[TOS] TOS Projects: Report Cards and Moving Forward

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

My assessment of the success of our various initiatives, and some 
proposals on "what to do next".  Please take 5 minutes to read.  Feedback 
welcome.  Note: I will take the absence of feedback as agreement and 
consent.  :)

ASSESSMENTS.

1. Teaching Materials Project.  This consists basically of two pages: 
"Collections of OSS teaching materials" and "Teaching Materials 
Catalogue".  Both of these have some interesting content, but relatively 
few edits.  Feedback I've received has been "interesting collection of 
links, but not notably more useful than Google searching."  Some 
reorganization and focus seems to be in order.  (Grade: C-)

2. OSS Directory Project.  Purpose: to provide a single point of reference 
for people interested in education and research related open source 
software so that those interested in using or contributing to the software 
can easily do so. A single page with almost no data, and hasn't been 
touched since May.  Well-intentioned, no one has time.  (Grade: 
Incomplete)

3. OSS Education Papers in Scholarly Journals.  Lots of good ideas about 
how to get more open source articles into scholarly journals, but again, a 
single page, and no significant edits since March.  (Grade: Incomplete)

4. FOSS Mentor Projects.  There are actually a number of projects listed 
here, and the team had regular meetings for a while.  These have since 
fallen by the wayside, it seems, but this looks like a potentially useful 
resource, and I'd like to see if we can pick this project back up, dust 
this page off, and start driving interested folks aggressively to it.  We 
continue to hear that this is one of the most valuable resources we can 
provide, so long as we do a good job at maintaining it. (Grade: C+)

5. Teaching Open Source Summit.  We held this summit in Toronto, and it 
was a useful gathering, but I think we all had much higher hopes for it. 
Most of the planning fell through, and many of the attendees who would 
have been most helpful were sorely missed.  Also, it's unclear to me 
whether this should be a "project" per se at this point.  (Grade: C-)

6. Get Involved Guides.  One edit in April.  (Grade: Incomplete)

7. Textbook.  We've got an outline and some rough copy, and although it 
isn't going at the pace we'd like, it's moving along.  We had our first 
sprint recently, and I will schedule another soon.  Of the projects on the 
list, this one has certainly been the topic of most discussion.  What 
remains is to turn all of that discussion into action more effectively. 
(Grade: B-)

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RECOMMENDATIONS.

In Toronto last week, those of us present at TOS did a brainstorming 
session of all of the ways in which TOS could be useful to its 
participants.  The upside: a number of the suggestions were already 
represented as TOS projects.  Bringing together the feedback from that 
meeting with the evaluation above, I suggest refocusing on the following 
projects:

1. TOS Textbook.  We already have momentum, so let's keep it going.

2. TOS Mentors Project.  We've got progress and demand, even if we don't 
currently have a lot of momentum.  Let's pick it back up, make it more 
awesome, and advertise it heavily.

3. TOS Ambassadors Project.  This would bring together some of our 
existing projects, and refocus on a simplified, but impressive, goal: 
encourage/enable TOS professors to attend every major CS/CSE conference in 
the world.  Which means a few things: (1) actually knowing which 
conferences those are; (2) tracking the RFP dates and so forth, so that 
profs know what's coming up; and (3) doing whatever we can to get profs to 
these conferences (travel funding assistance, for instance).

4. TOS Course Catalogue.  Rather than trying to generate the huge list of 
"all open source teaching materials ever," it seems more achievable, and 
maybe more useful, to have a comprehensive list of open source courses 
that have actually been taught -- and, by extension, a list of profs who 
have actually taught them.  We've got some of this material scattered 
about now, but refocusing these materials shouldn't be too difficult.

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So that's the summary.  Feedback, please.  If people agree on these 
changes, I'd like to see us moving forward this week.

--g

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