We've got a lot of pieces here. We're very close. That's good. What we don't yet have is a textbook. That's bad. It's bad because we've got a trial customer -- Tim Budd, Oregon State -- and no completed deliverable yet. And we've got two weeks before Tim's class starts.
I believe that next week will be a crucial week for the textbook effort. I believe that we should seek to accomplish the following things by the end of next week: 1. Get every chapter to 100% status. Having all exercises completed will be of particular importance. 2. Move this document off of the wiki and into DocBook. 3. Get it into version control. 4. Make a "release". I'd say this would be release 0.8 or so. :) I think we can get it done, but I'll need some help. In particular, these are the things I'm worried about: 1. The "beginner's mind" chapters. Dave and Chris, I think that these are crucially important -- even if they aren't complete and perfect, we need something here. I've seen blog posts from both of you that would do in a pinch. If we want one chapter instead of two, that's fine -- but I think we need *something*. Need your guidance here -- can we have something next week? At least something to start from? 2. The infrastructure for the basic version control exercises. I know that Chris set it up, but I honestly haven't even looked at it yet -- but it'll take some time to make sure that we've got what we need. 3. I need DocBook help. I don't know the first thing about it. I know we've got some folks here who can help with this -- Jared, Sebastian, Karsten -- and now is the time when your help will be deeply appreciated. 4. I'm worried that the whole thing will kinda suck and won't hold together well -- but I'm always worried about that, and it's certainly no reason not to finish strong. Besides, that's what we're testing here: can we build a text like we build software, with alpha and beta releases that are useful, if imperfect? And we won't know until we do it. I'm pretty proud of what we've accomplished so far, but if we don't finish strong for Tim, I'm worried that we'll miss our first big opportunity for feedback, and I want to make sure that we do everything we can to capture this opportunity. If you have time to spare next week, send a note to the list reporting for duty, and let's figure it out. I'll be on #teachingopensource all week long, looking to complete the push to Glorious Victory. --g -- Educational materials should be high-quality, collaborative, and free. Visit http://opensource.com/education and join the conversation. _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
