[TOS] POSSE IRC/wiki assignment: now written up!

[Mel Chua]

Those of you who've been through a POSSE may remember the first exercise 
we do, which is creating wiki userpages while communicating only over 
IRC. This is consistently one of the most polished/effective and 
repeatable exercises we do at POSSE, so Sebastian and I finally wrote it 
into an assignment document here at Doha.

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

Text also pasted below for folks who are lazy like me. ;-) It's probably 
not user-friendly enough and lacking some context that we don't realize 
it's lacking, so feedback on what's missing would be great.

We're also curious if anyone is thinking of using this in their 
classrooms, and would be willing to serve as random remote people 
drop-bys during the IRC time of the exercise if anyone wants to give it 
a shot with their students.

--Mel

== Background ==

'''IRC''' is a text chat program. It is used by the vast majority of 
open source projects as their form for real-time communication. This is 
where meetings are held, but also a social place where people idle and 
hang out while they are working, similar to the casual banter that goes 
on in an office or a lab. One of the primary differences between IRC and 
messaging programs most people new to open source are familiar with is 
that ''IRC conversation is in group chatrooms by default,'' whereas AIM, 
ICQ, Jabber, etc. tend to do ''individual conversations by default.''

A '''wiki''' is a publicly editable webpage. You may be familiar with 
wiki-based sites such as http://wikipedia.org. What most people don't 
know is that wikis are extremely simple to set up, so individuals, open 
source projects, and other sorts of groups use them for notes, project 
webpages, and general collaboration/documentation infrastructure.

A '''wiki userpage''' is like a profile page for an individual user of a 
wiki. These can be [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mchua extremely 
elaborate] or [http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/User:Ctzenben 
highly minimalist]; most are [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Sdz 
somewhere in between]. People decide what they want to show and share on 
their userpages; it typically acts as a "homepage" for them for their 
work and introducing themselves to potential collaborators who may not 
yet know them.

== Instructions ==

Your goal for this exercise is to have a wiki user page of your own. Use 
the wiki specified by your instructors. Your page must be completed by 
the end of class, and it can say anything (tasteful) you like; think of 
this as a professional homepage for your open source activities.

There are two additional constraints that you are under for this.

The first constraint is that you ''may not edit your own wiki user 
page.'' This implies that someone else needs to edit it for you. That 
person can be anybody, in the classroom or remote.

The second constraint is that you ''are only allowed to communicate 
electronically'' during this exercise. You may not speak in person, 
write on pieces of paper, show somebody else your screen, use hand 
gestures, etc. Essentially, pretend that you are in a room by yourself 
with your computer, and communicate and collaborate with your partner 
that way. This constraint extends to finding your partner - you need to 
find a way to match up with someone else for this (we suggest IRC) and 
coordinate between yourselves online.

The only exception to the second constraint is that ''you may 
communicate with your instructors in-person,'' particularly to ask about 
tool usage and communication strategies. Please do not use this 
exception to secretly communicate with your partner. The point of this 
exercise is to give you an experience in distributed collaboration; we 
are particularly interested in what sorts of coping strategies you find, 
evolve, and negotiate on your own while working on this. We expect this 
exercise to be confusing and occasionally frustrating, so your 
instructors will be walking around throughout the exercise to help you 
turn that confusion into insight, because exploring new ways of doing 
things should be slightly frightening, but ultimately a fantastic 
adventure where you'll end up being surprised at how much you learn.

== Deliverables ==

* An IRC log of the conversation
* Individual wiki user pages

== Examples of usage ==

For an IRC log of attendees of an actual POSSE completing this exercise, 
see 
[http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teachingopensource/2011-01-10/teachingopensource.2011-01-10-07.10.log.html 
POSSE Doha transcript].

For sample wiki user pages that have been created during this exercise 
(also from Doha), see:
* http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/User:Ctzenben
* http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/User:Rrix
* http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/User:Bilal