On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Neville A. Cross <nacross@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. > I think either way - the first step is to actually work on some ways to get college students contributing in a bigger way, before we can start case-studying/whitepapering our successes :) And I'd -really- like to see something where we're not just tapping engineering departments for braaaaaaaaaains, but also marketing students, English / technical writing students, art / design, journalism, foreign-language, and I'm sure we could probably find something for the students in the physics department to do, perhaps bending time and space to increase time to be a 28-hour day... :) There are a few routes we could take, not including all the ways I haven't thought of: - A basic in-school ambassador program (of sorts) where students are going out and getting other students to use Fedora, and possibly contribute to whatever they want - Mini-projects: Find university departments who have students who want to free-intern on something. Foreign language students can work on translation type things; IT departments with students who are interested in learning about infrastructure support. Groups of students can work on either on-going, continuous things, or taking on project launches. - Larger projects: Get a student "leader" at a school (we'll call her a mini-stickster!) who may be on an official "internship", paid with small stipend or unpaid, maybe with bonus goodies (we'll send you to a conference!). A project where there might be marketing students working on a marketing plan for some new feature that the engineering students are working on, foreign-language students doing translation of what the english / technical writing students are pumping out for documentation. In other words, a real, honest-to-goodness, cross-team project. I'm just braindumping, of course - Mel also sent an email a while back that was a beginning-of-the-thought-train on getting students involved, which I would reference here but my search skillz seem to be rusty this morning. :\ And you KNOW we have to call it F(ed)ora or something like that. Although that kind of looks like the Project Red branding (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Red)... maybe F.Edora :) -robyn > > -- > 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 > -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
