What I Learned Teaching A Smaller Online Open Source Workshop (During A Pandemic)

The year 2020 has forced many former in-person tech events and conferences to go online. As a technologist who regularly speaks and teaches at tech events, I’ve also had to make adjustments. Earlier this year, I taught an online open source workshop that was attended by over 100 people. While that event was successful, I thought I needed to plan a bigger event next time to meet the needs of even more people. Instead, circumstances led me to go in the opposite direction …. to teach a much smaller, hands on online open source workshop. Here’s what I learned not only about teaching workshops online, but specifically about teaching smaller workshops online.

What I Learned Teaching An Online Open Source Workshop (During a Pandemic)

We’re living in a unique time right now, trying to build community while social distancing and fighting the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic.  A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to teach an open source workshop to the Women Who Code Mobile track community. This might have been just another online event, when I first signed up to put it together 2 months ago before the quarantines started, but it quickly turned into something so much more ….. Over 260 people registered for the webinar, over 100 actually joined, and the Slack channel for the workshop had 73 members …. By the time it was all over, I had merged / closed 20 pull requests.