[TOS] Greetings, and a modest proposal.

[Andrew Ross]

Hi Greg, All

I'll weigh in with my support on behalf of FOSSLC (http://fosslc.org). 

Goal #1 - looks like a great project. Count me in personally.

Goal #2 - I'd like to respectfully plug the work of Dru Lavigne and Dr. Tony
Bailetti at http://osbr.ca. They have been pioneers towards building an open
source journal. I could easily see this evolving into what we've talked
about on this list. If there's a way we can influence more articles on open
source in journals like ACM and MIS Quarterly, then that's a worthy target.


In terms of goal #0, this is a great goal - and a central point is needed.
FOSSLC was created with similar thoughts of enabling people to come
together. Perhaps a little history is appropriate so I can build to a
hopefully useful suggestion.

Scratching an itch, I decided to set off with osbootcamp. This was best
described as "a web site & a dream" approach. As soon as it hit some
success, there were interesting tug-of-wars between the supporters with
diverging interests. Indications were clear that more governance was needed.
FOSSLC was born early this year to satisfy some education needs immediately
and plan to address more in time. We felt a peer reviewed journal was out of
reach until there's critical mass to tackle it. 

We put a lot of thought behind the governance model, sponsorship structure,
and the IT infrastructure for FOSSLC. No doubt there's still more testing
and tuning to go as we trial by fire. The goal was to balance the interests
of academia, companies, those seeking to share knowledge, and those seeking
to learn. Neutrality was crucial. As the best feedback, we're very grateful
to have growing support. As an outcome of that support, there's a
significant amount of great content available through http://fosslc.org
today. Our videos have reached over 12K people and growing.

Thus, as a bit of proposal feedback and perhaps an important requirement,
I'd like to suggest TOS.org have a clear legal structure, governance model,
and a few well defined ways to engage. This will save headaches in the
future.

We're happy to share content and collaborate as much as possible.

Andrew
 

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org
[mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Greg Dekoenigsberg
Sent: March 11, 2009 1:57 PM
To: tos at teachingopensource.org
Subject: [TOS] Greetings, and a modest proposal.


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

--
Got an XO that you're not using?  Loan it to a needy developer!
   [[ http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Exchange_Registry ]]
_______________________________________________
tos mailing list
tos at teachingopensource.org
http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos