[TOS] Scope of TeachingOpenSource.org

[Chris Tyler]

A few questions have come up about the scope of TeachingOpenSource.org
-- is it university/college only? what about projects that teach With
open source or teach the Use of open source software?

TOS can be whatever we want to make it, but an excessively-wide scope
will make it difficult to move forward.

I propose that we focus on equipping and supporting each other to teach
people how to:

        * effectively operate in an Open Source community.
        
Or, to put this another way, if you break down "open source" into two
words, the "source" part is a given (and well-covered by existing
programs) and the "open" part is the new, challenging, and interesting
piece, involving distributed collaboration at both a social and
technical level.

This means that we're focused on more than teaching using open source
educational software, and more than teaching people how to merely use
software that is open source -- I'm talking about working within a
community on software development, packaging, testing, distribution,
documentation, deployment, support, or other tasks. Furthermore, the
focus will be on teaching (vs. self-learning).

This scope does not restrict activity by target age group (though from
the make up of the group, I expect the initial emphasis will be on
college/university level students), type of project, or type of
community involvement (though I expect software development will be an
early focus).

See http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Taxonomy for details of how
I see this division.

Do we have agreement around this scope?

-Chris