[TOS] OSCON submission: POSSE workshop

[Mel Chua]

Sebastian and I are on a roll tonight. Just shipped this one. (He also 
just submitted a solo talk on Etherpad... I need to figure out if there 
are other talks I want to give - anyone interested in hearing me blather 
about anything in particular?)

--Mel, typing this up while Sebastian fills out O'Reilly webforms

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Title: POSSE intensive -- a cultural immersion workshop

Description:

POSSE is a Red Hat workshop on the tools and practices of open source 
communities for people (of all disciplines - no code required) 
interested in participating in a project but who have no time and need 
to learn the basics of open source collaboration NOW. Originally 
designed for professors getting their students started as contributors, 
we're opening it to the public for the first time at OSCON.

Abstract:

Working in the open source world can be a daunting proposition. Not 
everybody has the time to learn about the means, tools and most 
importantly the culture this world employs. If you're someone with 
skills that would benefit an open source project - developer, sysadmin, 
designer, writer, marketer, lawyer, tester, and nearly anything else 
under the sun - but have a hard time figuring out how to interact with 
the communities you want to work with, this workshop is for you.

POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience) is a one-week bootcamp 
initially designed in 2009 for university professors who needed to learn 
the workings of the world they were about to plunge their students into. 
See http://opensource.com/education/10/9/open-source-education-educators 
for more details on the original workshop. Since then, we've run it in 3 
continents for faculty from institutions ranging from small liberal arts 
schools to large public universities to selective technical colleges, 
and from disciplines covering everything from CS and electrical 
engineering to journalism and technical writing. POSSE alumni have met 
with success, engaging their students in marketing, interface design, 
and more - directly in the project communities they've chosen to work with.

In order to bring these opportunities to a wider audience, we've 
distilled the POSSE curriculum into a one-day intensive for OSCON. This 
mini-POSSE is focused on basic communication skills and tools that will 
allow you to learn "the open source way" by navigating actual project 
communties - the equivalent of a traveler's phrasebook for a foreign land.

In  this workshop, you will be expected to dive into actual open source 
project chatrooms, code, writing, design, and infrastructure and work 
with contributors from that community who you have never met before and 
  who do not know that you'll be coming, because that's often how it 
will be when you're contributing there on your own. You will be pushed 
outside your comfort zone, but you will also have the in-person guidance 
of  experienced mentors who will - in real-time - annotate and explain 
the  methods behind the madness you're encountering, and help you learn 
how to navigate this new world yourself.

Attendees who enjoy the workshop and wish to proceed with their learning 
can utilize follow-up open content modules that will be released this 
summer. This long-distance, study-at-your-own-pace version of the 
remainder of the POSSE curriculum is not focused on tool-learning and 
book exercises, but rather on continuing to get you engaged in 
conversation and collaboration with actual open source communities you 
may want to work with. We highly recommend participation in this 
in-person workshop for those thinking about utilizing the remote modules 
described at http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_modules 
(currently under development by the Teaching Open Source community).