[TOS] Contributing to the TOS textbook

Dan Scott dan at coffeecode.net
Fri Feb 8 16:38:24 UTC 2013


On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 10:58:44AM -0500, Matt Jadud wrote:
> > I think the public contribution area is the wiki itself. Log in and
> > edit? And the issue tracker seems to be the discussion section for each
> > page. IIRC, much of this was written during a doc sprint a few years
> 
> BE BOLD.

Thanks, but maybe you need to direct your response to Jonathan, who was the one
who was asking how to contribute to the textbook. TOS might want to
interpret this as a suggestion that there need to be more explicit
directions / invitations on how to get involved in particular projects.

On a personal level, I think that telling someone to "BE BOLD" is a bit
offensive, as it suggests that they are timid, and that's generally not
considered to be a positive trait. I am already "being bold", in that
I'm running an informal set of lectures and code labs that is an
implicit criticism of our faculty's official curriculum.  I'm well aware
of and highly impressed by Seneca's work, I've given a couple of talks
at FSOSS (and dozens of other talks on open source at various
conferences over the years), and in fact I became aware of TOS through
an FSOSS session a few years back.

I offered up my intro to git materials as a possible starting point for
someone to build on for the textbook, if they find them useful.
I would suggest the desired response to such an offering from a relative
newcomer to a community is "thanks!" even if it's not a good fit, in
which case the right response might be "thanks!  but it would be even
better if...".

My lack of direct participation in TOS is not so much a lack of
boldness, it's a concern that investment of energy in what appears to be
a fairly moribund project may not be a good use of my time, and as a
faculty member who is a systems librarian, not a professor, it's frankly
hard to find the right place to fit into TOS (which is currently highly
oriented towards professors, for some obvious reasons, but a little
off-putting for an open source practitioner in an academic environment
who doesn't fit into that target niche).

For a newcomer to the project, the http://teachingopensource.org/
landing page refers to 2012 events as the only "Upcoming events". And
the mailing list is pretty quiet, too, with the exception of a recent
rush for funding, which was a little disturbing. This lack of attention
to fundamentals is a "community smell", akin to the concept of "code
smells" (I think Randy Metcalfe raised this concept years ago when he
was working with OSS Watch).

Again, I realize that it's a volunteer-driven project, and that I could
have moved the obsolete "upcoming events" into the past category by now
(I will do that in a few minutes). I just wanted to highlight some
problems (let's call them opportunities?) that might act as barriers to
TOS participation at the moment, and work through some of my own
equivocation about participating or not participating in TOS over the
past few years.


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