechSchool, for instance with the workshops that currently are not happening so much. We can always bring them back - and I think we will - but this is hard in terms of sustaining things. The co-learnings are actually super sustainable because the benefit is really high and the maintenance is really low, and you can integrate it into your normal week's rhythm.
Martin Stadler: Most of the co-learnings are every two weeks or once a month, so people are like "Okay, I can do this for a long time. I'm committing myself to at least go every second co-learning, so I talk to my co-organizers. Once a month, one night a week I can do this for a long time. It's not like, okay, after the third thing it's too much for me." This works great in terms of sustaining, and this keeps the community active and growing. Otherwise, we were thinking a lot about getting some kind of funding or more donations to pay some people for organizing stuff, and that would actually help us a lot... But it's all ideas, currently.
Eberhard Wolff: This really seems like a great idea, and I really want to join, so how would I attend an Open TechSchool or a similar event?
Martin Stadler: You go to the website (http://opentechschool.org/), you find your chapter and the Meetup group, and you just check the calendar and see what appeals to you. Then you just go there.
Martin Stadler: For a workshop, you have to sign up, and there's limited space, of course. Co-learnings are usually open because there's not too many people coming.
Eberhard Wolff: Let's assume that there is no local Open TechSchool - what do we do?
Martin Stadler: If you're really dedicated to starting something, that's amazing. Just get in touch with us, maybe on the forum - we have a discussion forum where you just write an e-mail and/or social media - we have a lot of channels, so it's hard to decide - and you just make yourself heard and say, "I want to start something."
Martin Stadler: We usually support in trying to find other people in the same area. If you have a little group ready, we are going to help you with setting up some infrastructure, like social media, Meetup groups, something that we actually have to pay for, but we cover that, giving you a lot of tips on how to do this.
Martin Stadler: We'll have a call probably, and then we usually would recommend you start with some kind of co-learning or initial workshop and see how it goes from there.
Eberhard Wolff: Do you have any idea how long that would take me or how much effort that would be, to start my own chapter somewhere?
Martin Stadler: It depends if you're able to create a little community. If you're on your own, you're on your own. That's tough, and that's probably not going to work out because of the community thinking we have. You need to find a few people that want to do this, and then if you have a few people around you and you don't think too big, you more think in terms of frequent co-learning, learners’ meetup maybe, and then once a year a workshop, I think that's possible and it's not too much work.
Eberhard Wolff: Yes, because it really does sound like a lot of work, to be honest. Setting up a co-learning event every week, that seems to be not too hard.
Martin Stadler: You don't have to do it every week. Actually, the only one that's every week is the web frontend co-learning, and we have like four core organizers. That's not really necessary, but depending on your city, if you just put it on Meetup...
Eberhard Wolff: ...people might just show up.
Martin Stadler: Yes, you will have a small group of people, and then you see if there's actually interest in making this bigger.
Eberhard Wolff: Yes, and as you said, you would help the people to set up the Meetup group. By the way, is this something that is limited to Germany? Because we were talking about Berlin, Hamburg, and in particular those chapters. Could I also do it if I'm in the States or somewhere else?
Martin Stadler: Of course, we have a lot of inactive chapters unfortunately, but they're all over the world. Australia, in Melbourne, was really active. The story was that actually someone visited Berlin from there. He was part of the Berlin group for quite some time, and then he moved back and he got started there. They also had some spaces where they could go, they had a big community. Then some people stopped doing it, so currently it's kind of on hold.
Martin Stadler: We had chapters or we're having inactive chapters in a lot of places in the world, and there's nothing that stops you from doing it somewhere else. There's nothing Germany-specific or Europe-specific. Culturally, it's interesting... If you actually have the same kind of do-it-yourself approach...
Martin Stadler: For instance, I was traveling a bit in East Africa and I started something in Nairobi, just to try it out because I got to know some people there who did similar things, and I said, "Hey, let's try the Open TechSchool concept!" I think there was not enough interest, because everybody was already doing something else in the same field. Also, we got this feedback that "Just do it yourself and everything's for free" was not so interesting there because they got a lot of sponsored events there, and they kind of got used to big companies presenting stuff for them and paying lunch.
Martin Stadler: In Sweden, Stockholm we did some things and we said, "Oh, we do Saturday and Sunday", and everybody was like, "Sorry, Sunday is family day." Things are different in different places in the world.
Eberhard Wolff: Okay, so you probably need to figure out how to do it there. What kind of help are you looking for?
Martin Stadler: Be a nice participant - it's great! Be a coach - even better. There's not much you have to commit to, you can just come once and help people. This happens sometimes at the co-learnings... In the introduction round someone's like, "I'm here for the first time, I just wanted to help other people. I'm good in JavaScript." This is really great.
Martin Stadler: We would need help in social media, promotion and stuff like this a lot. I think we could reach much more people if we were better on Facebook, for instance. Nobody wants to do that in the current community. We would like to get donations; you can become a member of the German Foundation and pay a little fee and be part of it, and then decide where we're heading and how to spend the little money we have, or maybe in the future more money.
Eberhard Wolff: And it's tax-deductible, right?
Martin Stadler: Yes, of course. We also need help in reaching out to people and telling them about this. We want to partner more with schools, universities, social workers... Get the word out, because we're quite in a bubble, to be honest, which is sad.
Eberhard Wolff: Yes, that's true. What about companies sponsoring you? Is that something that you do, or is it limited to persons?
Martin Stadler: We're open to that. It's kind of a chicken/egg problem, because you get donations if you ask for donations in a certain way and tell them what you will do with the money. But that's something you have to organize. Actually, we would need someone organizing that. I think there would be companies which would sponsor stuff; we wouldn't be open to promote them too much, because we want to be independent and "do-it-yourself"; that wouldn't match so much. But if someone would like to support us financially...
Martin Stadler: We do get some support already - we go to co-working spaces for free in the evenings or in the weekends... These space donations are important to us, too. In other cities than Berlin sometimes this is hard.
Martin Stadler: How a company can also support us is just sending people. If you're a tech company, give your developers two hours off in two weeks and send them to a co-learning, and they will actually be better developers too, that's what I think.
Eberhard Wolff: Yes, that's a very good point. You pointed out that being a coach actually helps to become a better developer and better architect yourself. That's true.
Martin Stadler: Yes. Then we're working on a new website, so help with that is appreciated. It's on GitHub, everything's open.
Eberhard Wolff: Anything else you feel I didn't cover or I didn't ask you? Anything else you want to add?
Martin Stadler: No, I think we talked about the most important things.
Eberhard Wolff: Okay. Thanks a lot. Open TechSchool is really a very impressive project and you're doing great things, so thanks a lot for taking the time and talking to me. We will put some of the links that we mentioned for Open TechSchool and so on in the show notes, so feel free to browse them and take a look around. Thanks a lot.
Martin Stadler: Thanks a lot too, it was a pleasure.