Instead we are going to watch lots of astronomy videos and see what that inspires. Maybe a new project? Also, she has a former teacher who took us up to her ridge-top-clear-view-in-the-Santa-Cruz-Mountains home for some telescoping, and we’d like to arrange for that again. Maybe after she dreams up a new project? One project I suggested was to study up, then take her own video of the night sky and narrate it, then edit it for a short piece on … something.

So I’m going to use this post and regularly update it with the videos we or she are going to watch or did watch, just so we get a nice running total. I’ll also link in the websites we use, etc.

• http://new-universe.org/ – I plan to get this book and possibly use it as a core item, since I think the cosmology and humanistic viewpoint will appeal to Malakai.
• http://www.khanacademy.org/#cosmology-and-astronomy – Yeah, I know, i could just start and stop here.

I’ve been having a difficult time getting organized and starting the big work on the next edition of the textbook. However, my recent calls for help have gained a fair amount of attention and multiple really good offers, so we are clearly underway again.

My goals in calling for this first sprint are to:

1. Start a writing rhythm for the team;
2. Take care of some administrivia (decide upon weekly work times, order of work, etc.)
3. Get some initial writing done that may still help the Teaching Open Source professors who are using parts of this textbook this school semester.

See you on IRC bright and early (for me) on Monday!  (This weekend is the end of daylight savings in most of North America.)

FSoC is a web-based tool for administering a student contributing program — handling proposals, commenting, automatic reminders, and so forth.

There is a running instance to look at, and we could get a similar instance running on a Fedora Infrastructure public test server.  We have a ways to go for it to be fully hosted by the Fedora Project, but why not try using it for the next session?

Please pass on the word. Anyone interested should join the mailing list to discuss it.  I’m available for direct questions.  Reach out, if you think you might be interested, I’d like the chance to talk with you.  Thanks.

One of the articles that comprise the book’s source is “Ten easy ways to attract women to your free software project“.  Actually, as Terry points out in the article introduction, nine of the ten ways are clearly useful for making your project more friendly for anyone and especially women.  That means implementing Terry’s ideas covers double — egalitarian attractiveness of the project while adding to the solution of the serious gender imbalance problem in free and open source software (FOSS).

There is a lot that makes this article great.  One part is the quality and quantity of research and supporting evidence.  I found the explanations of the different ways to support women instead of just men in a project to be very compelling.  I suppose some people might find it hard reading all of that, especially if it is the first time they have faced up to how easily a mono-culture arises when it is just men involved.

In reading over the points, I was very pleased that I see initiatives in the Fedora Project to address nearly all of the points there.  As the author points out, these ideas have been floating around.  I see projects such as Fedora have implemented them in a semi-haphazard fashion, partially because we haven’t had a guide.  I’m excited to have a chance to extrapolate these points in to The Open Source Way, as well as the Practical OSS Exploration textbook.

My only complaint about the article is the word “easy” in the title — I suspect that fell from the modern style of doing lists of how-to items as articles and blog posts.  I’m not sure that all of the items are easy, in fact I think changing an existing project to use a mailing list instead of a web forum would be a huge challenge.  My solution is to find ways to bring the forum up to the importance level of mailing lists, somehow.

Do you want to help us write the next version of the first textbook that teaches open source participation?

We need writers, editors, reviewers, and researchers to find or create content on:

• Testing code in FOSS communities.
• Working in open communities.
• Different types of open source community cultures.
• Open communities and diversity.
• Licensing FOSS  code.
• Threats and risk analysis of FOSS as a technology choice.
• FOSS business models.
• Determining program requirements.
• Designing FOSS programs.

Join the mailing list and let us know what you are interested in, or you can email me directly.

Note: The textbook Practical Open Source Software Exploration is licensed under the CC BY SA 3.0 Unported.  We are very interested in reusing and modifying existing content that is compatibly licensed.  This is especially true if we can use the content as an active downstream.

Tl;dnr version follows …

Earlier this year we released the first usable version of a textbook, “Practical Open Source Software Exploration”.  This book fills a need that we hear about repeatedly from educators — there is no other standard textbook that teaches how to actually participate in a free and open source software (FOSS) project.

Although that first release, 0.8., had some problems, it was pretty solid in terms of having practical material for students to work through to check out code, build code, debug code, submit a patch, and write collaborative documentation.

However, in a meeting earlier this year with Tim Budd and Carlos Jensen of Oregon State University, Dr. Budd noted there was really only enough material in the book to teach a few weeks of classes.  It was so practice heavy that a student, unless they ran in to technical problems, could go through the material relatively quickly.  The book was extremely short on the other material a class needs — the theoretical side.  It was missing material on the history, culture, types of communities, diversity, licensing, business models, and so forth.

Working with the professors who are using or planning to use the textbook, we figured out what the new chapters needed to be.  Much of the material for those chapters probably exists already, some may be under a CC license we can use, so I’m hoping a good portion of this chapter work will be reusing and rewriting existing materials as a downstream.

Who might get to take advantage of this?  Perhaps some people who do not yet even know how they can, as a part of their day job in a hardware or software company, contribute directly to FOSS in a collaboration done the open source way.

