[TOS] Red Hat's education strategy DRAFT: would you want to take this offer?

Heidi Ellis heidijcellis at gmail.com
Thu Feb 10 13:15:30 UTC 2011


Hey Mel, 
A few comments.
On the Pitch to Profs:

- Not sure what NDA is :-)
- I'm not sure what you mean by "freely remixable". Do you mean reusable and
customizable materials?
- The "optional interactive online tutorials" are interactive with real
people? It isn't apparent from the description as on first read I thought it
was an automated tutorial. If so, it would be helpful to know who is
providing the tutorials.

I see no problem with the fine print. I do note that you may get questions
from some institutions about navigating the Intellectual Property hurdle so
you might want to be prepared for that. 

On another note, I was reading the "Value to RedHat" section. I think that
in addition to the advantages that you note, I'd also like to add that
RedHat is building a large store of goodwill in the academic community.
POSSE's are becoming known in the academic community and RedHat's (and your)
willingness to listen to faculty and to provide help is generating publicity
within the community. This is a less quantifiable value, but should provide
RedHat with positive play at many levels in academia. This positive image
should ripple through faculty to students and hopefully gain RedHat both
developers and customers in the long-run. I note that Greg Hislop and I both
promoted POSSEs and RedHat to multiple NSF Program Officers during the
CCLI/TUES conference a couple of weeks ago.   

Just my 2 cents,
Heidi

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org
[mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Mel Chua
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 3:55 AM
To: TOS
Subject: [TOS] Red Hat's education strategy DRAFT: would you want to take
this offer?

In the spirit of release early, release often...

== Short version ==

Professors!, can you do me a favor if you have 10 minutes and check out 
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Red_Hat_education_strategy#Pitch_to_
professors 
and 
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Red_Hat_education_strategy#Fine_prin
t?

This is what I'm thinking about advertising to professors at SIGCSE, and 
I'm wondering if it sounds like an attractive/reasonable offer to 
faculty. Basically: would you bite? Should we do it? (POSSE alumni would 
be eligible for this too!) I'm looking for feedback on what we're 
offering and/or how we're pitching it.

(Yes, I know this is an incomplete description - if folks want, I would 
be happy to explain design rationale, etc. and why we came up with this, 
but I'm really interested in initial reactions to that text alone, and 
what questions it raises.)

The rest of the wiki page is incredibly messy and incoherent, so just 
look at and give feedback on those two sections unless you really want 
to spend a lot of time on something that will shift rapidly over the 
next week.

Thanks!

--Mel

== Longer context ==

I've been working on Red Hat's education strategy for the next year a 
bit over the past 2 months, and with all my time over the past 2 days; 
we're going to be converging on this by the end of the month - though 
it's an evolving document, it'll be in polished "release" format for Red 
Hat executive +1 at the start of March, and then we'll see where it goes.

It's not done. It's not even alpha. It's rough, incoherent, has missing 
parts - but this is the raw, uncensored source, there's no "secret 
behind the scenes" version and then an "edited" one for the public, I'm 
doing all my work right here:

http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Red_Hat_education_strategy

So, a few important things to note here:

* Did I mention this was raw and incoherent? I'm still working on it and 
will post here again later (late next week) when it's been whipped into 
understandable shape. Right now there are logical gaps, math errors, the 
structure of the document is terrible, etc... but if you want to see a 
work in progress, here it is.

* We're exploring options, not making commitments. What we are trying to 
do is practice the open source way by letting people see (and contribute 
to) our work in progress while we are trying out ideas - just because 
something's on here does NOT mean we're necessarily going to do it! 
(When it is, we'll say so.)

Questions, comments, flames, etc - fire away. I'm mostly letting folks 
know I'm working on this and that I'm working on it here. It's *not* yet 
good, it's *not* yet coherent, it's pretty tough to figure out how to 
get involved *right now* - it's pre-alpha, what do you expect? :)

Major thanks to Max Spevack and Sebastian Dziallas for helping 
considerably with the hacking to date; if anything on that page makes 
sense right now, it's probably their fault.

--Mel
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