My assessment of the success of our various initiatives, and some proposals on "what to do next". Please take 5 minutes to read. Feedback welcome. Note: I will take the absence of feedback as agreement and consent. :)
ASSESSMENTS. 1. Teaching Materials Project. This consists basically of two pages: "Collections of OSS teaching materials" and "Teaching Materials Catalogue". Both of these have some interesting content, but relatively few edits. Feedback I've received has been "interesting collection of links, but not notably more useful than Google searching." Some reorganization and focus seems to be in order. (Grade: C-) 2. OSS Directory Project. Purpose: to provide a single point of reference for people interested in education and research related open source software so that those interested in using or contributing to the software can easily do so. A single page with almost no data, and hasn't been touched since May. Well-intentioned, no one has time. (Grade: Incomplete) 3. OSS Education Papers in Scholarly Journals. Lots of good ideas about how to get more open source articles into scholarly journals, but again, a single page, and no significant edits since March. (Grade: Incomplete) 4. FOSS Mentor Projects. There are actually a number of projects listed here, and the team had regular meetings for a while. These have since fallen by the wayside, it seems, but this looks like a potentially useful resource, and I'd like to see if we can pick this project back up, dust this page off, and start driving interested folks aggressively to it. We continue to hear that this is one of the most valuable resources we can provide, so long as we do a good job at maintaining it. (Grade: C+) 5. Teaching Open Source Summit. We held this summit in Toronto, and it was a useful gathering, but I think we all had much higher hopes for it. Most of the planning fell through, and many of the attendees who would have been most helpful were sorely missed. Also, it's unclear to me whether this should be a "project" per se at this point. (Grade: C-) 6. Get Involved Guides. One edit in April. (Grade: Incomplete) 7. Textbook. We've got an outline and some rough copy, and although it isn't going at the pace we'd like, it's moving along. We had our first sprint recently, and I will schedule another soon. Of the projects on the list, this one has certainly been the topic of most discussion. What remains is to turn all of that discussion into action more effectively. (Grade: B-) # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # RECOMMENDATIONS. In Toronto last week, those of us present at TOS did a brainstorming session of all of the ways in which TOS could be useful to its participants. The upside: a number of the suggestions were already represented as TOS projects. Bringing together the feedback from that meeting with the evaluation above, I suggest refocusing on the following projects: 1. TOS Textbook. We already have momentum, so let's keep it going. 2. TOS Mentors Project. We've got progress and demand, even if we don't currently have a lot of momentum. Let's pick it back up, make it more awesome, and advertise it heavily. 3. TOS Ambassadors Project. This would bring together some of our existing projects, and refocus on a simplified, but impressive, goal: encourage/enable TOS professors to attend every major CS/CSE conference in the world. Which means a few things: (1) actually knowing which conferences those are; (2) tracking the RFP dates and so forth, so that profs know what's coming up; and (3) doing whatever we can to get profs to these conferences (travel funding assistance, for instance). 4. TOS Course Catalogue. Rather than trying to generate the huge list of "all open source teaching materials ever," it seems more achievable, and maybe more useful, to have a comprehensive list of open source courses that have actually been taught -- and, by extension, a list of profs who have actually taught them. We've got some of this material scattered about now, but refocusing these materials shouldn't be too difficult. # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # So that's the summary. Feedback, please. If people agree on these changes, I'd like to see us moving forward this week. --g -- Computer Science professors should be teaching open source. Help make it happen. Visit http://teachingopensource.org. _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