If you have ever done or wanted to be part of a team that puts together an online student contributing program (similar to Google Summer of Code and Fedora Summer Coding 2010) …

If you have skills in event and project or program management …

If you are interested in outreach to education that makes a difference to individual students whose work can reach thousands and millions …

Would you be interested in helping organize Fedora Students Contributing (FSC)?

To get the Fedora Summer Coding program going this last season, I just did the work and played it all out on the two public and one private mailing list.  Our team at Red Hat calls those two principles, “Get in there, get it going.”  Now I am trying to move through “going” toward the last principle, “Get out of the way.”

Now is the time to bring in other voices to guide and shape and take personal responsibility for the future of this program.  Rather than taking total control of this program forevermore for the Red Hat brand, we are convinced that applying the principles of the open source way to community events management is the right way to do such a program in the name of a community.  In addition to inviting all Fedora users, enthusiasts, and participants to join in organizing this event, I want to specifically call out to the organizations – corporate, academic, non-profit, etc. – to join with some of their staff/members.

Fedora Students Contributing requires/teaches skills for program administrators, such as:

• Project management.
• Fund raising and small accounting.
• Community organizing, mentoring, and leadership.
• Mentor training.
• Writing.
• Strategic and tactical planning.
• Open marketing.
• Public speaking.
• Getting things done in a FOSS project.
• Remote team collaboration.
• Running a student program with applications, proposals, acceptance, milestone checks, and stipends.
• More!

It’s rewarding to help so many people help each other, and the results are often surprising.  As with many other parts of working in FOSS projects, it provides a chance to learn, use, and teach skills that are useful in other parts of your life, as well as on your CV/resume.

End note: I have not done a review of any other student contribution programs, so I do not have specific knowledge of how they are run.  I am envisioning here a program done the open source way entirely from my own imagination, a vision fueled by so many of you all.

But many people relish the opportunity to help someone solve a problem they didn’t even know they had, or did know but didn’t know who to turn to.  Or they have it solved, but in an unsatisfactory way.  That’s where the people who will knock on doors and explain things come in very handy.

We need help to find sponsors for the Fedora Students Contributing project.  (This has been called the Fedora Summer Coding project this past summer in the Northern Hemisphere.)

You get the opportunity to:

• Grow a coalition of organizations interested in the many opportunities a student contribution program brings everyone.  (Organizations such as corporations, K20+ schools, private- and public-interest non-profits, small government, etc.)
• Engage in a sales-like role, yet different criteria and stakes.
  • Stretch yourself!
  • Use skills you have already that aren’t exercised in FOSS projects!
• Take a significant role in growing a proven education program in a major FOSS project.

As existing resources:

• A five-year report that shows the value a student contribution program has had for Fedora, JBoss, and Red Hat.
• A first-run of the Fedora version of this program, with thirteen complete projects (eleven funded by sponsors.)  This includes the first student content contribution, the Fedora Musicians Guide.
• A generic presentation to quickly customize and use.  (Full notes available but incomplete, I’m in progress of finishing.  Will update this parenthetical aside when the notes are fully written in.)

Contact me directly or, even better, join the SIG mailing list and let us know your interest.

This post is about the upcoming session for Fedora Students Contributing, to cover September 2010 to February 2011.

We need organizing help and we need sponsors.  In fact, would you like to help find new sponsors?

This week we’ll get the list of known tasks updated (in our Trac instance) for anyone to work on.

We have a success on our hands.  For a relatively small chunk of budget, we were able to fund about a dozen students to work on an equal number of interesting projects.  As you read more about this successful program in the coming weeks, think about how you can be involved.

Are you willing to recommend that an organization make a bet of a few thousand dollars in budget to find out what they can gain from supporting and helping organize the Fedora Students Contributing program?

Read some more.  Think about it.  Join the mailing list and introduce yourself.  Then, let’s get to work.

Part of the way to scale ourselves we have always done, which is to engage with other community leaders and leverage each other.  Recently I had a new idea that we could fill out our circle on education and open source by inviting people who are passionate about K12 to work within our team as external contributors and entirely in the public sphere.  Read on if this is interesting to you.

Our team’s definition includes that we are failing if we are growing too quickly by adding paid bodies to manage projects instead of building projects that scale themselves.  A project or program truly done the open source way should be able to survive and thrive without a person paid to be at the helm or shoring up all the work.  So we baked it in to our team’s methodology (and that explains why we work on ten full-time things at once, because once done right each might become a not-full-time thing that comes from and benefits many others.)

One could argue, quite correctly, that our team is currently extended in to the community via all the community leaders we are in regular contact with, where we mutually support in varied ways.  Primarily in Fedora and TeachingOpenSource.org, but others as well.

What I’m imagining is a person, or a few people, deeply passionate about open source, young people, and education.  We recognize that a big selling point for people is that FOSS can save cash-strapped schools a lot of budget.  However, we think the higher goal is to teach open source participation.  It’s as easy as contributing to a Wikipedia article or testing and sending feedback on Sugar activities.  The point is to show kids that they can tinker with their own knowledge, and we start by showing the teachers how to tinker.  They already tinker with what they can – many teachers jump around a textbook if they see fit.  Our goal is to make them feel the same way about technology and the wider world of information, that it is something they can manipulate, model that manipulation to their students, and kickstart a new generation of makers, autodidacts, and teachers of learning it yourself by doing it yourself.

