Short version: Marketing and Design have help for the remainder of F13, and we're working to scaffold 40 newcomers quickly into helping with specific deliverables (Marketing) and tickets (Design). Longer version: Over the next month, this statement will become more and more true. "During the Spring 2010 semester, 40 first-year students from Allegheny College dove into the Fedora project. Specifically, with the help of the excellent people on the Marketing and Design teams, they engaged in their first experience as open source contributors, learning about blogging, wikis, IRC, and how to create positive change as part of a worldwide community." https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Allegheny_Activism_And_Fedora I'll be writing more details to the lists as we find them - I'm working with the professors and will be on campus for another week working with the class directly. We're trying to be as open and transparent about this process as possible, but there's also the tension of not wanting to completely overwhelm students with what's going on. We are learning how to build this kind of scaffolding - it's going to be frustrating at times from the community side because the first thing we need to figure out in bridging the classroom + the community is how to communicate. It means we may be doing some things opposite of the way we'd usually encourage people to get started in FOSS - experimenting with private emails that later get forwarded to public lists, etc - at least during initial attempts to see if they work out. Basically, we're trying to get them all to work TOSW, but maybe in order to do that quickly we have to start in a less-TOSW manner so we can ramp up to full "yeah, community participation makes sense!"-fu as fast as possible for as many people as possible. We'll do a full report + disclosure of everything after the semester ends (right after F13 releases, actually). I suppose what I'm trying to say is "yes, we're doing strange things; we realize that some of what we're doing is *not* normal, and we're trying our best to be transparent and explain things as we go along, but "the best we can do" may not be "good enough to make sense" for a little longer. Anyway! That disclaimer aside, I'm quite excited - we've got them on small projects like "make a webpage for this new spin" and "develop and teach a microblogging outreach strategy." We'll see more as the week goes by. The students hang out on #allegheny (sometimes - they're still learning IRC, so the channel is still rather empty) if you want to lurk and say hello; that's their sandbox to play in for the class (creating a safe space where the profs can announce things like assignments, lab hours, etc is important), though we'll be pulling them into #fedora-mktg and #fedora-design as much as possible as well. Please please please ping me on IRC (mchua) or email or anywhere if you have any questions, thoughts, ideas, concerns, and especially suggestions on how we can be more transparent about what we're doing - that's a big focus of mine, trying to teach people here how to turn on the firehose. We're going to learn a lot about what Fedora looks like to newcomers as we go along - their end-of-term reflections are supposed to be on that - and that, for me, is the most exciting part about all this. We're learning how to help people help us. That's an update for now, and a big setting-the-stage dump: more thoughts coming as more things happen. Tomorrow morning (Tuesday, 11am-noon EST) is class again, so there may be a flurry of activity around then. --Mel -- marketing mailing list marketing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
