Archive for September, 2010
Dear Lazyweb:
I want a wireless headset for making video calls (and perhaps gaming someday, though my sense of productivity has resisted this so far). I travel frequently and would like something portable, durable, and with sufficient sound isolation so that when I turn the volume up to accommodate my severe hearing loss, I don’t leak audio to everyone within a 30-foot radius. I’m willing to make an investment in good hardware, but my maximum budget cap is $200, and I’d prefer to stay under $100 if possible. Oh – and it has to work on Linux. (I run whatever the latest Fedora version is.)
Recommendations? Here are some things I’ve considered:
Of course, I could always get a nice headset “for home” (although I’m “home” half the time or less these days, with my travel schedule) and a cheaper, smaller travel version for when I’m on the road… a travel version wouldn’t necessarily need to be wireless. Thoughts? How do those of you who do a lot of VOIP, etc. calls home on the road handle this?
Thursday, September 30th, 2010 | fedora | 2 Comments »
Max and I were talking with Michael Tiemann last week when he brought up a project he’d love to see some students work on.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a “public policy research institution dedicated to analysis and policy impact,” has just published a document on open
source policies.
The survey tracks governmental policies on the use of open source software as reported in the press or other media… The data in this report provides a snapshot of the current state of government open source policy. We divided open source policies into four categories: research, mandates (where the use of open source software is required), preferences (where the use of open source software is given preference, but not mandated), and advisory (where the use of open source software is permitted). We also looked at whether an initiative was made at the national, regional, or local level, and whether it was accepted, under consideration, or rejected. The study has found a total of three hundred and sixty-four open source policy initiatives. –”Government Open Source Policies,” March 2010
Image based on a public domain map of Romance languages in the world from Wikimedia Commons by user Qyd.
It’s 66 pages of graphs and tables, and there’s some fascinating information buried in there:
- “The government of Brazil says it will switch 300,000 government computers from Microsoft’s Windows operating system to open source software like Linux… President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is studying a draft decree which, if approved, would make [OSS] compulsory for federal departments.” (page 7)
- “The Department [of Information Technology in India] is supporting the development of a Hindi Linux distribution, Indix.” (page 15)
- “The Polish Ministry of National Education is advising schools and universities to use Open Source software. The recommendation comes at the end of a volunteer campaign to help schools switch to Open Source.” (page 20)
- “The City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems.” (page 31)
- “All students and teachers at the elementary school in the municipality of Tønder [Denmark] were given a 1 Gbyte USB key pre-loaded with open source applications last week. The municipality as a matter of principle says it will use open source when possible…” (page 31)
- “An act [in New York State] to amend the tax law, in relation to providing a tax credit to individuals for up to two hundred dollars of expenses related to the development and posting of an open source or free license program.” (page 37)
What would happen, Tiemann asked, if someone pulled this into a map mashup? Behold,
the power of the map to explain complex data. What if a class of students, or an independent study, were to go all informatics-ninja on this, threw the data across several world maps, and applied some Edward Tufte visual design love and made these maps manipulable and interactive, like Gapminder? “Hey, this is what it looks like in Brazil. Here’s what Chile is working on. Here’s Japan.”
Interested? Our community team at Red Hat can offer guidance and help any completed work make its way out there into the world. Leave a comment if you’re interested, with a way for us to get in touch with you, or contact me directly and I’ll make sure the right people get your message.
Thursday, September 30th, 2010 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
I often think in written words. I often discover how my brain is turning by putting my hands to a keyboard and seeing what comes out, and sometimes when I’m walking through life, long portions of poems or books will unfurl in my head. Some of then unfurl over and over again.
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn… “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.”
Cooking good food is also wonderfully… nourishing, in a literal as well as a spiritual sense. Tonight: heating olive oil in a (no longer nonstick – I should seriously get cast iron) wok, tossing in a little turmeric and some whole cumin seeds so that they fried, then a thinly sliced summer squash, sauteeing until it softened, pouring in some miso soup to unstick the little bits at the bottom of the pan and also give it some salt, and reducing until the soup had all boiled into the squash. I’d like to actually bike to the farmers’ market this week like I said I would a month ago; if my bike isn’t perfectly cleaned and aligned, that’s okay. (Also, I have a lone zucchini in the fridge and some tomatoes – need more fresh things.) I still agree with what I wrote during an earlier improvisation with chard, though.
