[TOS] Textbook Outline: moving forward

Ross Gardler ross.gardler at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Sun Jun 28 23:27:28 UTC 2009


If the copyright of our contributed content remains with my employer
(University of Oxford) then I can offer all of our resources
(http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/fulllist.xml). These cover the
basics of many areas and will allow us to quickly get high level stuff
into most sections.

All are CC-BY-SA so there are no issues with remixing the content in
order to make it fit the book as long as we are not signing over our
copyright. I'm sure we can work out a suitable attribution for content
as a whole rather than trying to attribute each individual
contribution. Whether that contribution should be passed on to reusers
of the book depends on how much content is still present once a stable
version exists.

I'm also happy to provide around half a day a week from our content
editor. She has lots of experience in book editing, but is not too
experienced in the open source domain as she is new to us. She'll be
great at getting content in there and proofing, but someone else will
need to do the topic area QA.

I'll try my best to contribute too, but I'm really not sure how much
time I'll be able to put into it so don't assign me to a specific
role.

Ross

2009/6/24 Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com>:
>
> I've been continuing to make edits to the textbook outline based on some
> of the outstanding feedback from the softhum workshop at Drexel... but now
> I find myself going over and over the same ground.  Some of the pieces of
> the outline seem weird and superfluous, but some of the pieces seem pretty
> much dead on.
>
> Where we are now:
>
> http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/User:Gregdek/Textbook
>
> It's time to figure out what's next -- and I think that means "let's start
> writing."  Find our authors, validate the basic structure of the outline,
> hand off a few chapters while we continue to hammer out the others, put
> forth a simple schedule, and get to work.
>
> First, let's get some assumptions together, so that potential authors
> understand what they're getting into.  I'd like to propose the following
> assumptions.
>
> Assumption #1: This will be, in its entirety, a CC-licensed book.  Once we
> know who our authors are, we can then get together to decide which
> license, exactly, we will all choose.  Technically, it might even be
> possible to have each author decide which license to use individually, so
> long as the choices do not preclude the aggregation of content into a
> single text -- but these are decisions I believe that we can sort out
> later.  So long as we all agree to CC licensing, I see no impediment to
> moving forward.
>
> Assumption #2: Release Early, Release Often.  Since we are not bound by
> traditional economies of scale for paper books, we do not need to achieve
> perfection to chase a print deadline.  That's not to say it can be a
> sloppy text, of course, but it does mean that we should be comfortable
> allowing people to see, and even use, the work in progress.
>
> Assumption #3: Remixable.  This will not be a static text.  We will, at
> some point, get to a "release" version of the text, and it may be that
> this version is the one that makes it to print, either through a publisher
> or some self-publishing agent like Lulu.com.  But if some professor
> decided to take a chunk right out of our text to put into a software
> engineering book, all the better, so long as the terms of the license are
> followed.
>
> I now have two questions.
>
> Question #1: Are you, dear readers, interested in taking up the pen?  Any
> of you?  Do you think we've got some places to start, and are their pieces
> you feel like you could take, basically, now?
>
> Question #2: If so, do you agree with the assumptions that I've proposed?
>
> As soon as we've got a handful of people who say "yes" to both, we'll
> proceed to look a bit more closely at what we've got.
>
> Basically, it's time to figure out who's on board.  So.  Who's on board?
>
> --g
>
> --
> Computer Science professors should be teaching open source.
> Help make it happen.   Visit http://teachingopensource.org.
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-- 
Ross Gardler

OSS Watch - supporting open source in education and research
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk



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