[TOS] Welcome, Shlomif

Karsten Wade kwade at redhat.com
Tue Aug 24 15:55:10 UTC 2010


On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 06:29:35PM -0700, tosmaillist.neophyte_rep at ordinaryamerican.net wrote:
> Welcome to the Teaching Open Source project, Shlomif.
> 
> You've spent some time refining "How to start contributing to or using
> Open Source Software",
> http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/How_to_start_contributing_to_or_using_Open_Source_Software

And it's looking good; it seems to have a defined audience with
beginning experience.  Being distilled, it's useful as an introduction
and director, and complements works such as the Practical... textbook
and 'The Open Source Way'.

Shlomi - one question that I have about the focus on the document.  It
includes contribute and use.  I'm curious if you've thought about
focusing it to just contribute, perhaps as:

[[How to start participating or contributing in Open Source software]]

Aside from the teaching of participation being more of the topic of
this wiki and project, it also occurs to me that there are a huge
number of documents and books and articles that focus on getting
people to use open source.  The gap is in how-to participate and
contribute.  I separate those two because participation is much easier
and is the gateway to contribution -- most people participate lightly
before they heavily contribute.  (I explain this more in this blog
post - http://iquaid.org/2009/04/14/community-sets/ .)

As an example and contrast, here is a similarly purposed document with
a different audience.  The reader is expected to be already interested
in contributing:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_be_a_successful_contributor

Again, I see a complementary relationship.  I see it somewhat like
this, as a spectrum from very-new to very-experienced:

(How to for very new)[..............](How to for very experienced)

These sit on top of a number of longer reference works, such as
Programming OSS or Practical OSS Exploration.

Somewhere in the middle are handbooks such as The Open Source Way
(TOSW), with the longer works providing a spectrum from topic-focused
to broad-focused, all as a foundation:

   (How to ...)[..]
     (Distilled handbooks e.g. TOSW)
   (Programming OSS)[...](Practical OSS Exploration)

Something like that. :)

Cheers - Karsten
-- 
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:                Red Hat Community Architecture 
uri:               http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41
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