#teachingopensource Meeting

Meeting started by posse_projector at 17:37:51 UTC (full logs).

Meeting summary

  1. logging bots (posse_projector, 17:37:56)
    1. Logging bots sometimes sit in IRC channels and take notes. This is nice, since it saves work following up on meetings. (mchua, 17:54:54)
    2. http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teachingopensource/2010-04-27/weekly_posse_meeting.2010-04-27-19.02.html (mchua, 17:54:58)
    3. We've been logging this POSSE, too. Here are example logs from Monday: (mchua, 17:55:16)
    4. http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teachingopensource/2010-06-07/posse_worcester_-_monday.2010-06-07-12.34.log.html (mchua, 17:55:20)
    5. http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teachingopensource/2010-06-07/posse_worcester_-_monday.2010-06-07-12.34.html (mchua, 17:55:24)
    6. We also log things that we want to preserve, like classroom/tutorial sessions on different topics. (mchua, 17:55:39)
    7. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom (mchua, 17:55:42)
    8. By the way, you can usually get someone to teach an informal/impromptu class on any topic - useful if you want to pick up a new skill, or your students need to learn something. (mchua, 17:56:03)
    9. Common practice is to agree on a date/time/IRC-channel between the students and the teacher, then email that to a public mailing list (for the project) so others can join in if they wan. (mchua, 17:56:27)
    10. Here's a sample classroom session on Packaging. (mchua, 17:56:38)
    11. http://www.sparsebrain.com/2010/06/fedora-packaging-classroom-session.html (mchua, 17:56:40)
    12. Logging bots come in many different versions, and are often open source - you can use a project's existing bot, or you can run your own on your own server. (mchua, 17:57:06)
    13. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Zodbot (mchua, 17:57:10)
    14. Zodbot is Fedora's bot, and its commands are documented in the link above. (mchua, 17:57:19)
    15. Logging bots sometimes sit in IRC channels and take notes. This is nice, since it saves work following up on meetings. For example: (mchua, 17:59:10)
    16. http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teachingopensource/2010-04-27/weekly_posse_meeting.2010-04-27-19.02.html (mchua, 17:59:13)
    17. We've been logging this POSSE, too. Here are example logs from Monday: (mchua, 17:59:17)
    18. http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teachingopensource/2010-06-07/posse_worcester_-_monday.2010-06-07-12.34.log.html (mchua, 17:59:20)
    19. http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teachingopensource/2010-06-07/posse_worcester_-_monday.2010-06-07-12.34.html (mchua, 17:59:24)
    20. We also log things that we want to preserve, like classroom/tutorial sessions on different topics. (mchua, 17:59:27)
    21. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom (mchua, 17:59:31)
    22. By the way, you can usually get someone to teach an informal/impromptu class on any topic - useful if you want to pick up a new skill, or your students need to learn something. (mchua, 17:59:33)
    23. Common practice is to agree on a date/time/IRC-channel between the students and the teacher, then email that to a public mailing list (for the project) so others can join in if they wan. (mchua, 17:59:37)
    24. Here's a sample classroom session on Packaging. (mchua, 17:59:42)
    25. http://www.sparsebrain.com/2010/06/fedora-packaging-classroom-session.html (mchua, 17:59:45)
    26. Logging bots come in many different versions, and are often open source - you can use a project's existing bot, or you can run your own on your own server. (mchua, 17:59:48)
    27. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Zodbot (mchua, 17:59:52)
    28. Zodbot is Fedora's bot, and its commands are documented in the link above. (mchua, 17:59:54)
    29. You can also look at all the meeting logs that have ever been taken in a particular channel - for instance, "I wonder what my student teams have been talking about in their meetings." (mchua, 18:00:00)
    30. http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teachingopensource/ (mchua, 18:00:05)
    31. IRC bots can sometimes also do non-meeting functions, like telling you information about a contributor. (mchua, 18:00:16)
    32. For instance, I just typed ".fasinfo mchua" into the channel - you can read the full log at this timestamp to see the output that produced (it spewed out some info about what I do within Fedora). (mchua, 18:00:51)
    33. Conclusion: Bots are useful. (mchua, 18:00:56)

