What’s the balance between inclusiveness/accessibility and being able to use the best tools/formats available (in other words, not having to worry about whether everyone else is keeping up)? For instance, during the first day of CLS, I found myself zoning out a lot; as someone who can’t hear, it is extraordinarily hard for me to lipread multiple people in a conversation with background noise – should I have interrupted them and said “excuse me, I’m deaf… would you mind signaling when you’re about to start speaking so I know to lipread you?”

The issue is not that I should scratch my own itch, nor that it would not be an entirely unwelcome or unwarranted interruption and imposition on my part. I’ve been speaking up and making (and asking for) my own accommodations since I was a child. I fully admit that I’m frustrated and to some extent just venting/whining here, but my frustration is that there is that extra expectation that I must – and will – expend energy on rectifying this every time I’m at an event, and the incremental cost of doing so slowly chips away at my willingness to participate at all (because it “costs” me more than hearing participants to have the same level of participation). There is nothing I can do that will fix it permanently (if there were, I’d be more than willing to work my ass off for an extended period of time to make that happen) – things will always be this way, no matter what I do. And I am tired.

It’s like being told you need to pay a dollar every time you want to participate in a conversation. It makes you pause slightly about participating in that conversation at all, and even if the conversation isn’t that great, you’re more likely to reluctantly stick with it, because… well, you paid a dollar. Others will look at you and go “why don’t you just pay the dollar?” or “it’s only a dollar,” or “well, if you can’t even pay a dollar (you lazy bum) you shouldn’t be here” – and not recognize that it adds up. Say you have a dozen conversations each day, which is on the low side – you probably walk by many more in the space of an hour without realizing it (the questions on the bus? the chatter by the water cooler? the informal banter about the soccer game at lunch?)  – that’s $4380 a year.

And you have to publicly put in your dollar. I have to stand up and tell people I can’t hear, and would they – graciously, please – accommodate me? Most folks are goodhearted and will gladly do so, but sometimes I don’t want to stand out. I don’t want to be labeled as deaf, because there are some associations that come with it that I find even more tiring. And offering to pay the dollar for me doesn’t really help, because you have to stand up and publicly say “hey everyone, I’m putting in a dollar for Mel!” which doesn’t help with the standing-out problem. So I just choose to opt out, and quietly slip out the back door and go away. Sometimes I come back. Sometimes I don’t.

I want to make this clear: I have no problem with paying the extra bill. I do so often. I stand up and ask often. I take a lot of extra, invisible effort to set up things (sitting in front so I can lipread, etc) so I don’t have to inconvenience others by asking whenever possible. But sometimes, when I’m tired, I wish there wasn’t that expectation. I wish I didn’t have to ask. I wish I could just be tired and not have to ask and have the world still work and have me be able to participate in it. I’ve expressed this kind of thing before. Multiple times.

Asheesh did a great thing yesterday: after we talked about this, we went to the next talk together and he started transcribing it in etherpad, in backchannel, in notes that everyone could see – including me. IRC transcriptions at the last FUDCon were a huge boon. One reason I’m so fluent in text-based communication channels is that it’s a part of the world where I never have to ask – I’m on equal footing by default. And I wish this could extend more to other parts of the world, even (especially) in tiny increments – my suitemates leaving captions and subtitles on in our lounge by default (I never asked for it, they never mentioned it) I am incredibly grateful for to this day. Small things like that – people understanding without you asking them to, and being able to participate in the tiny moments of life folks that people usually think “oh, this doesn’t matter” because they take it for granted.

I feel like I’m whining here, because I can’t propose a good solution – I’m just venting a frustration, and the frustration I’m venting is that I can’t think of a solution. But I promised Asheesh I’d give this voice, so here it is.

Thoughts?

I’m tired.

It was the first time I’d heard good mathematicians talk to each other about math and do math, joyously, in front of a group of awestruck and excited kids. This sounds simple, but… when your prior exposure to math classes has largely been full of rote stuff, watching adults having fun with it is absolutely spellbinding – and heartening, if you’ve grown up wondering whether any other real (i.e. not in books and/or dead) people also actually like this stuff. And to watch adults having the kind of dialogue I wanted to grow up to speak – but had never heard before and therefore couldn’t even picture – that was awesome.

