The piece I like most about is the 'traveling road show of FOSS experts'. For the time they are in town, people at an event like OSCON can be a huge resource to *local* people who want to get involved but don't know how. University and high school students who'd like to code. Wikipedia users who'd like to contribute. Mozilla users who'd like to evangelize. All of these local people could benefit (as well as a few regular OSCON attendees … but doesn't seem this is the main audience).

A tactical marketing question: is it possible to find a couple of Portland university, college or high school teachers who'd be willing to push their star students to this event? For me, this is what works with David Humphries Mozilla course at Seneca -> the teacher inviting and incenting the students to jump in. If you could make some connections like this in Portland before the event, you'd have a home run even if few people from OSCON came as regular participants.

In terms of bringing people from South Africa for this (which I discussed with Zak), I don't think it's a fit. The people I was thinking about are already running quite sophisticated open content projects. They know how to do the basics. However, they would be interested in something that connected people running open software and content projects together to swap tips on running their communities, and possibly producing some 'how to' documentation along the way. Maybe this is a future event?

One last thought on Portland comes to mind: get the guys from FreeGeek (http://www.freegeek.org/) to send their volunteers. They would be perfect participants in this.

Damn - you read fast. :)

I think that it will always be difficult to get novice contributors out to a distant and/or expensive event. However, the conference circuit brings experienced FOSS contributors out to many different major cities. If we can start a trend of running FOSS 101 camps along with most FOSS events, then that should reduce the problem of location. Of course, contributors who are away from major centers will lose out — as always.

As for the name, I like how your suggestions are more direct - potential participants are more likely to be able to understand what the event is from just the name.

Some other ideas for the event name:
"Starting OSS Camp"
"How to OSS"
"OSS 101"
"Building OSS"

(I just don't prefer the term "coaching" event if it may be exactly what you're trying to get at.)