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.

The two big questions were generally:

• How do we enable developers and designers to contribute back to setiQuest in a way that benefits all involved?
• How do we share the SETI vision with the world, so that conversation can come back and support people wanting to find ways to participate?

The community building problems are pretty straightforward, the kind of thing we cover in The Open Source Way (TOSW).  In fact, I’m going to follow up this meeting by joining a working group to help setiQuest architect the community structure and seed the leadership team/interim board.  I intend to create and use some checklists and so forth derived from TOSW handbook. To me, it’s a great chance to take the principles in TOSW and see them applied in another domain while at the same time applying them to actually new open source and open data.

Another stroke of luck, one of the IDEO people I met today works on OpenIDEO, their new project to open the design thinking process.  I’m excited to get to follow up with them, find out more about how they want to grow the OpenIDEO community, and how that can feed in to and learn from a “Design the open source way” chapter in The Open Source Way.  It will be an interesting conversation, since I intend to press on the license and terms used by OpenIDEO in comparison to the open nature of the site’s purpose.  At the same time, I hope to learn about more about the challenges of design and free/open business models, and learn more about how to make The Open Source Way a better book.

I’ll write more about this as it develops.

I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.

Aside from being an amateur scientist and a lifelong wannabe spaceman, there is a more immediate and grown-up reason I care about this.  It has longed seemed to me, and I’m sure to many others, that SETI is a natural for embracing a FOSS community.  As the original programmers, some of whom have put 20 years in to the program, near retiring, it’s an opportunity to pass on the legacy in a way that lets SETI grow and scale.  The ability to run their code on commodity hardware, and openness to contributions from citizen scientists, makes the timing natural.  It’s the kind of project that could be completely free and open, and doing that will allow for the growth of an ecosystem around it, including new businesses.

Since SETI started, we have proven the FOSS development model time after time.  SETI, being a scientific pursuit under the aegis of “in the public interest”, there is also a moral imperative to reveal all the scientific methods used … including the source code.

The purpose of this summit is to bring SETI staff together with people who truly understand FOSS development.  I’ve seen the list of attendees, I’m pretty awed by some of the Bay Area big names they have drawn, but not surprised — around the Bay Area and beyond, SETI has a particular interest for many geeks.  It’s great that two efforts for the betterment of humanity, searching of companions in the universe and keeping humanity free, are coming closer together.

For myself, I’ll be bringing whatever brainpower that I can, but I’ll also be gently inserting The Open Source Way all over the place.  As a handbook, it’s a way to get much of the knowledge that you find at a summit, but in a handy format to carry around with you.

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.)

Phipps’ recent post, “Is the ‘Open Source Bubble’ Over?“, talks on the same topic and says that the true open source way has always been community and collaboration.  He and Aslett refer to Stephen O’Grady’s post, “The State of Open Source: Startup, Growth, Maturity or Decline?“, which is rich with trend analysis over the years to show that some projects  are in maturity, but overall open source is growing with all the return to community and collaboration.

This is a really exciting point they are making.  As many people know, a hallmark of Red Hat’s activities in open source has always been a focus on upstream collaboration and scaffolding for strong communities.  When we acquire a company with an existing codebase or open source community, you see a clear set of moves.  Codebases are released under open source licenses to spur the greatest open community we can, where Red Hat actively participates.  Communities are grown without an attempt to control the intellectual property.

This re-emphasis of the communities that include vendors and customers acting equally on common needs was described in 2004 by Michael Tiemann in ‘The Open Source Triple Play‘.  I regularly redraw this image to explain how and why Red Hat does business:

I was tickled that Aslett included JBoss as an example of the third stage, which he summarized with the first two:

While the first two stages were focused on collaborative development as a by-product of open source licensing the projects and vendors that characterized the third stage were focused on market disruption through widespread distribution and typically eschewed the potential advantages of collaborative development in favour of control over the future development of the project.

When Red Hat acquired JBoss, the clear methodology they had was to hire anyone from the community who started to do any real work with the open source codebase.  This kept all the copyright in the company, what I once heard JBoss founder Marc Fleury refer to as a “strong IP” position – strength in holding intellectual property.  But this was at the downfall of a strong community – it couldn’t stand well on its own if every active contributor was hired to be  part of the same corporation.  To an extent, this was incurring the cost of a closed development model where you have to pay for every developer hour, while not gaining the supposed benefits of a product that can’t be downloaded and freely distributed without you being paid.

As Simon Phipps ultimately points out, this is the way many of us have been doing open source business all along.  The fact that customers are finally figuring out that there is a triple-play in this for them, too, is many shades of awesome.

