Posts that are fedora-ish
Dear lazyweb, my engineering education research group’s infrastructure is driving me nuts, and I’d like to fix it.
We’re qualitative researchers, and we do a lot of interviews – for instance, talking with faculty who teach open source (me) or engineers on interdisciplinary teams (Robin and Tiago) or people who mentor minority STEM students (Joi). Whenever we do an interview with someone, we always send them their transcripts and our writeups on them afterwards to catch mistakes and make sure they’re okay with what we’re saying about them in our papers. Privacy and confidentiality are vital.
And that’s the problem. Security is in ZOMG mode, so we can’t simply stick these up on Google Docs, which was one suggestion – creating individual password-protected posts on our WordPress instance was another, which I instantly flinched at and nixed. For similar reasons, Dropbox was a no – not to mention I had nightmares of how that would (not) scale. Having one person email every subject is a nightmare, even if we use a separate group email account; inboxes are not made for workflow management, let alone collaborative workflow management.
And so I turn to you, o internet, for any ideas you might have. It’s safe to assume everyone involved has email and internet access. It’s also safe to say they’re probably not computer geeks and that any solution needs to be web-based or cross-platform. We can get hosting space and stand things up ourselves, but don’t have a dedicated professional sysadmin (I’m the closest thing we’ve got) and don’t have much budget – if we have any at all – to throw at services. I may be able to beg IT to do something for us if they already have instances of that software running for other people, but there are no guarantees.
What would you do? Here’s what I’ve thought of.
- Drupal. With customization, you can have any content workflow ever known to mankind. That’s a ton of customization, though – and we’d need to make unique logins for everyone, which is a pain (we don’t want to force our interviewees to acquire Yet Another Web Login if we don’t have to). IT will know what Drupal is, but I’m not sure they’ll want to babysit something so heavily customized.
- Etherpad. Opens up the option of collaborative transcript editing and easy viewing of a writeup’s edit history, which might be handy especially for remote (phone, but sometimes videoconferencing or text chat) interviewees. Security is sketchtacular, though; you can protect each pad with an unique password, but whoever knows the password can read the pad. And I am pretty sure that if I asked IT about hosting an Etherpad instance for us, they’d laugh at me (fairly enough – it’s not the easiest thing in the world to maintain).
- Request Tracker. Track each interview as a ticket, which preserves email exchanges with interview subjects for future researchers on the team. Use RTFMs (premade text snippets for quickly composing common replies) to standardize and semi-automate responses. We can assign tickets (interviews) to specific projects and set per-project and per-ticket permissions, and our interviewees only see the email-based interface which makes it easier for them. IT knows RT (I’m pretty sure they use it themselves), and we need something very close to plain vanilla, so they might even do it on our behalf. This is my favorite option so far, but it’s pretty… culture-shock inducing for non-software people (which is everyone else in my research group).
Ideas?
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012 | ene, fedora, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
In the course of going through the literature on open access (OA), I’ve come across a ton of resources for folks who want to learn about open access. Most of them are okay. A few of them are gems. Here are the gems.
Anyone who writes and publishes (researchers, authors, students, and those who want to work with them) should read this little document on Author’s Rights [pdf] by Charles Bailey that gives a clear how-to and why-to introduction on getting started with open access. It covers reasons for making things open access, explains copyright and publisher agreements, shows you how to quickly find (and respond to) the policies of the publishers you use, explains creative commons licences and open access journals… I found it to be an easy-to-read guide (10 pages not counting cover page and bibliography) that I’ll use as a quick-reference in the future.
For anyone who wants to give a quick talk on open access, use or remix Isaac Gilman’s sharp little (public-domain!) slidedeck on “open access in 15 minutes or less.”
Finally, if you’re an open access advocate at your institution and looking for some empirical data to take to people, print out this handy crib sheet for conversations on open access with both authors and administrators. It contains a list of selling points for each audience, plus (I love this) links to actual data and examples to back up as many points as possible.
