From Fedora Project Wiki
Notes from Chris Tyler's talk about Seneca College open source program.
Examples of Program
- Implementation of apng spec in Firefox 3
- Improvements to plugin code, resurrection from the rust
= Mozilla Experience
- Students have to take work to a .3 (more than new, but working)
- Second course, take to a 1.0 (doc'd, ready, polished, tested, etc.)
Fedora Future
- More classes (six) that interact with the Fedora Project
- No dumping of people, Chris will be alongside them
- Protect project from post-project attrition
- E.g. if they maintain a package, make it a co-maintainership
Fedora's To-do list in preparation
- NOW Make list of potential projects
- Be careful of release blockers
- Chance to go far beyond pure programming
- Don't worry about scope
- Smaller scope projects can be combined under one student
- Larger scope projects may be doable anyway
- Mentoring is not required throughout, but ...
- You must be available to explain wtf your idea is about (more of a sponsor role)
- Hang out with the students
- #seneca
- Come to do a guest lecture
Tips
- Faculty needs to have one foot in FLOSS, the other in academia
- Community has to care about the student's project
- Start by asking community to propose projects students can work on (initial list >3x more than are going to be used)
- Ask idea proposer from the community to be an initial contact to get started
- Project has to be what student is passionate about
- Students pick from list (which is helped by the long list)
- Students work directly in project, using tools and methods there
- Not done in a sandbox
- Not locked off in a learning management system (LMS)
- Project needs to be big enough to absorb a large number of students
Questions
- Non-coding opportunities; my top list: docs, marketing, art(?)
- How to kick-off a new opportunity from scratch?