I wish I could share the results of my good improvisations with others, though. That there were more people in the house to call over when I’ve found a way to cook something delicious, or when I’ve hit a musical groove, or drawn something cool, or made something shiny.
I’ll use the contents of my spice cabinet more. I’d like to learn what to do with fresh herbs, too. And you can never really go wrong with freshly sliced strawberries and bananas on a bowl of cereal with (soy) milk poured on top, or blueberries or chocolate chips sprinkled into pancake batter. Someday I want to take cooking classes again; the basics let you learn to improvise. Someday I want to take cooking classes in Italy, and to learn how to enjoy large, bold portions of good food and red wine and fresh air. The first I’m pretty good at; the second I don’t have much in the way of experience with, and the third I really could use quite a bit more often. Someday I’d like to get the Indian cookbook that Matt Jadud has and learn about the way they balance spices… $5, though. Not now. Perhaps another day.
The desk provided with this apartment is inadequate in size for my monitor + laptop + assorted technological implements; I don’t even write with pen and paper on it – there’s no surface left to do that on. So I pulled two blue bins, stacked them on each other, and made a secondary desk off to the right side, atop which my new subnetbook (hullo, shrike!) is merrily playing the Across the Universe soundtrack from a little portable disk drive. Someday, I’ll dual-boot it with rawhide (and KDE!); someday I’ll get a headset so I don’t have to use a tangle of headphones and a mic stuck awkwardly into a tissue box as an impromptu stand (even worse: balancing it atop my water bottle). But not tonight. I don’t have to fill all my days and nights with frenzied activity; breathing is good. Learning about that quite a bit these days.
I am appreciating little things right now. The SM Tuna Fish can (saved from recycling!) that now serves as a earbud holder on my desk. The pile of instruments leaning against the air conditioner. The small ways I’ve settled into this place, even temporarily, with gaps for travel – my toothbrush goes here, I pile dishes in the sink like so, this corner is for laundry, the contrast of my new filing bin in the closet next to the ragged cardboard boxes I’ve been hauling mementos in since high school, knowing that I occasionally need to reach through the wires on the floor to reboot my (cheap, terrible) wireless router. It’s not that life is easy, but it’s worthwhile, and I don’t actually feel restless right now, which is… different. Nice, though. I appreciate those moments.
This week will be a tough one; it is the calm before the storm, and the difficult part will lie in keeping it calm. I have a 6-week blizzard of work travel coming up which I am very much looking forward to; there are a bunch of pressures and priorities (none bad – all very good, full of potential) that will be hitting me this week before I leave. Stepping back from that, making sure I keep a clear and level head, making sure I know what’s important and what just looks shiny, making sure I am aware of the capacity and energy I have and don’t just snap into oh my god work work work burnout wheeee mode as I am wont to do (one of my biggest dangers is that my reaction to being tired is to work harder until I’m too tired to realize I’m tired) – that’s going to be the struggle. Fortunately, I’m not doing this alone.
Sunday, September 26th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
It’s been a while since my last big cooking wins, but I’ve had two recently that I just had to share.
Sweet and sour maple kale
This was an accidentally successful adaptation of a recipe for sweet and sour collard greens from the wife (also named Mel) of my friend Greg. The original recipe involved collards, vinegar, and sugar; I had kale instead, and no sugar, so I used apple cider vinegar and replaced the sugar with maple syrup. Served over a bowl of brown rice with a fried egg on top, it’s just about perfect. But it gets better. The next day I marinated some tofu in olive oil and vinegar with herbs (dried thyme and cilantro, if memory serves), pan-fried it in thin slices, added that to the bowl of kale + brown rice + egg, and sprinkled sesame seeds on top. A little bowl of heaven.
