Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
While it's a specific goal of the meta-work <em><a href="http://theopensourceway.org/wiki">The Open Source Way</a></em> to go beyond code, the <em><a href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Textbook_Release_0.8">Practical Open Source Software Exploration</a></em> textbook has to start somewhere for a specific student audience. While many audiences are under-served, it is to me one of the saddest shames that people studying <em>computer science</em> aren't learning about participating in open source. That's why I was satisfied with the initial scope and release.
I come to this agreeing and having worked in similar circles with Máirín on getting open source projects to think beyond "code is king". As one of the editors of <em>Practical Open Source Software Exploration</em>, I know it won't be as easy to remix the current content for a non-coding audience. However, it can be done, and it should be done. In fact, I think the title itself lends room for inclusion of parts (groups of chapters) dealing with non-coding parts of FOSS projects.
Then it's fairly straightforward to identify a subset on the wiki and make different books based on the same content, for different audiences. The greater the quantity and quality of chapters in the pool, the more student audiences can be reached with the textbook.
A way to go from here would be:
<ol>
<li>Create a new design-focused textbook landing page on the Teaching Open Source wiki.</li>
<li>Create a table of contents for the first version of the book, looking to reuse existing chapters from the other book.</li>
<li>Where the title of a chapter conflicts with the design focus, try to work with the upstream chapter author to fix this. For example, could we rename all the chapters to e.g. "Explaining the Source" for the documentation chapter? Does that make sense to a design audience?</li>
<li>Where the chapter title doesn't work, just create a new container chapter and use the MediaWiki include mechanism to pull in content.</li>
<li>Around here slot in the design-specific chapters we do have already, such as massaging the case study you reference.</li>
<li>With that half-day or day's work we can get some percentage of the textbook already underway or nearly done, and have an idea of how much work there is to do.</li>
<li>Start recruiting writers, then write the needed content.</li>
</ol>
If you like this idea, perhaps offer it as a challenge to Fedora Design Team and to other design communities you know. I volunteer to help with the MediaWiki wrangling, gardening, and understanding of the content for remixing. (It helps me in my goal to write a "how-to-remix this book" appendix.) We can do the conversion to DocBook and get the pretty Fedora branding (or whatever brand) in PDF, HTML, and Epub formats.
Thanks for the note. The server fell over, but it's back up again.