[TOS] blog post on getting students involved in open source

[Mel Chua]

> And I think in mentorship it is difficult to remember what it was like
> to be a beginner, or to see the obvious barriers to participation,
> unless you're close to that experience.

Completely agreed with Dave on this. See 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisition -- the 
key point the original paper makes is that you literally see the world 
differently at different stages of mastery. It's hard to see with eyes 
that are not our own.

> In short, I don't believe that there is a ghettoisation of project
> newcomers, or a clique of project insiders, by design. Projects are like
> any other regular social gathering (think PTA, chess club, political
> party, etc.)

That's another good thing to point out. Just because it's on the 
internet or has a "FOSS" label on it doesn't mean that people have 
never, ever, done this sort of thing before. The history of civilization 
is *still* "more people sharing more resources in new ways" (Howard 
Rheingold) and it'd be silly to expect people to stop being people just 
because, y'know, they're on computers.

--Mel