[TOS] Greetings, and a modest proposal.
Ralph Morelli
ram at cs.trincoll.edu
Thu Mar 12 03:16:03 UTC 2009
On Mar 11, 2009, at 7:34 PM, Leslie Hawthorn wrote:
> Needing mentoring to teach FOSS was a big point of discussion at
> SIGCSE. If a project's goals are laid out in a format that is
> familiar to academics, some of that initial fear of the unknown will
> immediately dissipate. I suspect folks will find they need less
> mentoring than they think, just initial encouragement to experiment,
> fail, and iterate.
This squares with our experience at Trinity and HFOSS. Having a
clearly described project and knowing that a FOSS project welcomes
contributions from students and understands that they are novices and
may occasionally need help is a big part of it. Our students have
been fairly successful with relatively little actual mentoring. And
we felt welcome in the projects (Sahana, OpenMRS, InSTEDD)
I also think that having big chunks of time to devote to the project
-- i.e., a summer internship, Google SoC -- makes it much easier for
novices (esp. students and faculty) to climb the learning curve and
make a contribution.
Best,
-- ralph
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