[TOS] "Open Source at $schoolname" hosting

[Chris Tyler]

On Sat, 2009-08-01 at 17:40 -0400, Mel Chua wrote:
> One thing brought up on POSSE Thursday (and discussed a bit more at the 
> BBQ dinner that night) was the need for Making Infrastructure Easier for 
> college and university classes - making it so that professors wouldn't 
> have to spend a lot of extra time acting as sysadmins in order for their 
> students to have a handy-dandy (school-branded) participation 
> infrastructure. Something like 
> http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Main_Page or 
> http://osuosl.org, possibly.
> 
> I wrote down some notes on the discussion; they're at 
> http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/User:Mchua/Braindumps (but 
> should move somewhere else if this is something useful to move forward). 
> Is this something that anyone would like/want/need? Should it turn into 
> something that we'd like to move forward with? (Does anyone who was 
> present for the discussion remember better notes than I wrote down?)
> 
> Personally, I'm not yet *entirely* convinced this is a need without a 
> preexisting solution, but there must be some sort of need, for it to 
> have come up in conversation, so I'm curious whether this is worth 
> poking at further.

Heh, two days ago I wrote a draft note on this to the list but decided
to wait before sending! ... I'm of mixed mind on this too.

On the one hand, I think that, to the greatest extent possible, we
should encourage students (and faculty) to work out in the real world.
They should be directly participating in the VCS, mailing lists, wiki,
and so forth offered by that community. If they're starting a new open
source project (note the big blinking neon "Don't Go Here" sign) then
there is public hosting readily available -- SourceForge, FedoraHosted,
and so forth. Hosting a project through one of these existing sites is
an all-round win: it avoids duplication of effort, makes it easier to
attract extra-institutional contributors, and helps to ensure that the
project will outlive the semester.

But there are two additional pieces needed: first, there's often the
need for course-specific material, and that should be managed on a
separate wiki from the community, because the community doesn't care
about it. Some schools don't have institutional IT support for this kind
of presence, and either the faculty members end up doing the sysadmin
work, or the IT policies don't permit the kind of network access that's
needed (at POSSE one participant said that they can easily get a wiki on
a host that's accessible from the internal network -- but even students
in the dorm can't access it). On the other hand, doing this in a
debranded space or under another organization's banner is politically
unacceptable.

I think that's the kind of resource that we could usefully provide to a
school.

Here's a question: is there value in creating a "Learning Open Source"
counterpart to TOS? I envision that this could be a place where
resources such as the textbook that Greg's project will produce could be
made accessible to students and to self-learners, and services (such as
wikis) could be made available to schools under school-specific
subdomains (fooschool.zzzzzzz.org?). Is there value in doing this? If
so, is there value in separating it from tos.o?

The other type of resource that is invaluable for students is shell
access to a server or VM. This is harder to provide, and perhaps this
need is best met through facilities such as Amazon EC2, if a school
can't provide it directly.

-Chris