FRONTYARD Summer School

Frontyard as a school.

What kind of school? Well, definitely not a private school, or one with any form of certification, that is for sure. More the kind of school which is asking - what is a school, what can a school be. Asking the very question of what it means to learn and teach together - from each other.

In many ways FY is already an informal school - a space for teaching, learning, thinking, making and sharing knowledge. The FYSS is simply an experiment in temporarily changing the cadence and timings of what already happens at FY. What happens when we concentrate?

Topic ideas, loose list, please add more :)

Alternative housing models for Sydney
cooperatives
renters rights
investigating local development
peer to peer alternatives

How to's

using decentralised web tools (maybe specific one, or specific scenario?)
privacy tools, password managers
web scraping
working with data, spreadsheets
bulk cooking
low energy/cost ways to keep your apartment/room/house cool in summer/heat waves

Sessions / Schedule, November 2018

This is a working draft schedule for FFYS 2018.

There are the possibility of 3 sessions per day for the two weeks of the Summer School.

Mornings: 9am - 1pm

Afternoons: 2 - 5pm

Evenings: 6pm - late

We are booking 1 class per block, but classes do not need to take up the entire time of the block. Classes can take as much or as little time as they need. I class may take up more than one block and could extend over several days. These blocks of time are purely intended to avoid conflicts.

Monday, 19th Nov

Morning and Afternoon Sessions: Open to proposal

6pm - 7:30pm - What is Web Scraping? How does it work? When is it useful? An open presentation and discussion

Organiser: Luke Bacon

Web scraping is a really handy way to collect lots of data off the web. Ever need to check the same website again and again to check if something’s changed? Need to collect lots of ephemeral documents? Want to create a little software to do that manual, repetitive labour so you can do something more interesting? Web scraping can help. Web scraping is the basis of most activist software projects and plays an increasingly important role in activism as more government information goes online.

This is an open presentation to explain what web scraping is, when it's useful and when it's not.

This presentation is for activists, designers, researchers, artists and anyone who works with information online, and will be followed by a hands on workshop on Tuesday for those who want to learn the practice themselves. Even if that's not for you, it's great to know what's possible so that you can collaborate with someone who does want to do some scraping in the future.

Luke has done lots of web scraping, to collect development applications from councils, find out who's profiting from WestConnex, collect and archive pollution monitoring data, and more.

Tuesday, 20th Nov

Morning and Afternoon Sessions: Open to proposal

5pm - 8:30pm - Hands on introduction to web scraping workshop (6 spots left)

Organiser: Luke Bacon

Following Monday night’s presentation, this workshop is for those who'd like to learn how to write a web scraper themselves. It's a great introduction to programming, so if you've interested in learning some

You will write your own web scraper using the Ruby programming language, to collect data from the web.

This workshop is limited to 8 spots, please RSVP to Luke Bacon at luke@equivalentideas.com , or on the Frontyard Slack.

What to bring: a laptop, note book, something to snack on.

Notes:

Step by step tutorial to set up your laptop and write a scraper https://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2015/10/13/ruby-web-scraping-tutorial-on-morph-io-part-1/
Helpful resources for web scraping in Ruby https://gist.github.com/equivalentideas/670481f8b4b2d892e1a6