Mr. Hamberg also gave me a valuable lesson in teaching. The summer I turned 16, I taught math camp for the first time. As one of the most experienced students in the group (I was a rising senior, so I wasn’t that experienced), I was in charge of the Number Theory team. We’d worked hard on our curriculum all school year, and the first day went well – we taught 3 classes, identical curricula, 1 before lunch and 2 after. And then we pulled out the curriculum for the second day… and failed. The kids (our students were just a few years younger than I was) blanked out, weren’t engaged, weren’t excited… and we had lunchtime to figure out how to turn this around before sections 2 and 3 hit. My team was looking to me for guidance; I was the leader, I was supposed to know what to do. I had no clue.

Shamefaced, I slunk over to Mr. Hamberg’s lunch table, sat down beside him, and apologized for being a failure. He and Dr. Condie asked why, and I explained the situation and that we didn’t know what to do, wavering between resigned dejection and mild panic the entire time. “Well, what were you trying to teach them?” Something about Pascal’s triangle, I replied. Anything, really. “Lunch is ending. Come watch us and then tell us afterwards what it is you saw us do.”

They proceeded to pull off this spectacular class on Pascal’s triangle, Fibonacci numbers, the Sierpinski triangle, and all these lovely little things tied into that sort of stuff – the kids were practically leaping out of their seats, shouting questions… and then during the break between sections, they walked up to us and said “okay, now you teach the next section.”

“But… but…” I sputtered, “I don’t know what to say! I… didn’t prepare that curricula!”

“Neither did we.” They backtracked and explained how teaching wasn’t a script – how you knew the material, and then roamed around it with your students, helping them dive into interesting things, roving on the fly. “All the stuff we just covered,” Mr. Hamberg pointed out, “you played with during your first year on math team. You know this stuff.” And then they left, and the students poured in, and my team looked at me expectantly.

And I proceeded to lead my crew through team-teaching one of the best math classes I have ever taught in my entire life to date.

8 years later, I’m still proud of it. We were sailing by the seat of our pants, but I really did know the material, and it was exhilarating improvising it and knowing it was okay to do that, that you could make it up, that you weren’t doing it COMPLETELY WRONG!!! if you didn’t follow a script, and that… kids get really excited about math if you do that. Wow. Excited students, learning stuff… I was on a teaching high.

I went up to them afterwards all excited with this revelation – probably babbling something like oh my gosh you make it up and it works you totally make it up and it works and it’s okay and they were so excited and and and PASCAL’S TRIANGLE!!! and the ideas lead so many places and you just go! and Mr. Hamberg smiled and told me that I was a teacher.

And so I am.

Thanks, Chuck. We’ll miss you.

Scott: “Open to critique” isn’t quite the same as “responsive to critique”. From an outside perspective, it seems that frequently SugarLabs is just not listening to people who offer contrary opinions.  This is better than flaming them, but maybe not as good as it could be. For an end-of-year report, I’d like to see instances enumerated where SugarLabs actually internalized some outside critique and responded in a positive way — some concrete change made to the UI, or Sugar, or to process.  That would be more convincing that simply stating, “we are now open to critique”.
 
Bernie: We’re definitely intimidating to non-technical people. At least, this is what I sensed at the Realness Summit. OLE also seems to be doing a better job at connecting with educators. I’m not completely sure what corrective actions should be. We might need to do some work on the  wiki, maybe add web forums, which non-geeks tend to prefer…

Scott: I suspect that the answer to this problem does not involve installing additional software.

Later in the day, Jeff and I were having this conversation on #teachingopensource.

Jeff: Is IRC really a barrier to entry?  maybe I have simply been using it too long, but it seems immediately recognizable to me. I think one barrier might be the attitudes that crop up.  Even with emoticons, sometimes it’s hard to discern intent.  Hard enough in email, but sometimes devastating in real time.