  2. events (mchua, 18:00:58)
    1. FOSS projects often have in-person gatherings - major projects tend to have one (or more) large get-togethers per year (several hundred people from all over the world fly in to collaborate, talk, etc) (mchua, 18:01:35)
    2. They're usually (1) free, (2) incredibly informal - look up the words "unconference" and "barcamp" - and (3) a lot of fun. (mchua, 18:01:54)
    3. They are particularly cool/welcoming to students, as a way to meet folks they've worked with remotely face-to-face, and as an opportunity to present their work to a community outside their school. (mchua, 18:02:19)
    4. Here are a few examples of events FOSS projects have - if you're thinking of getting involved in a community, one good way to do that is to see if you can go to an event. (mchua, 18:02:45)
    5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon (mchua, 18:02:49)
    6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJZQJRpC2_0 (mchua, 18:02:52)
    7. http://www.guadec.org/index.php/guadec/index (mchua, 18:02:56)
    8. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDSKarmic (mchua, 18:03:00)
    9. http://akademy.kde.org/ (mchua, 18:03:04)
    10. ...these are some examples. There are many more. (mchua, 18:03:13)

  3. Hackathons (mchua, 18:03:18)
    1. FOSS projects also often have hackathons - bringing people together to work on something for a few days. Different projects do them in different ways - in Fedora, we call them FADs, or Fedora Activity Days. (mchua, 18:03:39)
    2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD (mchua, 18:03:43)
    3. It's not just for code development; one can do them for, say, Marketing. (mchua, 18:03:54)
    4. http://www.braincache.de/wp/2010/03/14/fedora-mktg-fad-2010-day-1/ (mchua, 18:03:58)
    5. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_FAD_2010 (mchua, 18:04:01)
    6. They're very informal... here are some pictures - note the folks from all over the world, all backgrounds and ages. (mchua, 18:04:25)
    7. http://www.flickr.com/photos/7849458@N03/4430487810/in/pool-fedora_marketing (mchua, 18:04:28)
    8. http://www.flickr.com/photos/7849458@N03/4430488572/in/pool-fedora_marketing (mchua, 18:04:33)
    9. http://www.flickr.com/photos/7849458@N03/4430479760/in/pool-fedora_marketing (mchua, 18:04:36)
    10. Schools can host hackathons. For instance, if you want to get your students together for a 3-day weekend to sprint on some interesting piece of code, or to assemble a test case system, or etc - and it would be perfect if you could only have (1) pizza and (2) these two developers who know a lot about Python (or whatever) come join you for the weekend, then ask if you can host a FAD - there's often funding. (mchua, 18:05:28)
    11. This is not unique to Fedora; other large FOSS projects have this notion of hackfests as well. (mchua, 18:05:43)
    12. In general, there are resources out there, and they're informal to request and easy to get - just ask! (mchua, 18:05:53)

  4. Back to hacking (mchua, 18:06:03)
    1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom/Packaging_Sugar_Activities (sdziallas, 18:10:36)
    2. http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar-activity-packaging-walkthrough/repos/mainline (sdziallas, 18:11:18)
    3. Fedora Classroom Session on Activity Packaging took place; links as above (sdziallas, 18:11:41)
    4. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/tech-talk-pse-1-0-0-released/ (mchua, 18:13:50)

