1. Reference
1.1. I've checked in with our lead instructor, Max, and our youth community manager, Daisha, and everyone is interested in working with WordPress and providing this kind of capacity to our youth.
1.2. There was strong interest in doing a weekend-length program for Boot Camp alums and A team members sometime this spring as a first step, assuming we can share the workload in planning and make it manageable in scope.
2. The team had some great questions we should think about intentionally as we plan this (assuming we do that):
2.1. What might follow up from that workshop look like?
2.1.1. WP: I don't really know, since that would be *really* dependent on the content covered in the workshop. We could probably line up some ongoing mentorship, funnel them into learning how to contribute to the project, and/or something else... it really just depends on what the end goal is for the group of people who take the workshop.
2.2. Do youth join a local Wordpress community afterwards? (East Bay wordpress meetup, for example? Anca & team?)
2.2.1. WP: Yes, I would likely recommend they join the local meetups (there are several in the area), which are free, and we could encourage them to organize their own study group events within the meetups (we typically let any member schedule events rather than having an owner/gatekeeper).
2.2.2. WP: Side note: capital P in WordPress. It's a huge pet peeve in the community; we even have a function in WordPress core that will auto-correct it in posts/pages. :)
2.3. How would we support that?
2.3.1. WP: Again, I think this is more of a thing we should decide together than a thing we would want to dictate from our end. I don't expect to be short on volunteers, though, so I think it's mostly a matter of figuring out what would most benefit the students, Hack the Hood, and WordPress overall.
2.4. How do we provide youth an opportunity to utilize the skills they learned in the weekend bootcamp?
2.4.1. WP: I know I sound like a broken record, but it depend on the content of the workshop. :) It could be (as an example) that we teach a workshop on basic WP setup, customization with plugins, and creation of a child theme. In that case, the students could use their skills moving forward to create sites on their own for local businesses, and we could provide a mentor (or several) to make sure they are doing things properly/not doing anything that would be a security issue). We could potentially hook them up with a non-profit that needs a better site and have them work on it as a group (dare I say a study group they organize via the meetup?). I'm open to ideas. As another example, if the workshop was based on troubleshooting (this would be more appropriate for people already familiar with wp in general), they could answer questions in the volunteer-run support forums and have a mentor help them when they get stuck, which they could potentially leverage into getting a job doing wp support somewhere or overseeing a company's wp site.
2.5. How can Wordpress help secure paid apprenticeships or internships for youth who make a commitment to growing their skills on this platform? (looking ahead)
2.5.1. WP: This is trickier because it would depend on companies wanting to bring on junior people; this is less common in the slice on the industry that I inhabit (as I mentioned, Automatic typically doesn't do junior-level roles or internships). That said, I think if we put the word out, we could probably get a few companies willing to experiment... I imagine most of those companies would want more than a 2-day introduction to WP as a base, though. "Has more to learn" is one end of the spectrum, and "Doesn't really know very much yet at all about how this system works or how to work with it" is another. The former would be more likely to be easy to set up with internships than the latter, as many companies in this space are so busy they don't want to have to teach the basics when there are so many potential employees who are already much further along because of self-teaching (since so many materials are available to learn from for free online). So we'd want to think about this as we decide on workshop content. As an aside, I can generally get funding for something like Outreachy, but they'd be up against other potential interns, so again they'd need to know what they were doing vs. thinking of an internship as a continuation of a workshop (at least for now; this may change in the future if I'm successful).
2.6. Is there any kind of badging or certification process we should think about working with (similar to Google Ad Words certification, for example...)
2.6.1. WP: No certification (at least not currently... it comes up every now and then as being something we might do in the future), and as for badging, that would really be something tied to contributing back to the project. If they volunteer with one of the contributor teams, there's a badge that shows up on the wordpress.org profile, and people hiring wp folks definitely look there to see how someone has been involved. That could be getting the support badge for answering questions in the forums, subtitling a WordCamp video for wordpress.tv (a great way to learn at the same time), speaking at a WordCamp, etc.
3. Questions from WP
3.1. Could I get access to the regular bootcamp curriculum? Knowing what has already been covered would be important for developing something aimed at the A team.
3.2. Which of these 3 is more appealing to you:
3.2.1. general wp setup and configuration/customization,
3.2.2. theme building,
3.2.3. or troubleshooting?
3.2.4. For a 2 day workshop I think one of these makes the most sense if we want to keep scope manageable. If we later do a longer workshop, we could look at alternate topics and/or combine them.
3.3. In your experience, how quick on the uptake are the students?
3.3.1. Is going through something once and then having them do it on a project successful
3.3.2. Or do you find they need more repetition to grasp a topic?