Skip to content

Three reasons POSSE attracts professors and other educators

College educators, read and pass on the word. POSSE may be the really great experience you’ve been looking for.  The groundbreaker that suddenly makes sense and focus out of attending open source conferences, hurried LUG meetings, and dissatisfaction with the limits of what you can do in the classroom compared to the open world.

We’re having the West Coast’s first POSSE this 5 to 9 July in Mountain View.  I’ll be there as an instructor, as well as Alolita Sharma from the OSI, and my colleague and POSSE co-founder Mel Chua.  If you come, you’ll learn about how to become productively lost, which is the key to navigating myriad free and open source software projects.

While you are thinking on that, think about these three reasons POSSE is attracting so much interest:

  1. POSSE doesn’t solve all problems that academics face, but it works really well in a particular area.  If you plan to teach a class that includes open source development, or are even considering it, POSSE is the workshop for you.
  2. The POSSE curriculum is very broad and applicable from the largest and most prestigious four-year research schools to two-year community colleges or even advanced science high schools.  This is because, like learning to ride a bike on city streets, we all need the same basic skills and experiences.
  3. Being an alum of the class provides you hooks in to the POSSE community, which is at the crossroads that the Teaching Open Source project has been slowly occupying over the last few years.  This crossroads is where community leadership from the open source and academic communities are learning from each other and creating programs such as POSSE and the new textbook Practical Open Source Software Exploration: How to be Productively Lost, the Open Source Way.

Attendance is free, and you have to cover your own travel, meals, and lodging — one reason we do these regionally is to get a larger local draw so that more POSSE events can be held in the region as academics spread the word over time.