  5. maddog's talk (mchua, 18:33:23)
    1. How long have people been using FOSS? Probably 40 years (or whatever subset of that you've been alive), even if you didn't know it. (mchua, 18:34:28)
    2. Title: FOSS teaches you twice or three times (mchua, 18:34:40)
    3. Jon "Maddog" Hall - executive director of Linux International (mchua, 18:35:25)
    4. Goals of education - thinking electorate, workforce, lifetime knowledge, lifelong learners. (mchua, 18:37:18)
    5. Maddog believes it's important to create local jobs and local businesses - and FOSS can do this. (mchua, 18:38:02)
    6. maddog also believes FOSS creates a balance of trade, and makes a country more secure - able to rely on its own work. Reduces piracy. (mchua, 18:38:42)
    7. If you can't afford to buy a $100 software license, you're just going to steal that software. (mchua, 18:39:35)
    8. Back to national security - imagine the Chinese military putting American (Microsoft) code in their planes. Er... yeah. (mchua, 13:40:00)
    9. Also - what if MS were to go out of business? Then a lot of folks are just plain out of luck. (mchua, 13:40:00)
    10. How many people remember Digital Equipment Corporation? Apollo? <other defunct tech companies>? (mchua, 13:41:00)
    11. A lot of software rots along the way - without access and ability to fix the code, you can't do anything about it. (mchua, 13:41:00)
    12. Back when I (maddog) was young, software was written and passed around by hobbyists, amateurs - "I'm not really a programmer," just doing this for fun - sharing software, sharing modifications. (mchua, 13:43:00)
    13. There was a social structure of sharing this stuff, you didn't really think about making money from software. (mchua, 13:43:00)
    14. FOSS, for students, lets you (1) make interesting software as a non-solo contributor, on a team, on real products, and (2) have a portfolio of that work and that collaboration with others before graduation. (mchua, 13:47:00)
    15. John Lions, from the Uni of South Wales, believed in training students by showing them good code by good coders. He documented v6 of Unix - commented/annotated kernel - for education usage, but was blocked for publication by AT&T. (mchua, 13:50:00)
    16. However, this was *such* a good resource that it was secretly photocopied and passed around - there are 10th and more generations of photocopies (copies of copies of copies, etc) being passed around. (mchua, 13:51:00)
    17. If this had just been FOSS, the whole absurdity of having to get around that would have been avoided. (mchua, 13:52:00)
    18. FOSS has a complete CS curriculum. For instance, operating systems: linux, *bsd, <tons of other kernel projects> - multiuser, 32bit, 64bit... there are multiple variants of almost everything in FOSS. (mchua, 13:53:00)
    19. You also get to work across multiple platforms, avoiding learning specific things like "Intelism" (shortcuts you can take with Intel processors that give you problems when you try to port to other processors). You learn to step back and look at general architectures instead of being blindly tied to one. (mchua, 13:55:00)
    20. FOSS programs are often modular and can have chunks swapped in and out - easy to break down sections of problems/projects for classes to look at. (mchua, 13:56:00)
    21. maddog is detailing different features (64 vs 32 bit, multithreaded and multiuser architectures, etc) that are good for students to be exposed to and explore. (mchua, 13:57:00)
    22. Another area is research - you may be told by a company that "if you work on our product, it'll benefit ALL OUR CUSTOMERS!" (mchua, 13:58:00)
    23. ...however, after you make that code, it belongs to that company, not to the commons - so why not use FOSS instead? (mchua, 13:59:00)
    24. Places to learn Networking with FOSS - tcp/ip, etc... also security, graphics (X, opengl), clustered systems. (mchua, 13:59:00)
    25. By hacking on FOSS projects, you'll learn how to generate bugfixes and patches for customers. (mchua, 14:01:00)
    26. And sometimes people will just pay you directly to do that bugfixing and patching for them. (mchua, 14:01:00)
    27. Not just software - electrical engineering (spice, circuit simulators, arduino, etc) (mchua, 14:04:00)
    28. Not just CS - look at social studies! Statistics, geographical info (openstreetmap, opengis), dynamics of communities. (mchua, 14:06:00)
    29. And intellectual property law! And Project Gutenberg's massive collection of books! (mchua, 14:07:00)
    30. And business practices! Service-based businesses thrive in FOSS - other examples of service-based busineses are surgery and law. (mchua, 14:09:00)
