[TOS] Revising the POSSE pledge?

Mel Chua mel at redhat.com
Thu Feb 25 20:42:23 UTC 2010


I've been thinking about the POSSE Pledge lately, 
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_Pledge - "I pledge to be a 
bridge between the world of academia and Teaching Open Source. This 
coming school year, I will commit to bringing The Open Source Way into 
my school's curriculum by getting all the students in at least one of my 
classes in the coming school year actively involved in contributing to 
an open source project for their coursework."

Maybe we're asking the wrong question - right now we ask people to 
commit to actually teaching open source during the next school year, but 
with classes for that next school year already blocked out before you 
set foot into a POSSE, that might be a commitment people are nervous 
about making, because they're not sure if they can keep it, because 
they're not sure what that entails. I am speculating here.

But after spending a week with Remy and his Storytellers team at RIT, 
I'm coming to realize that what we actually want is stories - either "I 
taught open source!" or "here are the blockers that kept me from doing 
so." The second one is fine, and in some ways while we're still in the 
early stages of this, sometimes more valuable - because then we can 
start to help clear them.

So what if we changed the pledge to "I pledge to come back online a year 
from now and report back to my POSSE class what I've done in the TOS 
realm over the past school year," or similar? I like the idea of last 
year's POSSE attendees making a virtual gallery/expo of work of sorts at 
the end of their first post-graduation school year, to show the next 
round of POSSE attendees - this could be very simple, just a summary 
reflection blog post to Planet TOS. But we'd all get to find out what 
people did after their POSSE.

Thoughts?

--Mel



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