It doesn’t quite cover everything, though, so you’ll also want to download all 17 pages of The Open Access Citation Advantage by Alma Swan, which is an annotated bibliography covering (as of 2010) the empirical research that’s been done on the effects of OA on, quite simply, “the things researchers get evaluated on.” It’s essentially a big table of papers and their findings, so you can (for instance) search for studies specific to your field, sort by sample size, check their analytical approaches, and so on. They consistently find that, yes, Virginia, there is an OA citation advantage. (Of the 31 studies covered, 27 demonstrated a clear OA advantage, and 4 demonstrated either no advantage of a disadvantage — if anyone takes a look at those 4, I’d love to hear what you find!)
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 | ene, fedora, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
This morning was my first sprint on my Olin Open Access Institutional Repository independent study. As a refresher, making content open access (OA) means…
By open access, we mean its immediate, free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose.
–from Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship
I spent it (unexpectedly) engrossed in Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship (by James M. Donovan and Carol A. Watson), which took articles from an 18-year span from each of 3 law journals published by the University of Georgia and checked for correlations between citations of an article and its open access status (having “open access” status here was defined by “we could find the full text by using Google” – regardless of having the full text out there was technically legal or not).
Short version: yes, there was a nontrivial impact; OA papers got cited 58% more than non-OA ones. No surprise here; we’ve found this before. Two new things caught my attention, though.
First, how long does the “OA impact” last? 17 years. Donovan and Watson found the impact on citations trailed off over time, petering out at the 17 year mark. Why 17? No idea. (Would they have found different things if they’d looked at more than 18 years’ worth of data? I don’t know.) I wonder what you could do with a knowledge of that 17-year timeout – is that 17 years after publication, or 17 years after it first gets placed online? If it’s the latter, could individual researchers use this as a strategy to revitalize interest in work they did over two decades ago?
Second, OA had no (significant) impact on nonscholarly use of the material. The paper was written about legal scholarship, so what this means in practice is that while OA increases the use of an individual article by legal academics, it did not increase its use by courts. I wonder if similar things hold true in engineering; does OA make research more likely to be used by practicing engineers building real products, or does it only have an impact on engineering researchers? (Yes, I realize most practicing engineers hardly ever read research papers.) If it doesn’t, what strategies would facilitate the transfer of engineering research discoveries into the “real world” of “actual products” and the things that “working engineers” know?
Fascinating.
Next week I’ll finish the reading portion – far more efficiently, because I plan on coming in with printed copies of pre-triaged papers. Boy, am I glad we budgeted some start-up time; this morning’s biggest accomplishment was getting a basic Zotero workflow up and running (not the software so much as the habits I developed in order to use it effectively). I only managed to read one paper, mostly because I spent far too much time taking overly detailed notes on it; in the future, I’ll reserve detailed note-taking for really important papers and write short summaries for the rest. (Next week I’ll arrive with a printed stack of papers already triaged by importance and really try to blast through them.)
I also found the first reading for the open* reading group Seb Benthall and I are going to do this term: selections from The Access Principle, which (as its subtitle says) makes a “Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship” – and an empirical one, too.
Wednesday, January 11th, 2012 | ene, fedora, olin, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
My brother Jason hit upon a great analogy for explaining cloud computing to our (nontechnical) parents late last night: it’s like a laundromat.
You want clean laundry. You can put a washer and dryer in your own apartment and have access to it whenever you want, but you have to pay for the machines, maintain them, and are limited to one washer and one dryer load at all times unless you buy more machines. But why would you? That single machine is probably already sitting empty most of the time, because most people do a couple loads once a week.
But here’s the thing – you wanted clean laundry, not a washer and dryer. And all your neighbors probably want clean laundry as well. And furthermore, you’re likely to do laundry at different times; if you do your laundry on Saturday and Mr. Jones next door does his on Sundays, you and Mr. Jones could theoretically share the same washer and dryer and save money.
