[TOS] Greetings, and a modest proposal.

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

Hello folks.  Looks like we've got a whole ton of people.  Apologies in 
advance for this long-ish email.

This is my first big post here to our tidy new list, and I'd like to start 
by proposing some concrete goals for our organization.  Because I see TOS 
as not just a website, but a group of people looking to get stuff done.

Therefore, let me propose a couple of ridiculously audacious goals and see 
if anyone bites.  :)

* * *

GOAL #0: "Make TeachingOpenSource.org the center of the 'open source in 
education' conversation."

This is really a meta-goal, but an important one.  There are a lot of 
these conversations happening already, and I think part of the problem 
we're having is that they are happening in all kinds of places.  So 
bringing as many people to TOS as possible is an important goal.

* * *

GOAL #1: "Build a complete, modular, cross-disciplinary, widely endorsed, 
freely redistributable curriculum, suitable for direct adoption or 
customization by universities worldwide, within two years."

There's actually a pretty substantial amount of material out there for 
those who want to teach about open source.  Some of it is even freely 
redistributable.  But it's pretty difficult to track down, and for people 
who may or may not understand the subject matter very well, it must be 
fiendishly difficult to tell which is "best of breed", and where to get 
started.  There's just so much to know: licensing, patent issues, business 
models, economic theory, interpersonal communications, not to mention the 
actual mechanics of building software.

My guess is that we could make a really good start here by simply 
cataloguing all of the resources currently available, and giving it a bit 
of structure.  We made a modest start on this at the Seneca site, but I 
think we could, and should, build a much more complete and useful 
reference.  I also know that people (hi Ross) are hard at work building 
more of these resources.

Here's the use case: I'd like to be able to see any professor, anywhere in 
the world, at any time, with minimal effort, be able to find the best 
one-hour lecture about "basic licensing issues in free software", and have 
confidence that (a) it's the best content in the world for that purpose, 
and (b) that they can use, modify, translate and/or redistribute, without 
restriction.

* * *

GOAL #2: "Provide publication and research opportunities that will count 
towards tenure for professors who participate in open source development."

As has been stated, this is a clear blocker for broader professor 
participation in open source.  Seems to me like it's worthy of being one 
of the Big Issues that we tackle.

It may be that creation of a new journal is required -- but it may also be 
that there are plenty of journals out there that might be sympathetic to 
open source.  I don't know this area nearly well enough to be able to say, 
but in a way, that's an advantage, because I'm dumb enough to ask obvious 
questions.  :)

For example, selecting a journal more or less at random, the International 
Journal of Online Engineering (http://www.i-joe.org/ojs/index.php): it 
seems like a lot of the abstracts here are on topics that are also hot in 
open source right now.  For instance, the paper "Grid Technologies for 
Virtual Laboratories in Engineering Education" dovetails nicely with the 
work that's been going on in the Condor project out of U Wisconsin for 
many years.

Perhaps there's too much emphasis on open source as an end in itself, and 
not enough of a recognition that open source is a highly effective means 
to an end.  If the end is publication, then the means to that end is 
research -- but surely that research can happen using open source as a 
central tool, and contributing to open source can and should be a part of 
that research.

It might be useful to maintain a list of successful open source projects 
that started life as university research projects.  I'm sure there are a 
good number, and consulting these professors to help figure out "the 
tenure problem" might be worthwhile.

* * *

Two big goals.  Why bother proposing them?  Well, we've got to start 
somewhere, and if my time in community-land has taught me anything, it's 
that a community with clear and achievable goals accomplishes way more 
than a community without them.

The goals I propose are not *the* goals.  They are just possibilities. 
I'd love to have a really clear sense of what we'd like to accomplish 
together, so we can start digging in and making some things happen.

Patches welcome.  :)

--g

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