Curried carrot soup
Carrots, peeled and sliced into thin coins, sauteed in a bit of butter, and then some curry paste mixed in. Toss that around in the wok a little longer until the carrots soften, then pour in miso broth (what I had on hand, but it adds a lovely nutty ricey flavor that I enjoy). After that simmers for a while, blend until creamy. This is where my magic super blender comes in handy (a Vita-Mix – my first-apartment present to myself, and yes, it’s worth every penny of the $300 it cost, it’s that much better than a cheap blender) – it makes the soup creamy without the actual use of cream. I’m enjoying this right now, and it is also heaven in a tiny bowl.
Le Noms: patterns over the years
So… I’ve been paying more attention to, uh, not killing myself with work lately. Where by lately I mean “slowly, over the past few weeks/months/years, at an incrementally accelerating place.” And I’ve noticed a couple things.
- Refined and processed foods, particularly things with lots o’ sugar and corn syrup, make me feel like crap. This is a far cry from my 14-year-old self, who chugged Mountain Dew by the liter and carried sugar packets with her at all times for quick snacks.
- Breakfast actually does makes me feel better all day. I’m not sure if it’s the food or the act of pausing before I launch into the morning – or both – but it turns out to be… an actual good idea. Who woulda thunk?
- I still love the taste and texture of good meat, but it takes much more effort to digest – so I no longer eat meat casually (i.e. I generally won’t grab a fast-food burger). If I’m going to give my stomach more work to do, it’s going to be worth it. Dairy is delicious, but makes me feel stuffy – I’m not lactose intolerant per se, but I tend to cough and blow my nose more if I’m chugging down the milk. I’m still a carb addict, but things like plain pasta and bread give me too fast an energy boost, and then I crash… but vegetables, beans, etc. taste great, work well, and keep me going.
- Oils, spices, and eggs are wonderful things.
- I’m lazy, so the less cooking I have to do to get something to become food, the happier I am.
everything.The end effect of all this is that I find myself increasingly hankering for a mostly vegetarian diet with very little dairy, lots-o-veggies and whole grains and beans, and fresh and spicy and minimally processed This… is not something I ever actually expected to happen. And yeah, I’ll still go for a 5-hotdog blowout, or have a giant steak, or down a pint of ice cream for fun, and when I go to the Philippines I plan on stuffing myself silly with various kinds of candies and fried bananas and roasted pig. That’s what celebrations are for. But in general, I really do feel better when I eat this stuff.
I want to make sure I’m getting enough protein and everything in my diet, so I was thinking of actually keeping a food log at some point and then seeing a nutritionist – which I think my health insurance covers somehow, I just need to figure out how that works. I have very little idea what nutritionists do or how I can best prepare to ask one lots of questions so that he or she can help most… if you’ve ever seen one, please let me know. I’d like to make the most of the time I book with them.
The car thing
I want to give a shout-out to Harry from Sports and Compacts in Raleigh, NC, who did a patient and awesome job of caring for my aging ’93 Lexus ES300 the other day, and explained everything to me as he went along. I’ve still got to replace my windshield wipers, but everything else is in great shape and I have A/C working again (and I know where the fuseboxes are and how to figure out where wiring runs)! It took less than an hour and $50, but he just made me feel a lot more grounded with respect to my car, the shape it’s in, and how to think about caring for and diagnosing it.
Oh. And I’m becoming increasingly tempted by Alex’s suggestion that my next car be a Miata. Perhaps when I come back for grad school… we’ll see what finances and my transport situation look like then.
Exercising
As with diet, so with exercise. Being able to use and move my physical body well is something that I’m slowly spiral-learning. One consistent bit of feedback I received from everyone who helped me with my RSI is that I have no muscle tone – sometimes I look explosive and energetic, but that’s because I’m literally throwing myself from one position to another, unable to consistently support things like… oh, I don’t know, posture – in between. I just hurl myself into chairs, across rooms, down hallways; when I’ve tried to exercise before, I do the same thing – flinging myself through running a mile, throwing weights up and down – and this worsens my RSI sometimes because the structure is weak, my posture collapses. So I said – okay, fine. Slowly. How do I build up that sort of strength so I can move out into the (exciting! running! jumping! hurrah!) things I want to do?
