Hydra Community Training Plan

Goals and Objectives

In order to support a vibrant and growing community of adopters, the Hydra community needs to ensure that sufficient training exists to help new adopters get up to speed on Hydra.  This training definitely needs to address brining new developers onboard, but over time we hope to address others in the Hydra ecosystem as well: curators and archivists, operations staff, project managers, etc.

Training Areas

• Planning a Hydra deployment for non-developers
• Sustaining a hydra installation (for operations folk)
• Technical training
  
  • Getting Started
  • Models & metadata
  • Rights management
  • Multimedia issues
  • Discovery

Technical Training

We offer training in a variety of contexts from online training like the hydra and blacklight tutorials to full-blown 5 day HydraCamps.  In between, we have a number of training contexts (such as the Code4Lib pre-conferenece sessions) that allow us to offer half- or full-day training sessions that focus on a specific topic.

By adopting a strategy of making the training modular and loosely coupled, we have the opportunity to use the same curriculum in multiple contexts - online, half-day, full-day, and HydraCamp.  In this structure, we might have the following half-day modules:

• Intro to Rails programming (leverages Railsbridge / rails for zombies / ??? )
• Intro to Hydra (leverages hydra tutorial)
• Intro to Blacklight (leverages blacklight tutorial)
• Collaborative development processes (new content addressing Agile, Distributed Source Control, Ticket/Story management, group decision process)
• Test Driven Development (new content - looking for a good resource here - need to check out the quickly generated list below)
  
  • http://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html
  • http://www.rubyfocus.biz/class_video/2010/07/19/rails_tdd_class_1.html
  • http://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html
  • http://www.agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html
• Content and Metadata models (new content - how to get it right without getting mired down)
• Rights Management (new content)
• Server Architecture and Deployment Management (new content)

Each of these sessions should be sized for a half or full day session that could be offered individually or in groups at events like Code4Lib or OR.

Then, you could offer a HydraCamp that leverages these modules while also giving the opportunity to do more hands-on, exploratory learning.  Hydra-camp could offer participants the opportunity to build a full fledged repository / Hydra-head that manages text, image, or generic (small) file content.  Mornings would be spent covering the content in one of the individual modules and afternoons would be spent in team-based hack-fest style collaboration on an actual repository that students could use as a starting point when the go home to their respective institutions.  

A possible outline might look like this:

HydraCamp

• Day 1 - Intro to Rails (AM) | Collaborative Dev Processes (PM)
• Day 2 - Intro to Hydra (AM) | Build your own basic Repo (PM)
• Day 3 - Content Modeling (AM) | Build out your own content model & Ingest data (PM)
• Day 4 - Intro to Blacklight (AM) | Build your own discover Interface (PM)
• Day 5 - Student Choice (AM) - class votes on Intro to TD or Rights Management or Deployment Management | Travel & small group sessions (PM)

We need to find a way to give students a sense of a continuous flow through the various morning sessions, so thinking about giving a good overview on day 1 and providing appropriate transitional material in the afternoons that helps link the modules (which are designed to be stand-alone) that students cover in the morning.

To-Do's

• Finalize the modules and order to be used in HydraCamp (Mark and Justin can give this a Dry-run in Dublin)
• Find content suitable to seed HydraCamp roll-your-own repos (probably 10 items each with metadata)
  
  • Text / PDF
  • Images
  • Generic File Repo (i.e. Sufia / ScholarSphere)
• Think about how much we want to try to tackle Collaborative Development and TDD - Mark thinks these are really important topics to participate successfully in the HydraCommunity, but also some of the harder topics to teach.
• Incorporate feedback from Code4Lib pre-conference retrospective into all of the above
• Finalize one or more of the training modules to post-online and add to they Hydra-Wiki developer training section
• (Optional) send out survey to past HydraCamp participants and get feedback
• (Optional) send out survey to current Hydra Partners asking where they percieve gaps in available training - do they have what they need to bring new developers up to speed, etc.?