Here’s how I imagine such a community leader role description would go.   Think of it as a first draft.  What would you add?

And more importantly, would you be interested in doing one of these roles?

FOSS in Education Community Leader Role Description

You have a passion about free and open source software (FOSS) and education.  In particular, we are looking for people who want to work in the primary education years, sometimes shortened in the United States as “K12″ to signify thirteen years of primary education.  You can focus on one or more niches in the K12 area, such as public schools, charter schools, private schools, homeschools, foreign or second-language schools, etc.

In this role you will be expected to:

• Choose one or two niches to focus on.
• Attend weekly or bi-weekly bi-monthly meetings on IRC with other members of the community leadership team (CLT), as set by consensus.
• Set goals for the quarter and year, and report status and progress back to the CLT.
• Potentially travel (regionally, nationally, or internationally) for education conferences.
• Interact with school boards, principals, teachers, and staff at all levels about teaching open participation and collaboration.

You should have or be willing to develop skills in these areas:

• Research and writing.
• Public speaking.
• Community organizing, which is done from within and not on top of.
• Fedora Linux and Sugar on a Stick.
• Being a catalyst so others are able to do things (versus doing everything yourself).

The role includes on the job training in being a catalyst in communities (PDF includes full speaker notes.)

While you retain copyright on all your work, you are contributing all your work to e.g. TeachingOpenSource.org under the Creative Commons BY SA 3.0 Unported license.

A last story if you’ve read this far …

Once upon a time there were two build systems and two sets of packaging standards around Red Hat and Fedora.  They were very similar, but were in fact forked from when Red Hat Linux was split in to Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  Primarily, the Fedora packaging standards, tools, guidelines, and processes greatly evolved in the first few years of the fork, compared to their kin inside of Red Hat.  When the Fedora Project brought all the Core packages out to the open community infrastructure, the Red Hat engineering teams had to retool and reunderstand these new systems.  They adopted the packaging guidelines that were driven for six releases by open community process.

There are many examples of this, where everything from code to content to policy and processes that are developed in the Fedora Project are adapted or used directly by other parts of Red Hat.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a primary example of that, but also consider how important the entirely community run Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) project is to Red Hat and our customers.  If you don’t know, it’s very important.  I don’t know a service or support person who doesn’t direct customers to EPEL on a regular basis (until the customers figure it out, and maybe take the next step of participating directly in EPEL for shared benefit.)

So the deal is this:  while there can be zero guarantees or promises, you can look to history to tell you there is a very good chance that your doing work and helping set our policy on K12 FOSS education will find it’s way up in to the education strategy that we work on for Red Hat.  Our team’s role is very strategic, more than probably any other similar team exposed by Red Hat to open community work.  You can take advantage of our sharing nature and our desire to use your smart and capable brain to help us figure out this part of the future in K12.

People always say, if you complain about something in FOSS be prepared to do something about it.  We can offer you an opportunity to become a catalyst and center of gravity around K12 and education and teaching participation in FOSS, which means a chance to make a difference in exponential and surprising ways.

Interested?  Comments are open below, if you are ready to get used to the always-in-the-open discussions.  If not, contact me directly and let me help you help us … help you … help everyone.

Note: It should be clear from this site’s URL that these are my own, personal opinions and don’t necessarily represent those of Red Hat, my team at Red Hat, the Fedora Project, TeachingOpenSource.org, or pretty much anyone else in the entire universe.  I am noting this because I want it clear that I am not giving any kind of picture in to Red Hat’s hiring plans.  Also, I am not describing actual Red Hat strategies any more than discussing Linux kernel strategies tells what will be included in the next RHEL update.  I am writing this post as a way to better explain my idea to my own team, meaning that team is vetting this idea at the same time as you are.  Thus, even my own opinion here is subject to change.  This note is here because I’ve never discussed open strategy in this context and I want to set our shared expectations about what is going on here.

(Updated 2010-08-17 to meetings suggested as bi-monthly (twice a month) and decided by consensus.)

The announcement email explains everything nicely, with a list of accepted projects, and then details about funding.  We’re still working on updating and cleaning up the wiki pages.

The proposal review process was a challenge.  We missed our first deadline, then our second, and moved in to a few days where we just didn’t say anymore when things were going to be done until they were.  We finally reached a good set of decisions about which proposals to accept and fund.  In the end, we were six days late past the original deadline, and two days in to the actual student coding schedule.  I’ve proposed a minor adjustment to the schedule that puts the onus of making up the lost time on the mentors who lost it in the first place.

Part of this challenge was having to manually read, sort, and discuss proposals on the private mentor mailing list.  The proposals are all on the Fedora Project wiki, so managing and commenting was more difficult.  This was a result of starting the program from scratch without pre-building new infrastructure; in the future we’ll know more what we need by comparison to this experience.