The end result was that I started working through a book of (painstakingly explained – I got the most detailed book possible) Pilates exercises, and… wow. Awareness and control are hard, and I am incapable of slowly raising myself from a lying position to a sitting position without using my hands. (Also, there are more abdominal muscles in the human body than I had previously been aware of.) Unlike prior exercise things of mine, I’m starting slowly and doing just a little bit at a time; the goal here is consistency. I haven’t missed a single day since I started (easy, since it takes me less than 10 minutes, since that’s… probably all I can handle). I’m not working to exhaustion; I’m working until I can no longer control the movements I’m doing, then (successfully) fighting the temptation to go “bwahaha! I can power through another twenty of these!”
Slow, patient things. They’re hard, but… they are also what I need to learn. Otherwise, the Mel won’t actually last for a full lifetime. I’m pretty sure I’ve voided any warranties I came with by this point, what with the stress and lack of sleep and utter disregard for food and exercise and the tendency to go way overboard with work or anything else I’m doing – I burn bright and explosively, which is all well and good and I don’t want to stop doing that – but I also need to learn the slower, more sustainable, warm glow that comes from banked coals and slowly cooking charcoal. I need a base to explode from. Too many of the things I do still stem from an overactive kid’s idea of how to take care of herself – I left home to go to school when I was 14 – and one of the biggest things I’ve learned over the past 10 years is how to look at and rewire them.
It’s weird. Maybe this is how people become grown-ups. I know my own adulthood is still very much a work in progress… and I hope it always will be this way. Never too old to learn.
Friday, September 24th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
When I think about what “becoming athletic” means to me, I think of things like this – not just raw strength or endurance, but control for the purpose of expressiveness. I would like to be able to wield my own body as ably as I wield my thoughts and words.
Monday, September 20th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Months ago, when Greg DeKoenigsberg and I were still co-workers at Red Hat, I was running around frantically trying to do everything, not getting enough sleep or rest, losing track of what I should be focusing on because I was in full-out run-at-panic mode. I was a young and energetic high-pass filter, and had gotten away with that for years because I was so young and energetic that I was used to being able to hit everything I needed to hit by dint of sheer force of will and massive outpouring of effort. I didn’t actually need to focus or decide what to focus on. But this strategy was starting to break down.
Greg stopped me and explained the difference between the urgent – what I was responding to as aforementioned young and energetic high-pass filter – and the important, which… I had an occasional vague and shifting idea of, but didn’t really think about. Then he told me to read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Now, I actually enjoy books like that. They make me think. But sometimes I feel as if I ought to dismiss them as silly, hand-wavy stuff, mostly because they can be uncomfortable. I’m reading through it now, and actually working through it slowly (as opposed to my usual “entire book! one sitting! go!” info-digest-mode) and one of the things it asks you to do is write a mission statement. I felt really silly. Then I realized that I felt silly because it was uncomfortable, and sat down and actually did it. Awkwardly. Possibly not too well. But I did do it – had it in the back of my head for the past month or so, thought about it occasionally, tried to be quiet and listen – and today I sat down and wrote things out for the first time. It’s not perfect, but it’s a decent first capture, and now that it’s out there, I’ll be able to tune it as I go along and learn to listen better.
Anyway. Here’s my personal mission statement, first draft.
I am an interdependent being. I love and care for my family first and
foremost, and my friends, and I allow them to love and care for me. I
acknowledge and believe that I am a wonderful and worthwhile being, and I
trust that others will see that because of the way I choose to live my
life. I trust that those who love me will always be there to catch me. I
am self-reliant, but I am not alone.
I never betray a trust that has been placed in me.
I live in the present. I live with joy and share that joy with those
around me.
I dream wildly and freely, and pursue the dreams I have. I seek to
empower and and assist others in reaching their dreams along the way as I
pursue my own. I prepare myself at all times so that I may be ready to
take opportunities to realize my dreams, and I am awake and aware of
myself and the world around me so that I may recognize those
opportunities when I am blessed with them.
