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Saturday, November 28th, 2009
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12:07 pm - Rideshare goodness
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Thanks, Steven, for setting up the airport rideshare. I'm signed up. You should too. Especially if you're flying in on Friday afternoon -- when, as it turns out, Steven and I are arriving within 10 minutes of each other.
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| Friday, November 20th, 2009
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12:01 pm - The difference between transparency and communication
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There's an important lesson to be learned from the whole PackageKit episode.
That lesson: there is an important difference between being transparent and being communicative. Transparency is good, but sometimes it is not enough. Some issues must be discussed proactively. Sometimes, one must go and solicit feedback aggressively.
In reading through the bugzilla comments about this issue, the most insightful comment I came across pointed to a mailing list thread for PackageKit. The only two participants in that thread were Richard Hughes and David Zeuthen, the two Red Hat engineers who were most responsible for the changes to PackageKit's default behavior.
Were they making these decisions behind closed doors? Demonstrably not. Some people seem to believe that davidz and hughsie colluded to "sneak" a change in. Examination of this thread reveals that:
1. They certainly were not in collusion, since the discussion occurred on a public mailing list.
2. They certainly were not pushing a unified agenda, since the conversation looks exactly like any important technical conversation should, with appropriate give and take.
3. The conversation was limited to two people, which was not nearly enough input to make a decision of this magnitude.
It's easy in retrospect to see how all this happened. I've been in this position, too: you discuss a change very publicly, you assume that everyone who cares about the topic is paying attention, you make a decision, and then when the change hits, people go nuts in a very public way. It sucks. But it's also a good opportunity for reflection.
Some changes are really important -- more important than they may seem when you're down in them -- and it's vitally important to solicit feedback actively for those changes. It's an excellent demonstration of the importance of the Fedora feature process -- which exists precisely to mitigate risks like this. Big changes should never, ever be a surprise.
Well-meaning people make mistakes. Especially people who want nothing more than just to Get Things Done. That's one of the strengths of our model: we make mistakes in a way that allows us to recover from them, and if we're smart, to learn from them. I think we're seeing a lot of learning now. That's a good thing.
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| Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
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2:49 pm - OpenISR is cool.
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Max and I were in Pittsburgh earlier this week for the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Red Hat Computing Lab at Carnegie-Mellon. (In the Bill Gates building, muwahahaha! Jack, your vision lives!) CEO Jim Whitehurst and Senior VP / General Counsel Michael Cunningham wielded the gigantic scissors (and I mean SCARY BIG SCISSORS) for the cutting, and then Jim gave a great talk. Lots to share from the visit, but the first thing to share is a project called OpenISR.
The ISR stands for "Internet Suspend and Resume". It runs on top of kvm and other virtualization platforms. They demoed it to us in the new lab. Here's how it works:
1. Greg goes to a computer with an ISR-enabled client and logs in.
2. Greg sees a list of "parcels" -- i.e. running VMs that are stored on an ISR server somewhere.
3. Greg picks a parcel, and that parcel is downloaded to the local machine. Greg happily works with his VM, which is now local and therefore awesomely fast!
4. Greg finishes his work and saves his parcel.
5. Greg goes to another ISR-enabled machine, logs in, picks his parcel up again, and continues to do cool stuff.
Now I know this use case isn't super-exciting -- for most of what I do, this is a job for ssh and/or vnc. In cases where low latency is required, though, it looks like a pretty awesome tool. Most importantly: the ability to move these parcels around *reliably* has a lot in common with a lot of cloud use cases, and a lot of the magic is in optimizing how these VMs are sliced, diced and julienned.
Or, as the CMU folks put it, "by layering a virtual machine on distributed storage, the ISR system lets the VM encapsulate execution and user customization state; distributed storage then transports that state across space and time." Stateless computing.
Also: all components of OpenISR are licensed either GPL, LGPL, or EPL. (Which means getting this into Fedora would be a great idea -- the latest release has already been tested on Fedora 12!)
Here's the real point: a lot of smart people are working on interesting, practical projects that nibble at the edges of the gigantic beast called Cloud. I think it's common sense to get as many of these projects into the hands of our lead users as we possibly can. The innovation in this space is already spreading widely, because the tools are now good enough to encourage those innovations. (Wouldn't you agree, Mr. McGrath, hint hint?)
