This week I’m in Raleigh, North Carolina. The majority of my time here will be spent at Red Hat HQ taking part in POSSE 2009. POSSE is a gathering of faculty and open source practitioners where we are learning about and practicing the skills necessary to take part in open source communities. Our goal is to walk away prepared to begin introducing OSS into our classrooms and continue growing the community.
Today we covered a fair bit of ground, with conversation ranging broadly from technology to pedagogy. The people here who have worked to integrate their students into (large, production-quality) open source projects are, truly, inspiring. I look at the experiences that my students have in our classroom, and can’t help but want to provide them with opportunities like those I’m learning about. At some level, of course, that’s my job—to provide first-class learning opportunities for the students of computing at Allegheny, as well as students at the College as a whole. But there is more to it than that.
From the perspective of computing today, I can see why I want my students involved in open source software projects. On the surface, it provides them with incredible experience and resume fodder—it is a way for them to make real contributions to shipping products. (You’re probably reading this on Firefox, which is one of the projects we’ll be haxing on this week.) These large projects provide real-world experience for students that companies today are looking for. These kinds of projects have real users who provide real feedback. And to deliver working products to those users, students must learn to work with global teams, and how to learn the processes involved in managing a project in a distributed, sometimes decentralized manner.
Perhaps most importantly, however, is that students should feel empowered to dive in. The barrier to entry is low. And further, there are many ways for students to get involved. In fact, the students do not need to be studying of computing per se. The writing of documentation, maintaining wikis, testing software, localization (translation) are just a few of the ways that students can begin to engage an open source community.
Open Source @ Allegheny
One way to think about how I will integrate my experiences with POSSE into my local context is to think about the Computer Science Department and how I might bring my ideas to bear there. Or, I could think about how I might better serve a larger community—my College as a whole—as well as serve needs that are often overlooked in open source projects.
Allegheny has an excellent center for experiential learning that provides a home for cross-disciplinary courses with an outreach/experiential focus. Further, we have a strong English department, and a course in technical writing. I think it would be possible to discuss brining the technical writing course under the auspices of ACCEL, and begin integrating it with efforts like flossmanuals.net and writingopensource.com. This transforms technical writing from an academic exercise to one that provides high visibility for the students taking part, as well as visibility for Allegheny and its role in open/community-based projects.
This is a brainstorm at the moment, but I think it represents the most productive line of reasoning I have to date. Coupled with Allegheny’s Year of Social Change, this could be a good time to begin bootstrapping this kind of work in the liberal arts context.