I am thankful and humbled by the graces that have come into my life.
I am a steward of my talents and my resources. I will make sure I
have the physical, financial, mental, emotional, and spiritual means to
care for myself and others. I actively seek opportunities to share what I
have and what I know.
I live with mindfulness and intent.
I strive to clearly communicate my thoughts, feelings, actions, and
goals to others. I default to open, even when nobody else is watching.
I am a learner and a teacher. I lead by teaching, and I teach by
example. The most important thing for me to model to my students is how
to live a good life, rich and full of learning and of love.
I run fast and hard and joyfully, and I stop and breathe when I or
someone I am running with needs it. I do not leave anyone behind.
I take time to reflect and to discern in stillness what it is that I
must do before I do it. I continuously seek and recalibrate against that
which I am called by God to be. I pay attention to the details of the
things that are important. I do not get distracted by the trivial and
unimportant.
I actively invite feedback and thank others for the lessons they are
teaching me, especially the lessons that are hardest for me to learn. I
seek to listen and to understand before I speak.
I face my fears and difficulties and embrace and thank them as
opportunities for learning and growth.
I am fully aware that it is always my choice, at any given moment, to
do what is right. I am grateful for this freedom and the
responsibilities it places upon me.
I allow myself to feel, hope, and love. Even when it is painful, it
is still worth it to be fully alive.
I’m curious whether others have done the same thing, and if so, what yours is, how the process went, and what it has done for you. I’m learning to be a person rather than a hyperactive producer of work deliverables, and I haven’t previously articulated the kind of person I want to be, but this is the best I can express it at the moment.
Sunday, September 19th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I just finished a call with Andy Pethan (Olin ’11), an old college buddy of mine, who’s doing his humanities capstone on education and wanted to learn how to have his work be part of an open source style collaborative community. Andy’s already got an interest in open education; he and Colin Zwiebel (Olin ’12) gave a talk on open data in education at the LinuxCon 2010 education mini-summit. Now he was looking to apply that to his own project. I typed out some notes during our call and thought they might be of use to others trying to do the same.
What Andy’s project is:
Exploring and Evaluating Rapid Teacher Training Programs
“My name is Andy Pethan. I’m a senior at Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA… Given my interest in education and desire to learn through exploration, I am doing a capstone project in education. My capstone will focus on rapid training programs for young teachers, often aimed at volunteers without a degree in education or teachers certification. This includes the pre-service training and continuous education these young teachers receive. I will focus more on high school teachers than other age groups. [For my final deliverable, I will] design a “teacher boot camp” experience that will give Olin students a set of baseline skills that will allow them to excel early in the classroom and continue to grow in their passion for teaching.“ — taken from Andy’s wiki notes
What Andy had already done:
Andy had already started a wiki for his work, and licensed everything on it CC-BY-SA, which was a great start. He was using that as a place to point his interviewees to (“here’s the material I wrote, do you have any comments?”) so he was already thinking about getting feedback and putting resources out in the open. (He did, of course, ask interviewees permission for everything to be online and open-licensed.)
The question was where he could go from there.
My recommendations:
After talking with Andy for a bit about what he was trying to accomplish, we came up with the following strategy.
- Migrating his interview notes and curriculum development to Wikieducator. Andy had exactly the right idea in putting his work out on a wiki – but where could he put it up where more people were likely to see it? Wikieducator is an online community of practice that includes many K-12 teachers doing course development with open education resources, both making those resources and sharing tips on how to make and apply them in the classroom. It made sense for Andy to join up with people doing the same sort of thing he was.
How he migrates things over is going to be important – he can’t just dump content online and expect people to pick it up… he needs to figure out how to open a dialog with that community on what he’s doing. I suggested messaging their mailing list and saying “hey, I have existing work for an ongoing project – here’s my current wiki link – how can I best move it into your community?” and taking the recommendations that followed, because then they’d essentially be teaching him how to participate in their community. End result: openly editable resources in a place where people doing similar things are more likely to run into it and maybe – maybe – pitch in. It’s not guaranteed to happen, but it opens up the possibility of you being pleasantly surprised.