    31. And for creative works - such as musicians. They entertain, they play music - they're not "money producers." Music is a service business. (mchua, 14:09:00)
    32. FOSS is not just CS. Look at Creative Commons for the arts. (mchua, 14:17:00)
    33. Look at the scale of FOSS projects - 230k+ projects and 2.3M+ developers on SourceForge alone. (mchua, 14:17:00)
    34. This is without China, India, LATAM, etc. not having fully come online, even. (mchua, 14:17:00)
    35. Think about how many people in an actual software company are software engineers (as opposed to marketing, design, people who pack the discs in the boxes, etc) and those numbers look even larger - because the SourceForge numbers are *just* engineers. (mchua, 14:20:00)
    36. FOSS is a new (old) model of developing software. When software is free, you pay for service - to copy/distribute, to get features you need when you need them, to integrate into your setup, to train. (mchua, 14:21:00)
    37. To learn FOSS, you have to teach... distributed development, licensing, standard-writing, writing code to standards, how to motivate devs, how to find and engage communities, how to innovate, how to evaluate/size customer needs (mchua, 14:25:00)
    38. Groups of interest: Free Standards Group (freestandards.org) (mchua, 14:29:00)
    39. Linux Professional Institute (lpi.org) (mchua, 14:29:00)
    40. Linux training (lintraining.com) (mchua, 14:29:00)
    41. Open hardware: simputer.org, solarpc.com, open telephony (mchua, 14:29:00)
    42. You can use FOSS to solve all sorts of interesting problems - image rendering, modeling seismic disturbances, virtual reality, calculating financial reserves... (mchua, 14:35:00)
    43. "How many of you saw the movie Titanic?" RENDERED ON FOSS! (mchua, 14:38:00)
    44. ...and Matrix! and Shrek! Harry Potter! Lord of the Rings! (maddog quoting the very large number of FOSS-running processors that rendered these movies.) (mchua, 14:38:00)
    45. Lots of pictures of massive clusters and statistics about said clusters are now scrolling across the slides. Mmm, supercomputers. (mchua, 14:40:00)
    46. You could take individual machines in a lab and turn them into a supercomputer - same room, same hardware, just add a bit of software - and BAM! Supercomputer lab. (mchua, 14:41:00)
    47. You can also tinker with embedded systems in FOSS. Modular kernel == easy for embedded! Also, royalty-free. (mchua, 14:41:00)
    48. Example: OpenMoko phone (sort of out of date, but some folks are still using it.) (mchua, 14:42:00)
    49. "Create hackers, not crackers." - People who build things and make things, not destroy them. (mchua, 14:45:00)
    50. maddog is describing a case study of work with a group of high schoolers - "Hackerteen" program that taught students about tech using FOSS; they're now employed and in some cases teaching other students. (mchua, 14:46:00)
    51. Resource: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/ (mchua, 14:46:00)
    52. Resource: http://ftacademy.org/ (mchua, 14:46:00)
    53. maddog also has a longer list of cool projects (misterhouse, etc) that students may find interesting. (mchua, 14:48:00)
    54. A challenge for the profs in this room: find your brightest students and get them to propose embedded projects, then develop them - EE/CS partnership - and see if they can get into the market. (mchua, 14:48:00)
    55. maddog bringing up case studies of students - very young kernel developers, consultants, entrepreneurs, company presidents - that started because of the opportunities FOSS provided. (mchua, 14:50:00)
    56. Well-meaning misconceptions: "Software that costs $0" != "Free Software" (mchua, 14:56:00)
    57. Misconception: "Everyone uses our platform!" (yes, but you control and bottleneck it.) (mchua, 14:56:00)
    58. (there were more misconceptions on the slides, but they went by too fast for me to transcribe) (mchua, 14:57:00)
    59. FOSS can also run school infrastructure - for instance, http://sagu2.solis.coop.br - can handle entrance/placement exams, room scheduling, financial/accounting systems, human resources, etc. for schools. (mchua, 14:59:00)
    60. Other resources: Moodle, K12LTSP, Free Technology Academy, MIT (and others) Open Courseware (mchua, 14:59:00)
    61. finally... it's fun! (mchua, 15:00:00)
    62. Questions? (mchua, 15:00:00)


Meeting ended at 15:07:00 UTC (full logs).

Action items

  1. (none)


People present (lines said)

  1. mchua (150)
  2. zodbot (12)
  3. sdziallas (10)
  4. posse_projector (5)
  5. Mahadev (4)
  6. kevix (4)
  7. pfroehlich (2)
  8. walterbender (2)
  9. ianweller (1)
  10. aparna (0)
  11. kis (0)
  12. kwurst (0)
  13. mihaela (0)
  14. gpollice (0)


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