Anyway. Go play with OpenISR. It's cool.
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| Monday, November 16th, 2009
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11:57 pm - Thanks for the response, Pete!
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Glad someone's paying attention to my blog. And now that I've got your attention, Pete, maybe you can answer the following question!
What do you have, today, that is:
a. packaged in Fedora;
b. documented;
c. allows users to create and manage images;
d. allows users to create and manage storage;
e. all in a UI;
f. that engineers are actively improving;
g. that is functionally superior to Eucalyptus;
h. that people can play with, right now, today?
Understand: I'm not saying that you won't get there. I'm aware of the efforts in progress. I just want to be able to see, in Fedora, what's out there, right now, today. I don't think that's unreasonable.
Why is the prospect of even *packaging* Eucalyptus so frightening?
What should really frighten you is that it took all of two hours for me to get a half-dozen members of the Fedora community to say "I'd love to help package Eucalyptus". Why? BECAUSE THEY'RE LOOKING AT IT ALREADY. And so is just about everyone else I've talked to lately who's interested in the Private Cloud idea.
If you've got a better story to tell, Pete, then now is the time to tell it. And just pointing people to a git repo is not telling the better story. It's just inviting people to get lost, frustrated, and confused.
(p.s. Any reason you're not aggregated on Fedora Planet?)
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7:54 am - Dear Lazyweb...
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...are any of you out there in Fedora-land playing with Eucalyptus?
Specifically... are any of you playing with it enough that you'd be willing to help in an effort to package it up for Fedora?
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, November 12th, 2009
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11:53 am - RHCE Loopback Event, Philadelphia, November 18th
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If you are an RHCE in the Philadelphia area, we want to meet you.
We will even buy you dinner.
It's Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 5:30pm at the Mission Grill. Register here. Do it quick, please.
(Peter, I promise we'll have one in London soon, if you promise to bring all your RHCE friends.)
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| Sunday, November 8th, 2009
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6:09 pm - Windows 7. My idea!
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It's just amazing. Microsoft really, seriously, honestly has no shame.
In the most participatory age in history, the proprietary monster stands up and says "hey, Windows users, all of the improvements in our product were YOUR IDEA!"
What a great spin on the truth: "hi, Windows users, you rejected Vista completely, and we heard the message: you don't want software that's complete crap! So now we'll give you something that's not complete crap, and we'll say it was all because we're such great listeners."
It's just so transparently ludicrous. I guess I shouldn't let it get to me, but *oooooooh*!!!
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| Thursday, October 29th, 2009
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2:07 pm - Something important, Redux
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Reprinting this comment from my friend Badger, who read my blog post about the Open Textbook Act of 2009 and actually took me up on it:
"I wrote both my Senators. A staffer at Senator Burr's office just telephoned me, thanking me for the email, telling me the bill has been referred to the Education Committee that Burr is a member of, they'll be looking into this, and thanks again for the email. (I asked if the staffer knew if the Senator had an official position on the bill, and the staffer said not yet.) But the phone call was a nice surprise."
Participatory democracy works, people. When you actually tell your senator that something matters, sometimes they even call you back to let you know how things are going -- and sometimes they're even on the committee that determines if that bill becomes law.
These things matter. Do a small thing, and sometimes it turns into a big thing.
Thanks, Badger.
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| Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
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2:53 pm - EASYFIX
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Did you know? There's a URL that points to all of the bugs in Fedora that are considered easy to fix.
Looking for a way to help Fedora? See how many of these easyfix bugs you can knock out over the weekend -- and then tell us if it was easy or not, and why.
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| Monday, October 26th, 2009
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11:43 am - Xtra Ordinary for the XO
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So I'm hanging out with Karlie and Todd Robinson this afternoon at their lovely home in Rochester, and Karlie just showed me the distro that Todd optimized for the XO. Todd calls it Xtra Ordinary. It's pretty cool. Based on LXDE with some nifty hacks. (Based on DebXO, but I'll forgive them that, heh.)
The thing I like best: the plug-in for Iceweasel called Glazoom. It resizes the main browser pane to fit into your screen size -- which, for the XO, is one of these small tweaks that makes it *amazingly* useful. Note to Fedora Mini folks: consider shipping this plug-in by default.