- Teaching an alpha version of his “teacher bootcamp” as a P2PU course during the second half of term. Instead of being ready to teach his bootcamp at the end of the semester (at which point people usually get hosed and drop things), I told Andy, why not have already taught it? That way you’ll know your resource set (on Wikieducator, since you’re posting all your materials there) is complete, have feedback from students, have a first run you or others could pick up on. Andy thought this sounded great because it would force him to spend the first half of term preparing for something very concrete, and he would have to be on top of things to deliver a class each week – perfectionism goes out the window when you have to walk into a classroom tomorrow – and there would be real-time feedback from actual users on his deliverables.What’s more, since he’d be doing this online, his deliverable could then include a lot of content he wouldn’t have to generate himself : student work (all posted under open licenses), logs of his interactions with students on the material… and again, it would give him access to more people to have a dialog with, beyond the group on campus he’ll be talking with anyway.
Finally, all the needed materials for the course would be open content, meaning anyone could learn it in the future without needing to buy expensive books; Andy’s using books as his references for making the class, but he’d then write his own notes on the topics and post those as (fair-use) open content files online, so folks could use his notes as a minimum resource that would get them through the class, and then follow up on their own with the books if they were able to and wanted to access topics in more depth than the course covered.
What effect this might have on Andy’s work
Once you do these things, I told him, you can look into contacting other places because everything you’re doing will be clearly online and readable instead of being stored inside your brain. What about submitting a talk proposal to Big Ideas Fest to present your project, instead of just doing your final presentation to the people in your class? What about getting in touch with the Open High School teachers and interviewing them on how they do classroom management for their online courses, because you’ll now be doing a P2PU class? What about looking at the current education-related courses on P2PU and getting in touch with their instructors about how they went about setting up their course material, and if there’s anything from their courses you could repurpose for yours, or any of their students who might be interested in your class next term? What about asking the folks you’re already interviewing if they’d like to come in and be guest speakers for your class? Poking OERCommons to see if your material is of interest to the teachers they work with?
This would also save him a lot of “conversation-starting” time. Andy’s the sort of person who’ll walk up to anybody and start talking about the stuff he’s working on; his elevator pitches are excellent (I envy them, and need to get him to teach me how to do that), and he can get complete strangers interested in and involved in what he’s doing. But he’s got to give that startup explanation over and over again. So I pointed out to him that if he’s putting his work out there in a way that lets others easily collaborate on it, he could (1) contact the people who spontaneously started helping him and engage with them in real-time discussion – chat, phone, in-person – without needing to explain the project or get them involved/interested, because if they contribute they’re already involved and interested – and (2) point new people he’d like to talk with in the direction of those conversations, so they can get up to speed with the sort of dialogues Andy is having with others ahead of time, and jump straight into that when they meet Andy in person without him having to spend 30 minutes explaining the idea of a teacher bootcamp.
His final project proposal is due Tuesday. I’m not sure how many of these recommendations will ultimately end up in Andy’s final proposal, but I would love to see that class go up… heck, I would want to take it if he taught it. It’s a plus for Andy in terms of concreteness, feedback, and exposure to a lot more people also interested – and more experienced – on the topic; it’s a plus for Wikieducator in terms of having more material on it and having that material used by the students of Andy’s P2PU class, and it’s a plus for P2PU in terms of having yet another excellent course on it.
Any thoughts or further recommendations for Andy?
Saturday, September 18th, 2010 | olin, teaching open source | No Comments »
A translation from the Spanish of a blog post by Tatica titled “Colaborador? Embajador? Mentor? Qué eres? This isn’t a literal translation – I may have gotten a few parts wrong because my Spanish reading skills (supplemented by Google Translate) aren’t particularly good – but I tried to capture my understanding of what Tatica was trying to say.
Although I have been part of the Fedora community for nearly four years, I’ve seen that many people don’t fully understand the differences between the levels of collaboration (or hierarchy) that can occur in a community. Whether you’re a Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, or FreeBSD contributor, the community you participate in can help you learn to become the contributor you want to be.