Scale that idea up into a business and you get the laundromat. It’s got a lot of machines, so whenever you need laundry done, you can walk over, stuff them into unused machines, and pay by the load. You’re no longer limited to one washer and one dryer; if your little cousin gets the flu and projectile-vomits all over the house, you can do 10 loads simultaneously, and you don’t need to ask for permission to do it – you just pay for more loads. If you go visit your grandparents for a month, your laundry costs you $0. Not only do you not need to maintain the washers and dryers, you’re likely to be using bigger, better, and newer machines than you’d get for yourself.
The laundromat is like a public cloud.
Okay, said our parents. But then why would anyone want a private cloud?
Think about printers in your office, I said. Having your own washer-dryer is like giving everyone in the company their own desktop printer; using the copy shop across the street is like the laundromat. But as the big boss, you might not want all your employees using the copy shop across the street because… gee, that’s a lot of confidential information floating in a public place (whether your nervousness is justified or not). So what do you do? You get a giant super-printer, stick it in the office, and hook everybody up to that. That big printer is yours; it’s in your office, on your network, maintained by your IT staff. The printer is like a private cloud.
And in practice, you’re going to get a few employees with desktop printers, a bunch of big office printers that get heavy usage, and people running across the street to the copy shop when they’re on business trips or in a hurry to get 10,000 binders made right before the giant Sales meeting. That’s a hybrid model.
They got it.
Saturday, December 31st, 2011 | fedora | 4 Comments »
I finished my first lit review today. Or rather, I should say “I finished the first dot release of the pre-alpha version of my first lit review today,” because I look at this and know that it’s nowhere near where I want it. Then again, “where I want it to be” is at the start of my dissertation about… oh, 3-5 years from now. All things considered, it’s not bad for someone’s first real attempt at independently scouting out scholarly sources.
From the introduction:
This is a preliminary and extremely incomplete literature review surveying the current academic scholarship on open source and education. It can be summarized in three words: there’s not much. I’ll begin… by discussing what I am not looking at… I am not looking at the use of open source software in educational contexts… open source as an IT solution. Nor am I looking at open source with a focus on content licensing… open source as an information access solution.
Instead, I am concerned with an analysis of what sorts of practices and processes for learning are exhibited in open source communities themselves and how these practices might be made transferable back to the classroom. In other words, I see open source as a way of operating learning communities: radically cross-functional, collaboratively constructed realtime transparency.
Aaaaand here’s the whole dang thing, below. Why push now? Well, after a certain point, I decided to stop agonizing over it and release early and often because hey, maybe what I need are some other eyeballs to kick me out of the mental ruts I’ve gotten into. Also, I finished writing it and turned it in 20 minutes ago (which may explain why the quality of the writing degrades considerably in the last 3 paragraphs). It’s been a rough week. Month. Semester, really.
Literature review: the open source way and education (alpha)
Essentially, I spent my entire first semester of grad school finding that nobody’s really done research on my topic of choice (engineering education happening in open source communities) before – which is both awesome (because that means I get to do it) and depressing (because WHY AM I ALL BY MYSELF OUT HERE I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING). And now I’m standing here unsure of what to do next; I want to read some of these more deeply, talk about them with people, have folks tell me where I’m wrong and why, get into debates over a bunch of these ideas, throw them off the wall, bounce them off other people’s heads…
And so I fling this out to you, my friends. Thoughts? I apologize that this is not in comic book form – it was a little harder to get away with that for a lit review… but I’ll keep trying.
Thursday, December 15th, 2011 | fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
Last night was one of those nights where I wished I could sit down with lots of people and give them giant hugs and endless thank-yous. Friday was my last day at Red Hat after an incredible 2.5 years, and it feels really good to finally break the news to people; I wish we’d been able to get the word out earlier, but it’s been a hectic last few weeks working on the wrap-up details while the semester’s been ending (I’m still writing individual thank-you notes to Red Hatters in between multiple final papers) – so sometimes you acknowledge that perfection is impossible and work instead on making the good real.
