On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Mel Chua <mel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > (I'm pulling out one section of the thread for a moment, but hope discussion > continues on the other ideas brought up as well.) > >>> I'd love to get a marketing class working on this - actually, I >>> would love to see a case study (see >>> http://www.hbs.edu/mba/academics/casemethod.html) on Fedora. >> >> What would be really interesting is feeding back the process for >> meeting this goal into a discovery of what worked to captivate and >> motivate college students to follow through with a contribution. >> Maybe that's what you mean by the case method? It's hard to tell from >> the page in question, it's a bit vague but I'm guessing you have some >> experience with or knowledge about the method yourself. > > What I think you're talking about is a case study - documenting what we do > as a way to make it easier for others to follow. I think we should be a case > study of how open source projects can interact with the case method of > teaching, which is a particular thing. > > The case method is a particular way of teaching that I believe is mostly > associated with MBA programs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_method. Most > of the cases I've seen come from Harvard, which has an extensive collection > of them (http://www.hbs.edu/mba/academics/howthecasemethodworks.html, > http://www.hbs.edu/learning/case.html - for an example, see > http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5466.html for an explanation and > http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5466.html for the abstract to an actual case.) > > Think of a case as... an .rpm for curricular content for MBAs. It's a format > and delivery mechanism schools are used to. (Someone who actually has an MBA > may want to step in and correct me at this point.) > > There's one on Red Hat, though it's 10 years old by now: > http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/web/product_detail.seam?R=600009-PDF-ENG&conversationId=630649&E=35930 > > There's also one called "Linux in 2004": > http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/web/product_detail.seam?R=705407-PDF-ENG&conversationId=630649&E=45690 > > Here's the interesting opportunity: these cases are written about companies > - there are no cases (yet!) about communities doing many of the same things > The Open Source Way. > I have been teaching in business and had to take a seminar on case study writing. Case studies are usually wrote to demonstrate and exercise some concepts that were discuses on class. That's why case studies are usually business focused. A new trend have emerge where companies think that if some one wrote about them can be a way of marketing. This has led to some documents that are half case-study half white-papers. White papers in the sense of a success story. There are new needs for academics papers as there are a lot of new programs for NGO management were classical business case study does not fit. For instance, MBAs does not deal on how to recruit and motivate volunteers, which can be very important for NGO and for us. A good case-study, white-paper or mixture, should be a nice to read composition. It that sense, this case studies can have broader use. -- Neville https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Yn1v Linux User # 473217 -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