Who makes up Fedora?
Having an organized community or at least a clearly defined purpose is the main thing that turns users into contributors. When people come to you for information and help, or when you talk on IRC or the mailing lists for answers, we’re supposed to set a good example. However, many people are afraid to say “I don’t know” and prefer to remain silent if they don’t know the answer to the question they’re asked. What if we said to these newcomers “Hey, I don’t know either, but what if we learned together?”
What happens after I join the mailing lists and start hanging out on IRC and going to events? It’s at this point where you start seeing differences between different project communities. It’s at this point that users may decide to change and try another distribution, or stay and start contributing to that particular community. My own journey from user to contributor was very fast, so I will try to break it down a bit.
“What, me a contributor?” The first thing you have to realize is that you’re going to have to do work; you need to accomplish things. Your main motivator for a “career” within the community should be pride in knowing that you’re contributing to the software that you use. Simply attending events and giving talks about the work of others isn’t enough – you must contribute yourself. If you do that, recognition and responsibilities will follow.
Many times people fail to come to the community and collaborate because they don’t think they can contribute anything. That’s one of the biggest misconceptions I’ve found. If you want to be part of a community, you should know that the community will also be your school – they will teach you how to contribute in the ways you want to help. When I started with Fedora, I couldn’t really draw, much less speak or write English. I learned English here, and am now learning Porguguese. Learning is an everyday thing in an open source community.
“Hurrah for Ambassadors!” In Fedora, we say Ambassadors are frequent contributors to the community; our list of Ambassadors is the list of people who can spread the good word about the project. However, many people forget that to be an Ambassador, you need to be a contributor first – not because the wiki page says it’s a requirement, but because it’s the right thing to do. Every day I get 2-3 emails from users who want to be Ambassadors because they want to spread the usage of Fedora by giving lectures or workshops. You don’t need to be an Ambassador to spread Fedora. Some people believe the “Ambassador” title is like a “license” that you need to to give lectures or broadcast on Fedora, and some people have even sent me messages saying “I want to be an Ambassador so that Fedora will send me places.”
Now, as Ambassadors, is this the message that we want to send and what we want Ambassadors to be? We need to set a good example. For my part, since I became a contributor I’ve been trying to pitch in on what I can, and now I’ve started to focus more on specific things because I usually try to do too much. I’ve worked on Fedora art and events, translations, websites, writing content, and now working on the development of the LATAM Fedora community magazine. If all Ambassadors set a good example by showing a high level of commitment, the people who want to join will see our example and follow our lead without us having to explain a lot.
“And now a mentor?” After three years of participating in Fedora, I was asked to be a mentor to new Ambassadors. My role is to discover and guide new talent that will make our community better. I must be honest; I’m tough on new recruits. I filter out those who think that they can just install Fedora and become Ambassadors two weeks later without investing time in learning how to contribute to the community. However, if you just show me – even by a single email – that you want to take the next step, I will help you see how easy it can be.
Mentoring may be a scary task, but you should do it! I think I tend to be overinvolved with the people I mentor. Some of them do fail along the way. I try to teach them what they can do based on their skills, and I try to introduce them to others in their city and encourage them to teach others what they know. I’m not sure what the other mentors do, but I think they all do the same.
Being part of the community isn’t just about having Fedora, Ubuntu, or Debian installed on your machine. It’s not about appearing in events or delivering brochures, or about being on a mailing list or IRC channel but never saying anything. Being part of the community is about participating, learning and teaching that we are an example to the rest of the world on how to perservere and overcome obstacles. We spend our time doing wonderful things to improve the technology and help the other people who are doing this alongside us.
Now, who do you think you are to your community?
Thursday, September 16th, 2010 | fedora | No Comments »
Sugar is too hard to download and install. Walter was recently surprised to hear (during an interview) that even “advanced users” (I’m assuming he meant the computer-savvy who were new to Sugar in particular) had difficulty with our installation instructions, so he went and did something about it.
