On 16/03/2011 20:59, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
I've been talking with a Prof. at a local university who heads up
their Field Experience (FE) program and was mentioning that some of
the projects I work on (most notably Open Relevance Project, Lucene,
Mahout, OpenNLP) would fit really nicely with what his students are
learning as part of their degree program. The FE is a 3 credit
course that requires 135 hours of work for the semester with a "site"
(i.e. company, non-profit, etc.) In many ways, it is akin to the
GSOC in that it requires a mentor that the student works with. I'd
like to throw my hat in as a FE opportunity, but it requires an
official entity to be the "site". Thus, the email here. I'd like
the ASF to be the entity. I don't think it requires anything of the
ASF other than for recording purposes the University needs to know
who the site is. I would be the assigned Mentor.
What do others here think about pursuing this?
We're already doing it in two ways, at least in theory.
Option 1
========
I'm participating in an EU funded project that is providing open source
mentoring in formal education courses. "the site" is not the ASF in this
instance as the students can work with other open source projects. "the
site" is http://opense.net/
However, the site is currently undergoing a redesign for the second
pilot which is about to change.
The advantages of the OpenSE route is that they provide learning
assistant who helps with core skills so the mentor can focus on project
specific stuff. Unfortunately, we only had three students approach the
ASF on the first pilot and none of them actually delivered a project.
You could point the Prof. at this project. Although you might want to
ask me privately about the pros and cons of this first.
Option 2
========
At the ASF we have outlined how we might provide mentoring in formal
education at http://community.apache.org/mentorprogrammeformaleducation.html
We'd be happy for you to provide the mentoring under these terms (which
are open to clarification/discussion etc.) In particular I would like to
draw your attention to the role of the Tutor/Prof. in this:
Tutors
* Ensure the mentee is participating in the program
* Tutor grades the student within their formal education (the
mentor feedback should assist here)
* Take full responsibility for the learners moivation and progress
** Mentors will guide but will not motivate
In other words the ASF and its committers take no responsibility for the
success of the student. We'll mentor but nothing more.
Do I need Board
approval? I think as an Officer of the ASF I can do some of this,
but want to make sure I'm proceeding correctly.
No need to bother the Board. It's in our charter to provide whatever
support you need. It's nice to have a real test case to flesh out the
ideas here at the ASF.
Ross
