[TOS] Fwd: Resend: Points to hit from our discussion with TOS/POSSE communities

Tue Jun 12 14:28:25 UTC 2012

Greetings POSSE people.

We had a strong first meeting with MRC and Harish in Rochester.  What emerged from the conversation, as we had discussed on the list previously, in that for POSSE to move forward and grow we needed to be able to develop a report that would collect and summarize POSSE's metrics and effects so far and use them to look forward over the next several years to develop more refined metrics and goals for the program. This makes strong pedagogical as well as business sense as we are light on post-POSSE assessment, other than an anecdotal understanding of "who's done what" after the workshops.

For POSSE to move forward and grow we need to show how it and the TOS related efforts (collections of course materials, lectures, etc) can be used to rapidly scale the number of u/g students being trained on the OS development model, which in turn can be shown to meaningfully impact their participation as students and after graduation in the OS ecosystem.

I've taken the bullet points from the notes from the meeting and tweaked them below to put together a road map for what needs to be accomplished over the summer.
 From this we would generate a long-term planning document that would let us define the next 2-3 years of POSSE in a way that allows it to move forward, hit some targets for growth and have some data that demonstrates its ability to hit those metrics.

POSSE Goals for the Summer

1.  Surveying past POSSE participants:
We're looking to get the following types of information.
A.  What post-POSSE activities have they pursued (papers, Conference Presentations, initiators of FOSS Projects, Contributors to FOSS Projects, new lectures in old classes, new classes)
B.  What post-POSSE activities have their students pursued (papers, Conference Presentations, initiators of FOSS Projects, Contributors to FOSS Projects)

2.  Checking the results of the past POSSE participant survey against POSSE's original goals, especially
A.  Growing faculty competence and participation
B.  Growingstudent competence and  participation

3.  Setting Future Expectations and Metrics
Looking at what we learn from 1-2 and taking a realistic look at what we know about timelines within academia
What can we define as metrics post-posse short and long-term of a period of 2-3 years to demonstrate POSSE's success as a program and to keep and nurture Red Hat  support

Here's a straw man sample, of what we would we do for this…

100% of the POSSE alums have incorporated POSSE learnings in their curriculum and/or teaching methods, having an at least an N:M prof/student leverage ratio in the 1st 12 months and O:P  prof/student leverage ratio in the next 36 months

At least Y% of the students of these programs are identifiable in FOSS projects

At least X% of graduates from those schools are tracked within the first N years of graduation to have worked in the FOSS industry and/or created a FOSS project that got funded (entrepreneurial aspects)

4.   Revisiting Current TOS/POSSE WIKI content
A.  Does curriculum need to be revised in the face of one or two in the face of the above or do we need to build out and/or reorganize what's there?

5.  Infrastructure.
Based on the above, what do we need in terms of…
A.  Technological support (registration databases, survey systems, data collection of papers, courses, etc)
B.  Process (How should we build a process for site calls for proposals, teacher matching, etc)
C.  Growth (more formalized POSSE Workshop leaders training and certification?  Others)

Much of the initial work  #1 - #3 will be pursued in by Mel and the summer POSSE team electronically and then distributed to the larger POSSE and TOS communities for their input.  We will also do drafts of #s 4 and 5 for your input.

Additionally Mel and I would still like some concentrated face-to-face work for things like #4 and #5 and are looking at scheduling something 9/21 in Needham, MA just before the Olin College reunion as Mel will be there and its close to some of the East Coast POSSE people..

I'd like to invite those of you who wish to be active in this to join  http://groups.google.com/group/posse-deep-dive<http://groups.google.com/group/posse-deep-dive?lnk=gcimh> to handle the list traffic of this off of the TOS list so we're not spamming people's in-boxes.  I'll expect that once we have a rough draft we want larger input on we'll certainly pull a wider group of interested folks in at that point.

Looking forward to the discussions.

p.s.  an e-mail report on this summer's POSSE @ RIT will follow in about a week.

Stephen Jacobs
Associate Professor, Interactive Games and Media
Visiting Scholar,International Center for the History of Electronic Games
Chair, IGDA Learning, Games and Education SIG
Director, Lab for Technological Literacy
Rochester Institute of Technology
152 Lomb Memorial Drive
Bldg 70
Rochester, NY 14623
sj at mail.rit.edu<mailto:sj at mail.rit.edu>
585-475-7803 office

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