[TOS] Teaching Open Source at FSOSS 2009

Chris Tyler chris at tylers.info
Fri Mar 6 17:48:06 UTC 2009


Seneca is starting to put together FSOSS 2009 (http://fsoss.ca) and I've
been weighing different options for Teaching Open Source at FSOSS.  I
sent mail to some of the previous attendees, and it's been suggested
that I bring the discussion here.

Some things to consider:


- Mark Surman notes that many of the events so far have included "40%"
of the people involved in this space, and it would be great to try to
get everyone in one room. I propose that we call the gathering the
"Teaching Open Source Summit" (as opposed to "Track") and hold the first
one either during the Thursday of FSOSS or as a pre-conference event on
the Wednesday. We could make these summits a twice-annual event,
attaching the other summit to a spring event (SIGCSE? OSCON?). 

-- How do we do travel funding during these tight-belt times?


- Greg DeKoenigsberg has suggested that we need "an academic-oriented
open source conference with peer-reviewed, juried papers". Shall we do
this at the Summit? Or put things in motion at the summit for a Spring
event?

(To be honest, I'm a bit divided on whether this is a good thing. On the
one hand, this enables tenure-track professors to get involved, and puts
Open Source more squarely on the radar of the universities. On the other
hand, traditional academic research and Open Source communities are not
always a good mix; there are plenty of situations where academics have
studied open source communities rather than become involved with them,
requesting developers to fill in _yet another_ research survey (for
example), which drains energy from the community's primary activity. Or,
as is sometimes the case, a researcher will fork off some code in some
way that's useless to the community but helpful for their paper, and not
work with the community to integrate the results of their research into
the community's code. We need cultural change and best-practice
guidelines here. Perhaps a O/S Journal should include a review of
community integration as part of the article review).


- The multiple-Panel format from the first TOS at FSOSS track worked for
the first year. What format(s) should we use at the Summit? Peter Liu
has suggested the inclusion of case studies, and Mark has suggested a
conversational/strategic approach. I suggest we develop themes around
common challenges such as curriculum integration, funding, research
publication?


I look forward to your comments -- the CFP for FSOSS will be going out
in the next couple of weeks, so please share your ideas now :-)

*** PS: I've BCC'd a number of people who are not on the TOS list.
Please subscribe
(http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/TeachingOpenSource_Mailing_List) to continue the discussion on that list.

--
Chris




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