So I had a first taste of interacting with some people who are part of the mystical, apparently totally altruistic FOSS world. It was wonderful talking to Mel and Sebastian, and specifically looking at Sebastian made me think of another way FOSS could help students: maturity. Of the many benefits of FOSS, one thing that I have not seen bandied about is the (quite obvious in Sebastian and Mel) level of maturity that you would normally expect from people atleast 3-5 years older to them. It seems that the FOSS model promotes the sense of responsibility and corresponding achievement in a way that is provided in a very delayed fashion these days, what with Masters as the new bachelors in the job market (or even worse, PhD as the new Masters :) I think this observation alone has made me interested in getting FOSS to undergraduates.
Over to the first day of this radically shrunk workshop; I was disappointed by the attendance (partly my fault). Content and impact wise I thought it was really good until lunch when we had three active participants, and I thought that even the remote participation (except for the time zones) remains a distinct possibility (if planned into a POSSE). However, after lunch, when I thought something really exciting would happen, i.e. we would check out code , make changes and get patches into the fedora system, a lot of things went not to plan. First two of the participants had to leave (note: I don’t think people joining in late can benefit, especially for an intensive version of POSSE). Second, the code checkout became a bottle neck due to people not having Fedora on their systems. Third, and partly due to the second and first events, the edit process had to be done on Sebastian's laptop by me, with very little of the "lost" feeling that was healthily promoted in the morning. I guess what I really want to say is that I felt there was so much potential for the afternoon session, and what we achieved due to some unexpected events, was so much less than that potential.
I don’t mean to say that these are systemic problems; after all Mel and Sebastian had to deal with a completely new format of POSSE, with a vastly reduced number of attendants, and all technical details can not be looked at in advance. But these were something's that made POSSE Doha effort seem to fizzle out a bit, and it would be good to not forget these aspects especially if there need to be another POSSE-lite in the future.
About future POSSE, my inclination is for atleast a 3 day , if not 5 day, workshop and even then only if 4-5 teachers/faculty can commit to the entire workshop. This would as a corollary argue summers as the right time to hold any POSSE, as otherwise you would loose faculty for a few hours a day for teaching related issues.
The one thing I remain a little concerned about is that the POSSE and Red Hat do not have a very crisp argument for Universities to promote FOSS as part of course work. Beyond making that part crystal clear (and that too in less than a paragraph), I think we should brainstorm what are the core FOSS ideas/principals that can be used in *any* course and also identify some courses that can be completely built around augmenting existing FOSS projects . The first part would, for example, be suggesting using SVN/Git for assingment submissions, Wiki's for class room interaction (even though I am not completely sold on this idea). The second part would be talk about FOSS projects that can contributed to for courses like OOP, Operating systems, Database systems, Distributed Systems, Web design etc (basically CS undergrad courses). Thinking beyond CS would also remain an interesting area (Mel, can you sense a PhD thesis in there!).
PS: This is my, Affan Syed's, first Blog post ever. See Mel, I am already getting into the open-source mold.
PS: This is my, Affan Syed's, first Blog post ever. See Mel, I am already getting into the open-source mold.