This afternoon we head over to visit the Computer Science House at RIT, and then tomorrow we spend the day with Stephen Jacobs, the RIT professor who is teaching his students to write games for the XO. Great, great stuff, and I'm hoping to learn as much from him as possible to spread to other programs at other schools. Also, looking forward to getting his feedback on our nascent open source textbook effort.
Also, apparently there's one of these in my future:
(Props to andrewc for the CC BY-NC-SA image of the garbage plate.)
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| Thursday, October 1st, 2009
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1:57 pm - Near Boston? Want to sit on a roundtable?
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Seems like community is a very hot topic these days. :)
The First Wednesday Group is an executive roundtable of professionals in the services and support business. And they have a question that they'd like to ask:
How do you get your community to answer each other's questions?
They really want someone from the Fedora community to participate. And by "someone from the Fedora community," they specifically mean "someone who doesn't get paid by Red Hat".
If you are in the Boston area, and if you are an active helper on IRC / mailing lists / forums, and if you would like to sit on a fancy panel as a "community expert" on November 3rd, then ping me. They'll feed you, treat you well, and when you're done, you can put it on your resume: "distinguished conference speaker" or some such. Employers eat that kind of stuff up. ;)
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| Saturday, September 19th, 2009
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12:42 pm - Dearrrrr Lazyweb...
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...I have a question for you, me hearties.
Talk Like A Pirate Day and Software Freedom Day ON THE SAME DAY. Fail, or win?
Yarrrrr!
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| Friday, September 18th, 2009
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11:16 am - NEW YORK CITY???
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There are thousands of Red Hat Certified Engineers all over the world.
I'm talking to all of you. All the ones I can reach, anyway.
How well do you know each other? What opportunities do you have to share your considerable knowledge? Do you have to travel across the globe to a Red Hat event, or can you find other RHCEs near you? Are you able to help out your aspiring RHCE brethren and sistren? Do you have a strong voice that Red Hat hears when you have Something To Say?
That's what we're trying to figure out. That's why I will be at the RHCE Loopback event in New York City on October 8th. I'll be there with a long list of people who are way smarter than I am in the way of latest and greatest technical goodness. (Which, by the way, almost certainly includes you, RHCE person.)
Looks like Mr. Robinson is already keen to attend one of these in London. We'll see what we can do for you, Peter. But first things first: let's make sure the one in NYC is Altogether Freaking Awesome. :)
Which we could use your help with, by the way. Are you an RHCE in the neighborhood? Come on down. It's free. It's only a half-day, but go ahead and tell your boss it's a full day, I won't tell. We'll even feed you -- just go easy on the pastries. You know what I'm talking about.
Let's make it a huge success so that we can do a ton of them. I'd love to see multiple RHCE events, every year, on every continent. But we have to start with one. Come on, RHCEs of the northeastern US -- we're counting on you.
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| Thursday, September 10th, 2009
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6:06 pm - Help with Fedora Research
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I think it's a mark of our success in Fedora that people are starting to study how our community works. And not just in the "gosh, Fedora is awesome and amazing" sense, but in the "gosh, Fedora is a really interesting phenomenon that we should learn more about, warts and all".
I spent Tuesday morning with a couple of professors at Duke University's MBA Program, and they had a ton of questions for me. It was amazing. They are really digging into what makes communities like ours tick.
Here's the thing, though: they need to be talking to a lot more people than just me. Which is why I'm asking for help. :)
So we're looking for Fedora contributors who are willing to do one of two things:
1. Participate in an email interview with our Duke professors; or
2. Participate in a short phone interview (about 20 minutes) with our Duke professors.
We're looking for folks who don't work for Red Hat, and folks who do. We're looking for folks who are highly technical, and folks who aren't. We're looking for folks who contribute lots, or only a little bit.
It's a simple thing that could be hugely valuable in the long run. We've got something special in Fedora, and the world wants to understand how it works. Your experiences matter.
Please respond to me privately via email if you are interested in participating. Thanks.
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| Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
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1:04 pm - LOLWUT?
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I'm sure you're very nice, NAME REDACTED, but c'mon. If you're going to apply for our scholarship, at least have the faintest idea of what that scholarship entails.
