I've been thinking about the POSSE Pledge lately, http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_Pledge - "I pledge to be a bridge between the world of academia and Teaching Open Source. This coming school year, I will commit to bringing The Open Source Way into my school's curriculum by getting all the students in at least one of my classes in the coming school year actively involved in contributing to an open source project for their coursework."
Maybe we're asking the wrong question - right now we ask people to commit to actually teaching open source during the next school year, but with classes for that next school year already blocked out before you set foot into a POSSE, that might be a commitment people are nervous about making, because they're not sure if they can keep it, because they're not sure what that entails. I am speculating here. But after spending a week with Remy and his Storytellers team at RIT, I'm coming to realize that what we actually want is stories - either "I taught open source!" or "here are the blockers that kept me from doing so." The second one is fine, and in some ways while we're still in the early stages of this, sometimes more valuable - because then we can start to help clear them. So what if we changed the pledge to "I pledge to come back online a year from now and report back to my POSSE class what I've done in the TOS realm over the past school year," or similar? I like the idea of last year's POSSE attendees making a virtual gallery/expo of work of sorts at the end of their first post-graduation school year, to show the next round of POSSE attendees - this could be very simple, just a summary reflection blog post to Planet TOS. But we'd all get to find out what people did after their POSSE. Thoughts? --Mel _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