Mel: Actually, yes. I had a really, really hard time figuring out IRC. First, figuring out that it existed and I had to use it. Then how to get it, how to set the software up. Then what the heck networks and channels and whatnot were – and why channels? my IM paradigm was “you have a buddy list and you ping people individually.” So “chatrooms are the default!” wasn’t hard to understand once I realized it, but it took a while to realize because I wasn’t looking for it.

And then “oh man, who are all these people? I am nervous about pinging them, will they yell at me?” And then all the /commands I had to remember. It was so bewildering and terrifying and new and it was being used as a way to present new information to me at the same time, sort of like… taking your first calculus class in… Mandarin, if you’ve also just started studying Mandarin as a foreign language. You can’t concentrate much on the calculus because you’re going “zomg it’s in CHINESE.”

It’s hard to remember how hard things can be, especially when you’re surrounded by a community of people who are the ones who self-selected and made it past that hardness. By definition, if you’ve gotten into FOSS, the current participation mechanisms worked for you… so why fix them?

Because we want others to join us.

1. ssh into the box you have an account on – for instance, Sugar Labs folks can use sunjammer (aka people.sugarlabs.org) by requesting an account at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sysadmin/Shell_account_request
.

2. Run these commands (comments in parentheses).

screen

(a dialog will pop up, hit return to kill it)

irssi

(you’ll get a mostly blank screen, with a stripe across the bottom with the
time and a number [1] in brackets – that’s the window list – and then a line
below that with [(status)] in it, which is the description of the window that
you’re in, and the place you type the rest of the commands.)

/connect irc.freenode.net

(and then, if you want, /msg nickserv identify <password> to sign in.)

/set autolog on

(it’ll start storing things in ~/irclogs in self-explanatory filenames)

/join #sugar

(and whatever other channels you may want to be in)

(You’ll notice that every channel you join opens up another window – the first
channel will be in window 2, the next in window 3, and so forth. Use ctrl-p
(previous) and ctrl-n (next) to switch between windows, or alt-NUMBER to jump
to the NUMBERth window.)

(You’ll also notice that the numbers for each window light up in different
colors when someone joins/leaves a channel (blue), talks in a channel (white),
or calls your name in a channel (pink).)

(All the normal IRC commands work as expected, and so does tab-completion.)

(a note on /whois: if you have a PM window open for that person, the whois
information will appear in the PM window. Otherwise, it will appear in window
1.)

3. When you want to stop, do

/away <away message>

and then detatch from screen, which is

CTRL-a, d

(ctrl-a followed by d)

which will dump you in your normal sunjammer shell outside of screen.

Or you can just kill the terminal by typing

~.

or whatever.

When you log in again, restart the screen session with

screen -raAd

…and you’ll be back. If you then type

/away

…you’ll see all the messages sent to your nick in the meantime in window 1,
and you’ll be set to not-away.

4. More docs at http://www.irssi.org/documentation/startup
and http://quadpoint.org/articles/irssi
.

I mostly find irssi useful for being always-on all the time and having backlogs
of conversations that have happened while I’m away. It also means that anywhere
I have ssh, I have IRC.

Awesomeness of the day (one moment of many): running into Sanjoy Mahajan, an MIT professor who was my advisor for my humanities capstone on open content engineering textbooks. Sanjoy is also a FOSS geek, and he’s a visiting professor at Olin this coming year. Back in the day, we talked about software for writing textbooks. Turns out he kept working on it, and now one of his students has made an open source textbook writing software called nb – the code is actually under an MIT license, I’m told, but there’s no (easily findable) public repo of it yet, etc… we’ll fix that soon.

A Guided Tour of NB from Sacha Zyto on Vimeo.

Basically, it’s heatmapped commenting on textbooks in pdf format, inspired by the comment workflow on the GPL v3 draft back when it was a draft a few years ago. This way you can see at a glance where folks have commented, and how much, so you know what areas of the text you need to work on. See Sanjoy’s book, Street Fighting Mathematics, for an example of an annotated text.

How would this work in practice?

• source code: TeX
• compiler: LaTeX
• submit a comment/patch: write an annotation on the book using nb
• accept/push a patch: revise the upstream TeX, “recompile” the pdf in LaTeX
• forking: get the TeX source and build your own
• etc.