I’m tremendously grateful to everyone who took a chance on me and helped me grow; if OLPC was where I took my first stumbles into the big, wide world of open source and learned to walk, Red Hat was where I learned to run, and to run alongside the best. The chance to grow both Fedora Marketing and FUDCon into mature, community-run entities, the chance to lead POSSE from an idea to a reality that’s touched dozens of professors and hundreds of students around the world, the opportunity to play a crucial role in the early stages of Teaching Open Source, the chance to learn from everyone around me – these are experiences I couldn’t have had anywhere else, and things I could not have done without my kickass teammates, mentors, and friends. The list is far too long to include here, but suffice it to say it’s been the people who’ve made the journey as amazing as it’s been, and I have no plans to say goodbye.
I’m still going to be in many of the same spaces I was in before (especially Fedora, TOS, and opensource.com), so in practical terms, what this means is that I’m swapping a .com email address for an .edu one so I can devote more time to graduate school and other personal projects along the same general theme of Awesomeness and Learning. And I’m still doing research on the open source way — what are the elements of the methodology, and how can they be made systematically and measurably transferable and reproducible? It looks like answering that question (or whatever it turns into) will be a large part of the next few years of my life, and I’m looking forward to it and will definitely keep you all updated.
It’s a big wide world out there. Time for the next adventure.
Sunday, December 11th, 2011 | fedora, olin, Red Hat, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
Matt Jadud and I are giving a talk this Friday at his undergraduate alma mater, Kenyon College. I haven’t seen Matt since POSSE this summer and am looking forward to long conversations with him on the nature of academic life and other things, possibly punctuated by bottles of my favorite rootbeer.
Our topic is how liberal arts students can get involved in open source.
Take a Walk in the Commons: Open Source and the Liberal Arts
As educators in the liberal arts, we try to prepare our students for a lifetime of learning. When we introduce our students to open communities as part of their classroom experience, we provide them with an opportunity to engage with the world around them and help solve real problems for real people. Participation in open communities as part of the undergraduate experience provides ways of developing and practicing communication, teamwork, and leadership skills—and contrary to popular belief, sometimes the most valuable contributions are the nontechnical ones.
In this talk, we’ll explore the wide range of opportunities for students to get involved in open source and open communities, with examples, case studies, and concrete next steps you can take as an educator or student to bring these opportunties into your classrooms and projects. Regardless of whether your interests are intellectual property law, computing in the sciences, enabling government transparency, language learning, or something else entirely, there’s an open community waiting for students to contribute and make a difference.
As of today (November 30, 2011) our slides are almost-but-not-quite done – comments welcome on what we do have, which is up on github. Slides were created with Beamer. Which brings me to noting two things I learned today:
Installing Beamer on Fedora 16
Beamer is a lovely little tool that uses LaTeX for making presentation slides. And all the Fedora installation instructions I found for Beamer are incorrect, so I’ll save you the hour of head-scratching I endured this afternoon and tell you that you need two packages beyond whatever comes with the default F16 install. Just yum install texlive-texmf-latex texinfo-tex and you should be all set to jump into the directory with beamer slides and make away.
If you want to try out beamer, here’s a quick little walkthrough that’ll get you looking at our current slides in 5 lines, assuming you already have git installed (if not, yum install git first).
git clone git@github.com:mchua/A-Walk-in-the-Commons.git # grab the code
cd A-Walk-in-the-Commons/presentation # go to the slide files
sudo yum install texlive-texmf-latex texinfo-tex # install beamer
make # builds the beamer slides into a pdf
evince a-walk-in-the-commons.pdf # and you've got them!
