[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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