So, friends new and old, come on in and play.  The water is warm and the waves are just enough to make things regularly exciting.

http://www.planetary.org/special/fromearth/bradbury

The greetings are limited to 250 characters, and I took advantage of a return character costing the same as a space or punctuation to write him this poem:

From first rocket to last pricking of thumbs,
your words and ideas carried our minds
out
past asteroid belts &
in
to the light and dark parts of the soul
Helping make the 20th century
using a mirror as a tool to
reflect the future in the past
Thanks

• 16 July our team loads up a mini-van and starts the 12+ hour drive to Portland, Oregon.  On the way we stop in Berkeley, CA to visit the wonderful folks at ZaReason.  Cathy and Earl, our proprieters, are loaning me one of their snappy new (and shiny red!) Terra HD almost-mini-notebook.  I’m giving it a full test run under Fedora for a number of reasons.  Personally, I want to see what life is like on a modern, small notebook; I’ve always been a “bigger is better” laptop selector (for myself.)  I also want to see how this system, loaded with stock Intel components, handles Fedora 13 and maybe rawhide (Fedora 14 to be.)  This also gives me a chance to help iron out any kinks in delivering Fedora on these systems, if any arise.  I’ve long been a fan of ZaReason’s approach to supplying systems to Linux users, they’ve clearly developed a following, and it’s great to see them reaching out to Fedora users with pre-installation and so forth.
  • The trip north is simply epic, with the Bay Area, Central Valley of California, Mt. Shasta, the Siskyous, and the Willamette Valley of Oregon.  Beautiful country, awe inspiring.  It is great to show it to some folks for their first time.
  • We arrive pretty late to Portland where we hook up with Robyn Bergeron, who I get to meet in person for the first time; she’s very cool.  The hotel is very nice right in the middle of downtown, and we settle in to be as fresh-as-possible for CLS the next day.
• 17 July we spend at CLS, participating to various degrees.  My take of the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) community is that there are a number of large groupings you can lump attendees in to.  Some are very experienced online community membesr and leaders.  Some have taken that community leadership to add a production of some sort to the necessary, core social need of being involved.  Common products are free and open  source software projects, but those aren’t the only ones in evidence.   Some are a subtle mix of social and something tangible that still can’t be held in your hand.  Within those groupings are people who are new, experienced, and everywhere in between.  I don’t think these differences are clear to everyone attending, and I think they create some potential disconnect in terms of how the people coming to CLS interact.  Just something to expect in a rather new community, and dinner conversation spurs Max to write a blog post at my prodding.   I attend a few sessions:  “Moving beyond the mailing list“; “You suck or conflict resolution in your communities” (where we hear the advice to, “Just remove them from your mailing list,” when a poisonous person problem in e.g. the Fedora Project is much more complex).  I meet up with lots of old and new friends, make new friends and contacts, have a great lunch downtown at the food carts, and do my best to do my best.  We end the day with sushi served by model railroad, which finally makes me happy.
  • There are two incidents that happen that day, one I observe that makes me feel very uncomfortable while it is happening, and the other I hear about a few days later.  Both happen in the morning plenary session, and both are disturbing instances of sexist behavior.  I think my blocking on writing about those has contributed to my not writing about the event overall.  I feel that my first real writing about this has to be to the CLS discussion list, because this is the community where the behavior happens and needs to be corrected.  At the moment, that is all that I’ve decided.  I’m still feeling that stunning and chilling effect that makes me want to go silent and pretend nothing is happening, all will be forgotten. Ick.
• Sunday 18 July starts out OK, although we are all a bit over-sleep-ish.  This morning I pitch a session to share about the community leadership handbook, The Open Source Way.  I give a good, thorough introduction, and try to illicit some feedback on what people need from such a book, as well as prodding them to use it as a canonical resource for the principles we are espousing all the time.  I also attend a few sessions, including  “You’re killing your community“, a wry look at why too much help can be harmful.  We end up having dinner at the top of Portland, at Portland City Grill overlooking everything, where happy hour yields us some nice food at a tasty price.  Late night Saturday and Sunday we pony up for some points-only poker, and I learn finally how Texas hold ‘em is really played.
• On Monday 19 July we head down to Oregon State University campus to meet with Drs. Tim Budd and Carlos Jensen.  The real and potential fall out from this trip are worthy of a separate blog post, and I think I’m going to write an article on it for opensource.com.  The summary is, I’m seeing an inverse mirroring relationship between the goals and methods of FOSS and academia.  It opens some really cool possibilities.
  • Also cool, for the rest of the week I get to meet multiple graduate students from OSU working on research that is useful and can make a difference: gender equality; enormous lack of joining and engagement; and so forth.
• Monday night is the Teaching Open Source education bird’s of a feather mini-session, and I get to meet even more interesting people.  Then I head back to Corvallis to …
• … spend Tuesday with a friend and his family.  I head back to Portland in time to help with booth setup, then back to the hotel where I’m surprised by the kids and Larry showing up earlier than I expected. Yay!  Food is sought, then bed.
• Early Wednesday I’m up to finish my part on the final slides Mel and I are using this morning at 10:40, “5 FOSS in Edu Projects That Changed the World“  All goes fine in our talk, it is actually pretty good, and the day is a bit more relaxing after that.  We work the booth and hang out in the expo hall, make trouble, and talk lots of stuff to lots of people, especially teaching open source (TOS) stuff and the open source way stuff.
  • Wednesday night I dip to an Android hands on, which includes my own Nexus One handset to start developing on and such.  Thanks Google, and thanks Tim Bray for organizing the session along with the awesome crew from Google.  My girls are going to be very jealous when I get back to the hotel room.
• Thursday we try to just improve on Wednesday, including getting one or two mini-talks going at the Fedora booth.  Lots more TOS talk, I have lunch with an old friend and colleague (downtown food carts for the win again.)  Now that I’m with the kids, I take it pretty easy at night, heading back in to the hotel early and getting wicked tasty pizza delivered by bicycle for dinner from Old Town Pizza.
• Friday I’m up early again, having a morning adventure walk and finishing updating my slides (source and all OSCON materials) for my talk today, “Being a Catalyst in Communities: The Science Behind the Open Source Way“.  Very smooth talk, I’m happy with the updated slides and after giving the talk a few times this year, I’ve got a good stride with it; also, I don’t go over time.  Then we pack everyone up, load the kids and Larry in the minivan, and head back south to Santa Cruz.  We arrive home about 3:30 Saturday morning, and here I am still.