Changing the origin of your git repository
My git repository of the slides is actually a fork of Matt’s. I cloned his original, made and committed my changes, and then realized that I didn’t have push access to his repository, so I forked my own. But my commits were still lined up to push to Matt’s repository – how do I tell git to push to my new repository instead? It took a couple minutes of scanning through manpages and searching the intarwebs, so here’s the answer for posterity (for the record, the solution came when I finally realized we did this for SoaS documentation git issues).
git remote rm origin # remove the original repository (in this case, Matt's)
git remote add origin git@github.com:username/your-new-repository # add my new repository
git push origin master # and now it pushes to the right place
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
I was just looking for Fedora materials suitable for an “Extreme IT Day” for high school and college students, and thought I’d share what I found. Some of these are oldies but goodies, and all of them are suitable for teens who may not have had prior exposure to free software.
Fedora Flyer by Max Spevack – (odt) (png-front) (png-back) (other languages)
Fedora Cheat Cube by Nushio – (png) (other languages)
The remainder are flyers from SXSW by Mo Duffy and the Design Team – the download links on that post are broken, so I tracked down the individual pdfs.
(Assets-flyer.pdf)
(Whatcanitdo-flyer.pdf)
(Interviews-flyer.pdf)
(Guesswho-flyer.pdf)
(Getinvolved-flyer.pdf)
Monday, October 31st, 2011 | fedora, teaching open source | No Comments »
A big welcome to Monica Cardella’s “Informal Learning Environments” graduate class here at Purdue’s Engineering Education department. Here… is your mission for two weeks from now. We’re going to dive into my informal learning environment, the world of open source.
Reading 0: What’s open source?
In order to talk about open source, we’ve got to have a background understanding of what it is. We likely won’t discuss these readings much; they’re for giving you a quick overview of what “open source” encompasses (probably more than you think!) so feel free to skim whatever catches your interest and see which links you’re intrigued to follow down into.
- Wikipedia: open source – you may want to focus on the Applications section, and others of you might be interested in open design. This is for a quick overview and perspective-broadening on what open source is, so don’t spend more than 15 minutes here.
- Opensource.com – pick a channel and read 1-2 articles from it — again, this is for perspective-broadening on what the possibilities are, so set a 15 minute cap again. My guess is that life and education will be popular with this crowd; work on teaching open source can mostly be found under the posse tag.
Also note that you’ll see a couple terms used to refer to “open source” other than… well, open source. Multiple variants on “(Free) (Libre) and Open Source (Software)” frequently appear as acronyms, so whenever you see…
…consider them to all refer to the same thing for our purposes. (There are subtle differences between the terms that some people care about deeply, but we’ll save that discussion for another day if folks are interested.)
Reading 1: IRC chat
Read this chat log from a conversation taking place between a first-year liberal arts student new to an open source community and two experienced project participants who catch her question and try to step in. An informal analysis by the student’s professor follows
It’s important to note that all of this was remote and spontaneous; the student didn’t preschedule the meeting with community members, she simply showed up online and started asking questions, and one person answered, and eventually a second one began to chime in.
For those who want more, the chat transcript spawned a mailing list conversation between faculty members (Jadud and Morelli) and FOSS participants (Chua and Wade) but this reading is optional.
Questions to consider: who can you empathize with, and why? What would you have done differently in this situation if you were the student? Community members? Professor? For others considering this sort of immersion (students diving into a real-world project environment without explicit scaffolding or defined mentorship engagements), what sort of preparation would be useful to provide each of the three groups (students, community, and faculty)
Reading 2: Planet CDOT
A Planet is an aggregation of blogs — a sort of metablog that collects and publishes posts from many people who have individual blogs on their own sites. For instance, many contributors to the desktop software GNOME are featured on http://planet.gnome.org, many contributors to the Fedora Linux distribution are on http://planet.fedoraproject.org, contributors to the Sugar Learning Environment (which runs on the One Laptop Per Child XO computer) are at http://planet.sugarlabs.org… take a quick look at each of these (5 minutes each at most) and get a sense for what a Planet is. It’s a gigantic realtime look at the design notebooks of hundreds of (mostly) engineers, or at least that’s how I think about it.
