This semester, we’ve introduced 40 students to the Fedora project . By “introduced,” I mean they have been introduced as contributors.

I want to point out that for me as a member of the faculty this is 1. hard, 2. a massive leap of faith, and 3. very, very exciting.

And, it is all of those things for our students as well. They’re blogging over at act.ivism.org, and I’ve written an introductory piece about their project on opensource.com. If you want to check out what they’re writing (and leave them some encouraging notes on their blogs), that would be awesome.

Remember: these are first-year students in a Freshman Seminar who have not declared their course of study. Despite that, they’re diving into IRC, wikis, blogs, mailing lists, and sprints as they rapidly come up to speed on contributing to the Fedora project. I don’t think they have any idea just how big a jump this is for some people. And because they don’t know it’s a big jump, they’re just jumping.

Give em’ some props. (Or, leave the props here, and I’ll pass them on.)