A quick look at the numbers:

• 15 students and projects.
• 20 primary mentors, with 15+ more general mentors (includes mentoring the mentors)
• Three funding sources (two from Red Hat) are making the proof of value program happen this summer:
  • We know the concept works (thanks Google’s Open Source Programs Office!), with specific value to Fedora Project and JBoss Community in this 5-year summary report.
  • We have a model to include other sponsors and are actively seeking them.
  • The work this summer proves to those potential sponsors the value of this program.
  • The sponsors who lay a wager by supporting the program for the southern hemisphere this October are buying their own proof of value to see if they want to continue next year.

Next on the schedule is the mid-term review.  During that period, mentors review and privately discuss the state of each project and the student.  The goal of a project is to help the student learn FOSS participation via the Fedora Project and JBoss Community. Ideally, there is good code or content that comes out of it, but completing the initial project plan isn’t the real purpose.  As often happens, in open development we discover new ideas, methods, and reasons along the way.

For example, this week I spoke with a mentor who’s student is struggling a bit with the initial scope of the project plan.  If the only goal were to get that coding done, we’d all be in trouble.  However, the mentor is going to work with the student to narrow the scope so that it is achievable within the schedule.

Having to rescope and reorganize is not uncommon in the FOSS worlds, and this student is learning that reality first hand.  We’re all ambitious with our ideas and skills, and sometimes don’t learn until immersed what is hard and what is easy.  It’s better to rescope and complete a smaller project than to leave in frustration.  Guiding the student in that way is what the mentor is here for, as much as anything else.

In terms of sponsoring, my goal is clear.  I want to see this program run the way we run free and open source software projects.  By bringing in other sponsors, we create more room for innovation in the program’s organization and implementation.  We give these friends and partners a chance to reap the same benefits with a similar investment.  In the process, we work together to strengthen the FOSS ecosystem in to higher education.

Guess what we call that?  Yeah, the open source way.

I read all of PJ’s story (great stuff) of the Groklaw community and the eventual arise of trolls and astroturfers, glanced at the comments (wow, lots), wrote up an appeal to PJ to relicense, and along the way … I read something that reminded me to read the other comments first and not start my own thread if it belongs under another.  So I skimmed all the comments, leaving out all the side discussions about “Google {should,shouldn’t}” and such, and did find one where PJ explained why she would NOT be using a different license than the NC/ND for Groklaw works.  OK, fair enough.

So I wrote this comment, “Thanks, inclusion in The Open Source Way”.

This is my first time commenting on anything on Groklaw, and the reputation has me a bit intimidated. Yet, it was a fun distraction, and now I’ll keep my eye on the discussion for a while to see what else comes from it.  Meanwhile, I used this same content to stub out a page on the TOSW wiki, “Legal the open source way“.  This placeholder gives me a way to find myself again when I sit down to write the chapter, with help from PJ’s article-in-a-glass-box.

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.