Nicole C. Engard's Blog, page 13

October 21, 2014

ATO2014: The first FOSS Minor at RIT

Remy DeCausemaker aka “RemyD” was up next to talk to us about the first FOSS Minor at RIT

Remy is the Hackademic at Rochester Institute of Technology. He works on a lot of student engagement at RIT to get students involved in open source. They have run about 50 hackathons in the last 5 years. They offer credit to students who work on open source and/or pay them to work on open source to show them that they can make a career at this. RIT offers the first open source minor in the United States. Three courses are required for this minor: Humanitarian Free and One Source Software Development (H-FOSS), Free and Open Source Culture, and Legal and Business Aspects of FOSS and Free Culture.

Remy uses a lot of common open source tools in his courses. Students have to log in to IRC to take roll, assignments are managed on Github and have to submit pull requests to hand their assignment in. The H-FOSS class has to design an educational game for the one laptop per child project as their final project.

Finally, if you’re in upstate New York and want to guess lecture Remy is inviting you in to his open classroom.

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Published on October 21, 2014 16:12

ATO2014: Unmanagement and Unleadership

Luis Ibanez talked to us next about unleadership and unmanagement at All Things Open tonight.

We tend to celebrate leadership in sports, politics, in social movements. We make it sound like leaders are what are needed to succeed. That war stories don’t tell is the story of everyone else who made the success possible. When you emphasize leadership you miss what really went in to the success.

When you elevate the leader in a group of people you diminish everyone else. This makes the followers a little bit “mushy” and slow and dependent. The worst part of leadership is that it leaves the community members off the hook. This makes the community vulnerable (especially to zombies, aliens and the city bus).

Instead we want to educate and cultivate the community.

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Published on October 21, 2014 16:10

ATO2014: Social media for slackers

Rikki Endsley overheard this at a conference: “I don’t believe in social media” but she’s here to tell us that it’s real! Social media is a great way to direct people to where you want them – even your IRC channel. You want to share relevant interesting, accurate information with people – keep on message even with your retweets.

Make sure you avoid PR talk, write like you would talk to someone next to you.

Part of being on social media is begin “social”. You need to retweet, reply and reshare. Participate and grow your reach – ask your network to share particularly important content.

Remember to consider your schedule. If you’re going to an event in a different time zone schedule your tweets for that time zone. Don’t share in your local timezone if the event is 5 hours ahead of you – you’re missing those people.

Measure your success. You can do this with many tools that are out there.

Finally you want to promote all of your accounts.

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Published on October 21, 2014 16:00

ATO2014: Easing into open source

Scott Nesbitt was up next with his talk titled: Easing into open source.

There are lots of people out there who are interested and eager to try open source, but don’t make that leap right away. Scott shared with us his tips as a technology coach of how to ease people in to open source. A lot of us learned by getting thrown in to the deep end and we did learn a lot – but for most people that doesn’t work. This leads to a lot of fussy, angry people and they decide that open source is not for them.

So, the first thing you can do is curb your urge to get up on your soapbox – it rarely works. Most people don’t really care about the 4 freedoms or the ethical reasons to use open source in the beginning. Instead go for the heart of it. Show them what they’re interested in – they’re interested in what open source can do for them. How can they do their work with it?

“I’m afraid of open source, I can’t program” – tell people that this isn’t true (I like to use Firefox as an example here). “But it’s not … ” – the answer is ‘So What?!’ the software we’re showing you is just as efficient as the proprietary options. Instead of going feature by feature, teach them how to do a specific task.

And finally remind them that free software does have a price – the price is in the form of time – time it takes to learn the software. It’s time – but it’s time very well spent.

Take baby steps. Show them how to crop an image in Gimp – but don’t show them all the features all at once. Once they have the basics they’re going to want to learn more advanced topics – or maybe they won’t – but they’ll be happy that they’re no longer paint licensing fees for their software.

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Published on October 21, 2014 15:23

ATO2014: Building a premier storytelling platform on open source

Up first at the All Things Open Lightning Talks was Jen Wike from Red Hat.

Opensource.com started in 2010 as a platform to share stories about open source software. Jen denied for us the open source way (which is the twitter handle for the site) :

Openness
Transparency
Collaboration
Meritocracy
Rapid prototyping

One example of this is an inspiring story from oepnsource.com that talked about the E-Nable group which creates 3D printable hands http://enablingthefuture.org/

At opensource.com we ask why we tell these stories? It’s a great to way to share stories of people’s experiences of using open source as a better way to live and work. As a storyteller for open source we strive to educate people outside (as well as inside) of the open source community. We have pages like What is Open Source and What is Open Stack. We also have series for beginners and/or women in open source.

opensource.com has a moderator program where moderators write articles, give feedback, curate content and bring in more authors. This is essential for keeping new content rolling in on the site.

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Published on October 21, 2014 15:21

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