You should run a workshop!

This was a great post by @funvill in days long past that is no longer searchable

I was looking for it recently, because it’s very positive and addresses some common questions about workshops. Just a Good Post.

Hello

tl;dr: You should run a workshop or night at VHS on a subject that you are enthusiastic about! We want to know more about what you love to do!

Have you considered running a workshop/night/class at VHS? Its easy! Just choose any topic, Make a small post about the night and send it to the mailing list. Then pick a date in the event calendar that is free, and run it! If you have an idea for a night but don’t know if people would be interested, send it to the mailing list! Ask people!

Just imagine if >You< and all of our other 200 members run one workshop a year! Out calendar would be full to the brim of super interesting workshops on a huge variety of topics. That sounds amazing!

I personally run one workshop every month, I been running a workshop every month for two years strait now. I find it a very rewarding experience to give back to the VHS community.

You don’t need to be an expert on a subject to run a night, you just need to be enthusiastic about a subject. When I ran the Geocaching and Geo Coin night I had only found a total of 10 Geo Caches. But I was excited about the subject so I ran a night on it. Stevemopolis showed up for the night (one of his first times to the space), he had found +2k of Geo Caches over the last 10 years, and had much more experience then I did but we where able to learn from each other and the night was a great success.

The first time I ran a workshop I was worried that I would disappoint people, mess it up, that I wasn’t expert in the subject. I was super nervous. So me and a few other people joined together and ran the workshop. It was a lot less stressful and after that first workshop I felt a lot more comfortable running other workshops.

You don’t have to run the workshop for free. You can charge a course fee and pocket the money for yourself. We would prefer if you donated some of it back to the space and we like free events but you can charge what ever you like. There are no rules on the amount or if you need to donate back to the space.

The only requirement for running a Workshop/Night/Class is that you find a key member to bottom line the event. (open the door, clean up, introduce people to the space, get people to sign wavers). If you are not a key member but would like to run an event, ask on the mailing list for someone to help you bottom line the event.

Some of the past workshops/Nights/Classes

Big list of past events Events Archives - Vancouver Hack Space

Some event ideas
learn to solder
Intro to ubuntu and other linux OSs
robots
screen printing VHS shirts and hoodies
crypto party
board & card games
minecraft / lan party?
paper folding
knots
Paper lanterns
Stickers
Stencils with the laser cutter.
How to make the perfect mixed drink, Whisky tasting night, Craft beer night,
Wordpress, MySQL, PHP, Java, Ruby, Perl, Bash, c/c++, Go, Node, Rails,
Server administration
Different code licences

5 Likes

Bumping this thread. It would be great to see more workshops at VHS. If anyone wants to run one let me know and I’ll add you to the calendar.

3 Likes

Thanks for the bumps.

I was thinking of running a web scraping workshop to show the Python people why JavaScript rules the web…

2 Likes

That would be awesome! I was thinking of running a python one…

2 Likes

Would love to see both of these!!

We should run it together. We could even have a race :wink:

1 Like

Sure! I was planning to optimize for readability, but we can throw a performance comparison too, for sure.

1 Like

This is perfect for me because I am working on a scraping project now.

Maybe you could design the challenge…

Also, I’m thinking the race would be a 15 minute, a max of 3 pre-installed packages, or some other stupid junk like that. I know there’s a few talented scrapers at VHS so it could even be a Derby. Hell, anybody could join in if they’re so inclined.

Bob Ross night! Painting workshop, BYOB encouraged :slight_smile:

2 Likes