The sad thing is that we get a ton of these boilerplate "applications" for the Fedora Scholarship program -- but very few as entertaining as this one.
Or maybe I'm reading this completely wrong, and we're about to see the Fedora Dental Hygiene SIG starting up Real Soon Now. Considering that I'm considering bleaching my teeth to remedy my terrible coffee/tea staining problem, it would be excellent timing for me.
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| Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
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11:25 am - Tasty Thincrust
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I'm really impressed by how easy Thincrust is to use -- at least in my limited use case, which is "define my own virtual machine and then get it running as a guest on my laptop in half an hour."
It took me literally 30 minutes on my spiffy F11 system (Thinkpad X200 that runs full virt natively) to:
1. Download the Thincrust tools;
2. Download a bunch of kickstart files;
3. Edit one to add a few things in %post to play around with;
4. Build a virtual image using Thincrust Appliance Creator;
5. Play with the virtual machine built to my exact specs.
Shockingly simple. I tried to use "virt-install" and ran into funky problems that I lacked the capacity to troubleshoot, but Thincrust Just Worked. Kudos to you, Mr. Kearney.
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| Monday, July 27th, 2009
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10:42 am - I guess this is why they call me Professor.
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This, and the elbow patches on my jacket. And the pipe.
I've been reflecting on POSSE all weekend now. It was pretty insanely great, and I think that we provided a lot of value for the professors who attended.
Once again, though, as so often happens whenever I'm fortunate enough to assemble really smart people -- I learned way more than I taught. And I mean, way, way, way more.
When I started as "the community guy" at Red Hat almost five years ago, the job was perceived as "the guy in marketing who keeps the LUGs happy". The reason I took the job was because I saw opportunities to do a lot more than that. We'd just made the Fedora/RHEL split, with the promise that Fedora would be developed in partnership with the open source community -- but we weren't really delivering on the "partnership" side of that promise. The frustrating thing was that we had a ton of community support, but we weren't exactly putting it to good use.
So a lot of what I did in those early days, I did by feel. I spent a lot of talking talking to Elliot Lee and Seth Vidal and Karsten Wade and Jef Spaleta and many others, figuring out exactly how to give real responsibilities to our nascent Fedora community -- or just as frequently, how to take the legitimate work they were already doing and fit it into the ever-growing Fedora puzzle. Thus were born the Fedora Infrastructure team, the Fedora Extras Steering Committee, the Fedora Documentation team, the Fedora Ambassadors team, and ultimately, the Fedora Board.
As Fedora expanded, my understanding of how community works expanded with it. I quickly discovered that for some tasks, there was no substitute for an experienced Red Hat engineer. For most tasks, though -- the great majority, in fact, more than I ever suspected -- entrusting those tasks to passionate community members was actually far more likely to get those tasks completed in a timely and effective manner. Thus, Fedora's community work became tightly focused on making it easier for community to perform these tasks that gave them such enjoyment and fulfillment and purpose. It also became important to discern which tasks were good community tasks, and which were not, so that we could provide satisfying experiences to our volunteer base, rather than frustrating ones.
I never had a name for how all this stuff worked. I never studied any theory. I had no language to discuss these ideas, other than the language I made up or borrowed. I talked about "infrastructure of participation" and "on-ramp projects" and "pulling innovation from the edges" and "the apprenticeship of open source" and whatever crackpot terminology that seemed to sort of make sense. That's the thing: I just did what made sense to me, and whatever seemed most useful at the time.
So last week, when Cam Seay and Matt Jadud starting nodding their heads and talking about Zones of Proximal Development and Legitimate Peripheral Participation and Communities of Practice and referenced the works of Etienne Wenger and Lev Vygotsky, something clicked, way deep down.
Building community is fundamentally an act of teaching.
I suppose that I shouldn't be shocked at finding an entire pedagogy around what it is that we do. I mean, I am shocked, of course -- but I shouldn't be. Because while it may be true that the internet makes it easy to build communities of practice at a previously unimaginable scale, it's also true that people have been enmeshed in communities of practice, of one kind or another, for thousands of years. In the Red Hat Brand Book, we have a clever saying, and I hope it catches on: "open source isn't a new idea; it's the oldest idea."
