[TOS] SIGCSE BoF proposal draft - DUE MONDAY!

Sun Oct 31 13:50:39 UTC 2010

Hi Folks,

I've made some changes to the BoF proposal to focus it a bit more. 
Heidi

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org
[mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Sebastian Dziallas
Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2010 1:57 PM
To: tos
Subject: [TOS] SIGCSE BoF proposal draft - DUE MONDAY!

Hi all,

Greetings from Mel and me at FIE. We sat down and pulled together a
BoF proposal for SIGCSE. Heidi said (at lunch yesterday) that listing
the three of us as co-submitters might be a good idea. Please feel
free to jump in and fill out sections, we're looking for guidance on
the abstract (copied from OSCON 2010's submission) and citations for
the "Significance" section in particular.

http://www.teachingopensource.org/index.php/SIGCSE_2011/BOF_Proposal#BOF_for
_SIGCSE_2011
(text also pasted below, but please edit the wiki page).

Thanks,

--Sebastian

----------

BOF for SIGCSE 2011
The information below must fit on ONE page:
1. Proposer(s): Sebastian Dziallas (Olin College), Heidi Ellis
(Western New England College), Mel Chua (Red Hat)
2. Title: Teaching Open Source
3. Abstract (Description): 800 character (including whitespace)
description of the BOF. The same abstract will also need to be
submitted via a text box on the submission page
This BoF, run by members of the Teaching Open Source
(http://teachingopensource.org) community, hosts discussion on two
separate but interrelated topics: (1) Education about FOSS - turning
students into FOSS contributors (2) Using FOSS in Education - tools,
techniques, and stories. Anyone interested in open source and
education, at any level, discipline, and role, is welcome to
participate.
4. Significance and Relevance of the Topic: Please include information
about any trends in relation to the topic and possibly describe (or
cite) evidence to that effect. Your objective here is to explain why
the topic is significant. You should also justify how your BOF will
engage participants in group discussion and enhance future connections
between attendees. This information can help your proposal to be
selected if resources become an issue.
Engineering educators have long talked about involving students in
large-scale, real-world projects with distributed teams and direct
interaction with end-users. Open source tools, practices, and
methodologies can provide these sorts of experiences, both within the
software-producing communities that pioneered them as well as when
they are translated into internal institutional deployments. Peer
teaching and intrinsic student motivation is enhanced by immersion in
a community of self-directed, goal-oriented technical people. CITATION
NEEDED In addition, students are automatically exposed to the broader
context of technical development, including such things as end-user
support, quality assurance and testing, documentation, design, and
other elements usually ignored in core engineering classes. Successes
of several early pioneering programs in Teaching Open Source, such as
Seneca College's Center for Development of Open Technology in Toronto,
Rochester Institute of Technology's FOSS at RIT initiative, and Oregon
State University's Open Source Lab, show promise, but the topic is
still ripe for exploration and study to learn how it can scale and
become even more effective.
5. Expected Audience: Briefly describe the nature and size of the
expected audience. If you expect a particularly large or small
audience, please explain why. This information can help in room
assignment.
We have heard from at least a half-dozen core Teaching Open Source
(TOS) participants from various academic institutions that they will
attend to help facilitate discussion. We therefore expect at least
30-40 people with mixed backgrounds in the intersection of open source
and education who have had prior discussions with a TOS community
member but have not yet gotten actively involved themselves.
6. Discussion Leader(s): Although correspondence will be with the
proposer above, it will be the discussion leader(s) who will be
mentioned in Symposium literature. Please list any additional such
names (besides the proposer) and affiliations here. Be certain that
you have their commitments to attend the Symposium. All discussion
leaders must register for the SIGCSE conference and be present for the
BOF session.
Primary: Sebastian Dziallas (Olin College, Class of 2014)
Secondary: Heidi Ellis (Western New England College, <title goes here>)
Tertiary: Mel Chua (Red Hat, Education Community Liason)
7. Expertise of Discussion Leader(s): Give a summary of the
qualifications of the discussion leader(s) as it relates to the BOF
topic being proposed.
Sebastian Dziallas is the engineering manager for Sugar on a Stick
(SoaS), a Fedora-based Linux distribution that extends the reach of
the Sugar Learning Platform, originally designed and deployed by the
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, beyond $200-per-child laptops to
$10-per-child USB sticks. SoaS has been downloaded over 3.3k times
since its latest release, launched in May 2010, and used in classroom
deployments in Europe, North America, and Latin America. Its release
team hails from 3 different countries and regularly works across
multiple timezones and languages, and he is ultimately accountable to
the Sugar Labs Board for the management and execution of the entire
project.
Sebastian is also a Fedora packager and the founder of Fedora's
Education SIG. He was part of a team working on OLPC's operating
system for the G1G1 program in December 2008. He travels
internationally to speak and organize open source and education tracks
at FOSS conferences such as LinuxTag and LinuxCon. In his free time,
he is designing his own custom undergraduate engineering concentration
in open source at Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA.
Heidi Ellis is <Heidi, please put stuff here>
Mel Chua is a hacker. Over time, Mel has progressed from hacking
hardware (electrical engineer) to code (software developer) to
organizational cultures (OLPC community QA team lead). She now hacks
communities of practice as a member of Red Hat's Community
Architecture team.
These days, Mel spends most of her time with on open source in
education, teaching professors how to teach open source and otherwise
working to push patches of successful open source cultural habits
around learning and teaching "upstream" to classrooms in academia. In
her hypothetically existent amounts of free time, she serves on the
board of Sugar Labs, works on undergraduate engineering education
reform, and plays piano, occasionally at the same time.
8. Special Requirements, if any: Because of the informal and
spontaneous nature of these sessions, A/V equipment is typically not
provided. That said, please describe any pressing needs you feel you
will have. Although we cannot guarantee that your requested equipment
will be available, we will make every effort to let you know this well
before the conference.
We would like to request a projector.
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