Walter’s new revision draft is meant to be an improvement over the current Downloads page (last edited August 21, 2010).
I offered to try and drum up some testing to see if this is actually an improvement, and what remaining rough edges need to be sanded off. The catch is that most of us can’t help with this directly, since we probably already have Sugar running on our machine and are used to getting around the current install instructions to make it work. Therefore! Here’s what you can do to help.
If you’re a Sugar old-timer and can figure out the new install instructions with no trouble:
Congratulations, you’ve learned how to work around our existing documentation! Find yourself some newcomers and sit down with them and work through instructions below in person – remember to send things to the iaep list so we can all learn from it!
And remember, when they’re looking at the page, don’t say anything – don’t take the keyboard from them, don’t do things for them, don’t interrupt them. They’re doing very important work – the work of telling us exactly where the shortcomings in our documentation are. When they point them out, help them by fixing the documentation together and then allowing them to continue proceeding by themselves.
If you’re new to Sugar or think the install instructions are hard to understand:
You are exactly the kind of person whose help we need. See, most of us have been using Sugar so long we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a new user puzzled by install instructions – we’ve lost the ability to improve them because we’ve gotten too used to how difficult they are to understand. Here’s what we’d love help with.
- Check out the proposed redesign for the download/install page.
- Try to get Sugar running – whatever platform you have, whatever means you’d like to use. Do not ask for help yet, even if you’re getting stuck. We’re trying to find out whether the instructions on that page – and linked from that page – are sufficient to enable folks to get through the installation on their own.
- If you do get stuck, write down (or take a screenshot and circle) everything you can think of about what’s confusing about the page, what you had to take a guess at, and as much as you can describe about where and why you’re stuck. This is incredibly valuable feedback that only you can give – you’re showing us how our documentation can be improved, pointing out things we don’t realize we ought to fix – until you come along and tell us. (If you manage to make it through to the end, this sort of feedback on how it could have been better is valuable anyway – but you can also skip to step 5).
- Now that you have these notes written up, take them and send them in an email to the it’s an education project mailing list (iaep at lists dot sugarlabs dot org). If you cc me (mel at sugarlabs dot org) on the email, I’ll make sure your feedback gets looked at and brought to the right people.
- After you send that email, someone should come along and help you finish the installation. When you have Sugar working on your machine, if you can drop us a line again (on the iaep mailing list, and cc me) so we know you were taken care of and that things are working for you now, we’d very much appreciate knowing that you’re all set.
Thank you!
Thursday, September 16th, 2010 | fedora, soas, sugar | No Comments »
This is a followup to the Fedora Classroom class on distributed collaboration tools I advertised teaching earlier – I’m trying to show by example how to do good followup on a remote-attendance event. (Mmm, meta.) Thanks to everyone who came yesterday! I was… honestly, stunned by how well it went. Lots of participation, lots of questions, lots of insight for me to digest in terms of how to teach these things better in the future.
As is common for so many of us, I immediately got hosed with (unexpected!) life and (unexpected!) work right after running yesterday’s classroom session on distributed collaboration tools. BUT: the first rule of followup is “release early, release often.” Get something out within 24 hours, no matter what it is – perfection can come later.
Thanks to Zodbot (an IRC logging bot we covered in the session), I can send this in just a few minutes because we’ve already got condensed notes from the session – so those of you looking to find out what happened. Personally, I’d read the full log starting at the point where we introduce the concept of Fedora Classroom if you’re new to Fedora, or the point where we start talking about the dynamics of remote realtime meetings if you’ve been around Fedora for a little while.
I’ll be following up with longer on Thursday and individual pings for the folks who asked questions – feel free to shoot questions here in the meantime.
By the way, I timed myself… it took me exactly 8 minutes to write and post the followup email to the Fedora Classroom and Teaching Open Source lists where I’d advertised earlier, and to repurpose that text for this blog post on the Fedora and TOS planets. See? Doesn’t take much when you have your tools do the heavy lifting for you (thanks, Zodbot!) Actually, I’d have been done in half the time but it took another 5 minutes to put in all the links.
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