You may notice posts on many topics and in many languages. That’s normal around here. The content posted is not moderated; the only moderation takes place in deciding whose blog is going to feed into the big Planet, but once you’re “in,” anything you write goes out there – also note that these folks aren’t necessarily in formal project roles. In fact, nearly all of them are volunteers with no predefined commitments; they self-identify with these projects, work on them, and simply Do Stuff.
And schools have started using it as well. Go to Planet CDOT, which comes from the Center for the Development of Open Technologies at Seneca College in Toronto, Ontario. Spend about 20 minutes looking around and reading; pick 3 posts from 3 different people to hone in on and see what you can find about the people who wrote them.
You’ll see a stream of posts from students (at all levels), staff, and faculty (they may be initially hard to identify, but David Humphrey and Chris Tyler are both professors) talking about their work. It’s informal, like the sorts of conversations you might overhear if you plonk down in the cafe outside the CDOT space… except you don’t have to fly to Toronto in order to do it.
Questions for discussion: What information can you glean from 20 minutes of looking through this website? What projects do people talk about (coursework, research, etc?) Do they identify themselves as members of an academic community, members of an open source community, or both? How would this sort of resource be useful to the following audiences:
- A prospective student
- A new student in the department
- A graduating senior in the department
- A faculty member in the department
- A potential industry/academic partner that wants to work with or recruit students from the department
How does this compare to the “sense” of the department you think you’d get from visiting CDOT in person for an afternoon, and how does it compare to the “sense” you can get of another department remotely… for instance, pick an engineering school at Purdue you’re not involved with and check out their site; what can you find in comparison?
That’s it.
I know this is a lot of web stuff, so if you’re really pressed for time, do reading 0 and pick either 1 or 2 to dive deeper into. We’ll talk about all this on the 21st of October. This is the world I come from, and I’m curious what you make of it — what’s confusing, what’s difficult, what warts do you see that we’ve gotten used to? What’s surprising? What aspects fascinate you most?
FOSS folks, feel free to chime in… what do you wish faculty knew about us?
Looking forward to the discussion!
Sunday, October 9th, 2011 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
Sometimes when I’m confused, I sit down and write about it until my feet feel like they’re standing on something firm again. Here goes.
I’m a novice in the academic world. Context eludes me. Descriptions of methods are swarming like abstract, unapplied flies around my head. I came here because the open source world hasn’t yet been translated into the world of scholarly learning — these dynamic communities of practice for ridiculous amounts of learning remain unstudied, unrecognized, despite addressing so many of the things that engineering and computing educators have been crying out for for as long as I’ve been hearing them: authentic learning experiences! mentorship, peer teaching! global communication, teamwork, self-efficacy… onwards, onwards. Yes! I thought. New ground to blaze!
And then I got to grad school and spent most of my first month disoriented and fervently wishing for something that someone had done before, please don’t let me be the first one out here, please don’t let me be the only one out here. The irony is thick, I know; isn’t this what I asked for? It is, and it’s uncomfortable, and I will feel quite lost for quite a while (possibly forever), and that’s something that I need to remind myself to be okay with. The trouble with doing something new is that you can’t really hunt for validation for it until after you do it. It’s like a startup. You need to take a risk that you’ll put in all of this effort and then nobody will care. Yes, you can make your work transparent (and I should more) and work within a community (and I am — hello!) but part of the rite of passage is forging your own path, and good lord that’s scary.
I wonder if professors teach in order to stay sane, so they can have some part of their world that they know and lead and control… I wonder if it feels like we’re taking that solidness away from them when we ask them to take a leap into teaching open source, I wonder…
Okay. So where are gaps, and what am I finding?
Gaps are everywhere.
