On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 10:58:44AM -0500, Matt Jadud wrote: > > I think the public contribution area is the wiki itself. Log in and > > edit? And the issue tracker seems to be the discussion section for each > > page. IIRC, much of this was written during a doc sprint a few years > > BE BOLD.
Thanks, but maybe you need to direct your response to Jonathan, who was the one who was asking how to contribute to the textbook. TOS might want to interpret this as a suggestion that there need to be more explicit directions / invitations on how to get involved in particular projects. On a personal level, I think that telling someone to "BE BOLD" is a bit offensive, as it suggests that they are timid, and that's generally not considered to be a positive trait. I am already "being bold", in that I'm running an informal set of lectures and code labs that is an implicit criticism of our faculty's official curriculum. I'm well aware of and highly impressed by Seneca's work, I've given a couple of talks at FSOSS (and dozens of other talks on open source at various conferences over the years), and in fact I became aware of TOS through an FSOSS session a few years back. I offered up my intro to git materials as a possible starting point for someone to build on for the textbook, if they find them useful. I would suggest the desired response to such an offering from a relative newcomer to a community is "thanks!" even if it's not a good fit, in which case the right response might be "thanks! but it would be even better if...". My lack of direct participation in TOS is not so much a lack of boldness, it's a concern that investment of energy in what appears to be a fairly moribund project may not be a good use of my time, and as a faculty member who is a systems librarian, not a professor, it's frankly hard to find the right place to fit into TOS (which is currently highly oriented towards professors, for some obvious reasons, but a little off-putting for an open source practitioner in an academic environment who doesn't fit into that target niche). For a newcomer to the project, the http://teachingopensource.org/ landing page refers to 2012 events as the only "Upcoming events". And the mailing list is pretty quiet, too, with the exception of a recent rush for funding, which was a little disturbing. This lack of attention to fundamentals is a "community smell", akin to the concept of "code smells" (I think Randy Metcalfe raised this concept years ago when he was working with OSS Watch). Again, I realize that it's a volunteer-driven project, and that I could have moved the obsolete "upcoming events" into the past category by now (I will do that in a few minutes). I just wanted to highlight some problems (let's call them opportunities?) that might act as barriers to TOS participation at the moment, and work through some of my own equivocation about participating or not participating in TOS over the past few years. _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