In other words: there's nothing magical about community management. When I say "infrastructure of participation," I'm actually talking about a specific form of instructional scaffolding. When I say "on-ramp projects," what I really mean is legitimate peripheral participation. And when any of us say "the open source community", we are talking about perhaps the largest and best example of a global community of practice.
Maybe there's something to be said for the Art of Community -- but for earnest practitioners, it's far more useful to study the Science of Community. And those books have already been written; I just never knew where to look for them before.
Here are the books I'm reading now, and if you are responsible for building communities of practice, you should be reading them too:
Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Etenne Wenger, Cambridge University Press.
Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Cambridge University Press.
Cultivating Communities of Practice. Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott and William M. Snyder, Harvard Business School Press.
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| Friday, July 24th, 2009
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12:28 pm - Gender and code
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Fardad notes that 70% of the "computer science" students in Iran are women.
Here's the thing: in Iran, they don't talk about programming as science. They talk about it as art. Programming classes sit in the arts departments.
Woman are culturally drawn to the arts. Is it really that simple? Probably not -- but I've heard worse theories.
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| Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
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10:08 am - Matt states the central dilemma for professors.
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An excerpt from Matt Jadud's latest post:
"Perhaps I’m wrong in this—gregdek or another POSSE participant will correct me if I am—but digging in and playing in the sandbox matters. And if I am going to do that, it is going to take time to get involved, and I will want to sustain that activity over the coming 3-5 years at the least. Any project I do on that timeframe, that absorbs a significant amount of my energies, needs to be acknowledged by my institution as having value. It is true that I could just contribute. I could continue to teach without integrating open source, and do my research on things completely unrelated. I can strive to be an excellent husband and father, and … stop sleeping and eating. Ultimately, for me to take part in this, I suspect it must count towards my professional development at the College in a meaningful way."
No, Matt, you're not wrong at all. Chris and Dave have been so successful precisely because they have become enmeshed in their communities as you describe.
Now, I happen to know that you've got research going on that lends itself really well to community work. If you can derive value by building community around *your* project -- and if the lessons you learn at POSSE and in subsequent participation in large projects are the basis of that value -- then you've got your sales pitch built in.
That's the thing: for professors to be able to take the time required to build competencies in open source development, we must arm the professors with persuasive arguments. I'm hoping that POSSE will be a big piece of that puzzle.
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| Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
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11:29 am - POSSE, Day One
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Some observations about POSSE Day One, in no particular order.
* * *
Dave Humphrey and Chris Tyler are really awesome at what they do. It's no accident that they are leading the pack when it comes to teaching students about open source development.
* * *
When selling POSSE to various professors, it's not necessarily important to sell the open source idea. If the professor is excited about open source, that's great, but the big point is that open source is a means to an end, and that end is "teaching students to work in a big codebase".
This is not a purely theoretical concern; it's a real problem, and it is frustrating to industry. Even Microsoft has this problem. When students don't learn how to be "effectively lost" in a large codebase, they have a hard time fitting into the workplace.
We have the solution to this problem. It requires professors to do more work than they're accustomed to. Can we find the professors who are willing to do that work, and give them the tools they need to do that work? That's the 64 dollar question.
* * *
Matt Jadud just introduced us to the idea of legitimate peripheral participation -- a notion articulated by educational theorist and practitioner Etienne Wenger.
It's funny: I've been going around preaching this exact message, without ever having had the "proper" words for it. I talk about "on-ramp" projects every chance I get as a way to build the contributor base, and I am delighted to discover that there's actual research that supports my experience and assertions.
Which, by the way, is crucial as we wade into the world of academia. I may have a reasonable amount of street cred in the open source world, but in the world of academia, I'm a college dropout and a nobody. In academia, appeal to authority reigns supreme. When I can make a point, and then point to personal experience to support that point, and then carry in an armload of reference materials to further support that point, then I feel like I've got a much better chance to be heard.
* * *
POSSE is a great idea for computer science professors -- but it might be an even better idea for technical writing professors. I'll definitely need to look into this.
* * *
Quote of the day from The Mel (the Biblical paraphrase is mine): "Whosoever asketh for help, verily they ought offer to document that help. And whosoever offers help, they ought require the help to be documented. Thus do newbies become contributors, rather than annoyances." Amen.
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