I’m struggling like hell to figure out which projects to prioritize. Some recent ones:
- Academic copyright is so very, very broken.
- If you survey cyberlearning grants the NSF has given out, you’ll see big holes in authentic learning and building actual online communities (as opposed to “we put up a website, here it is”) — both areas that teaching open source excels in. Opportunity to fill?
- Hackerspaces are almost invisible in the academic literature. There’s plenty of nonscholarly information on them — websites, blog posts, everything — but that hasn’t been “validated” by peer-reviewed journal articles. Ditto for the maker movement as a whole. The open source way. All of this.
- As Michael Tiemann and Greg DeKoenigsberg and others have pointed out, open source communities are brilliant and readily accessible examples of communities of practice and nobody is checking them out according to that framework. Gah.
- I find myself repeatedly explaining the Dreyfuss model to open source hackers and project leaders. Maybe I should write an article on how academics can explain this to the communities they’re trying to work with.
- POSSE! POSSE as a program, chronicling POSSE participants (must… find out what people are doing… this year…), the… and my brain falls apart into unfocused incoherence.
- How do new participants in open source communities become experienced ones? This happens very, very rapidly in many cases. What determines how successful newbies will be? Can those behaviors be learned?
- The quick release cycle for open communities (“release early, release often”) contributing to the long release cycle for students… oftentimes it’s not until many semesters after the class, or possibly even years after graduation, that the effect is really seen. What do we do about that, how can we examine that?
- This First Monday article, which still bugs me with its limitations. Yes, you can analyze open source communities that way, but doing so misses lots of information that would be quite relevant to — and likely reverse — the conclusions of the study.
- Brain is lapsing into incoherent unfocus. Trying to sit with the tension and the discomfort and the not-knowing, but also to not be paralyzed by it. Difficult balance. What does it feel like for an academic to enter the open source world? What does it feel like for an open source person to enter the academic one?
A few more things I’m pondering:
- Is Fedora still a good project for me to base my research within? (I feel like a heretic writing this, but look — blunt questions.) I look at Biella and Martin doing theirs within Debian, and go well, wait, that… makes potentially more sense. No single corporate sponsor. (No single corporate sponsor that also happens to employ me, too.) On the other hand, it might be precisely that model that makes Fedora so interesting.
- Should I be grounding myself more in the doing for an open source (software or hardware) project? It’s been months since I made what I consider to be a direct contribution to an upstream. This makes me sad, and my hands are itching to do usefulness again, but they are also very full, and I do try to be a good citizen (bugfiling, etc) and know I can… I’m worried that I’ll fade too much out of this world and lose my base and float away into the world of academia, never to return. I worry about this a lot. Do I need to give myself an assignment every week — edit so many wiki pages, check out so many test plans, look into patching something, whatnot? This feels counter to the spirit of scratching one’s own itch; if I need to make myself do it, I should probably… not do it, right? But maybe it’s good for me…
- What should I do this summer? Dive back into direct FOSS contribution? Broader community work more focused on the industry side of things? Set aside the open source world for a few months and plunge into academic research and try to emerge with a firmer grasp on that terrain? Relax? Can I be fifty people at once? Why do I need to sleep? Why is the world so vast? How can I ever contribute anything to such a giant universe when I have such a short time on this planet and am so unskilled, unschooled, unable to do useful things?
Whoa. Hello, existential crisis. Okay, Mel. Snap out of it. You have a lot to learn, but you can do stuff. Big scary world, confusing, yes, I know. But moving forward.
I’m going to sit down and finish my overdue paper. If I finish that before my reading group meets, I’ll brainstorm on my fellowship application. — I have other brainstorms scattered here and there, I may or may not collect them, I don’t have to. And then we shall see. We shall… see.
Productively lost is profoundly uncomfortable. Knowing that this is where growth takes place doesn’t reduce the discomfort, but it helps you stay there, in that place of learning.
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 | fedora, teaching open source | 5 Comments »
