Hi Karsten, On Tuesday 24 August 2010 18:55:10 Karsten Wade wrote: > On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 06:29:35PM -0700, tosmaillist.neophyte_...@ordinaryamerican.net wrote: > > Welcome to the Teaching Open Source project, Shlomif. > > > > You've spent some time refining "How to start contributing to or using > > Open Source Software", > > http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/How_to_start_contributing_to_or_u > > sing_Open_Source_Software > > And it's looking good; it seems to have a defined audience with > beginning experience. Being distilled, it's useful as an introduction > and director, and complements works such as the Practical... textbook > and 'The Open Source Way'. > > Shlomi - one question that I have about the focus on the document. It > includes contribute and use. I'm curious if you've thought about > focusing it to just contribute, perhaps as: > > [[How to start participating or contributing in Open Source software]] >
I haven't thought about it yet. I think that there is going to be a relatively small amount of how to start using open-source software anyway, and I need it as the first step towards contributing to open-source. > Aside from the teaching of participation being more of the topic of > this wiki and project, it also occurs to me that there are a huge > number of documents and books and articles that focus on getting > people to use open source. The gap is in how-to participate and > contribute. I separate those two because participation is much easier > and is the gateway to contribution -- most people participate lightly > before they heavily contribute. (I explain this more in this blog > post - http://iquaid.org/2009/04/14/community-sets/ .) > > As an example and contrast, here is a similarly purposed document with > a different audience. The reader is expected to be already interested > in contributing: > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_be_a_successful_contributor > OK, I'll check these links out. Regards, Shlomi Fish > Again, I see a complementary relationship. I see it somewhat like > this, as a spectrum from very-new to very-experienced: > > (How to for very new)[..............](How to for very experienced) > > These sit on top of a number of longer reference works, such as > Programming OSS or Practical OSS Exploration. > > Somewhere in the middle are handbooks such as The Open Source Way > (TOSW), with the longer works providing a spectrum from topic-focused > to broad-focused, all as a foundation: > > (How to ...)[..] > (Distilled handbooks e.g. TOSW) > (Programming OSS)[...](Practical OSS Exploration) > > Something like that. :) > > Cheers - Karsten -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Stop Using MSIE - http://www.shlomifish.org/no-ie/ God considered inflicting XSLT as the tenth plague of Egypt, but then decided against it because he thought it would be too evil. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