I don’t know how well it would work, but I’ll be poking the maintainer over the weekend, trying to get an instance of nb up, and then throwing the latest instance of the TOS Textbook up on it to see how that goes, just as an experimental “let us try this tool!” branch. Hrm. When… do I have free time? That is the hard part. If this works out, it would be amazing to have students in classes (Heidi and Tim, I’m looking at you) comment on the textbook as they’re using it.

Basically, SoaS is a Fedora Spin, so we get nightly composes made here (as in, “Fedora automagically builds our .isos for us so we don’t have to”). In order to (we assume) save on disk space, the Fedora servers only store the latest nightly compose – once a new .iso is made, the old one is gone forever, bwahaha!

This is fantastic for developing, but not so much for testing. Expecting testers to keep up with daily builds is a bit much, and it’s putting a burden on people who are downloading them every day (possibly even getting into trouble with their ISP), so we decided to go with a weekly test cycle – each Thursday evening we’d designate the most recent image as the “image under test” and point everyone there. That way, developers would also know exactly what image people were finding bugs in each week.

Problem: in order to (we assume) save on disk space, the Fedora servers only store the latest nightly compose -  once a new .iso is made, the old  one is gone forever, bwahaha! So we need to grab the most recent image – which has a special naming – at that time and pull it down to the Sugar Labs servers so we have the files at http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/test/ (We’re also storing the old test images so we can go back and forth between them Since the builds do contain their build date in their name, and we can’t predict ahead of time what the build date and time are, we don’t know the exact filename to pull.

So we’re basically looking for a shell script that will:

1. Pull the latest iso and checksum from the SL servers
2. Rename the checksum so it matches the datetime stamp of the iso (the checksum is currently called – rather unhelpfully – “CHECKSUM-i386″).
3. Update the symlinks so that http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/test/soas-i386-test-latest.iso and http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/test/soas-i386-test-latest-checksum.sha point to the latest iso and checksum that were just downloaded.

This probably requires some sort of weird wildcard bash-fu that would take me multiple hours to inelegantly figure out, and someone else 5 minutes to write a one-liner to solve.

Can haz halp?

We started with an overview of the POSSE curriculum, which is all about open source development and teaching.

Day 1: Open (communication tools and culture)
Day 2: Source (getting, building, changing, making patches, committing)
Day 3: Development (diving into a real project, picking up a ticket, and making a contribution)
Day 4: And (development, continued)
Day 5: Teaching (pedagogical and practical considerations, aligning with release schedules, grading, etc)

Then we split into mixed groups, each group with RIT and outside-RIT-FOSS folks, to figure out a project that the FOSS group(s) and the RIT folks could do together, resulting in invitations to play at http://foss.rit.edu, the notion of a Drupal partnership (have RIT co-ops hacking on Drupal modules, and get a Drupal site up at RIT to tell those stories), working on CivX, and more.

One issue is lowering the barrier of entry for FOSS projects to work with RIT groups. For instance, some of the folks at RIT would like to offer mirroring for open source projects, but permission to actually do this with RIT’s infrastructure is difficult to obtain. However, as a first step, RIT will be hosting http://activities.sugarlabs.org for the Sugar Labs project by the end of summer.

We talked about Rochester’s FOSS presence, and how the local LUG and the campus hacking community didn’t seem to mix much. Luckily, some POSSE participants (Gary and Geoff, mainly) talked with Charles, the head of LUGOR, and it sounds like LUGOR might get meeting hosting, and that incoming freshmen to RIT will get some flyers about meetings on campus… it’s not just LUGOR, too. The local Pythonistas are moving to the RIT Center for Student Innovation, and the OLPC User Group meets at RIT every 4th Thursday of the Month.

The current computing curriculum was another topic. Asheesh pointed out that open source development bears little resemblance to the computer science curriculum. In fact, the IT world looks very different from the computer science curriculum. As Gary pointed out soon afterwards, schools don’t necessarily prepare students for the world they’re about to graduate into; sometimes it prepares them for a world that passed a decade ago. At the same time, faculty are under great pressures that make it difficult for them to change the things they teach. How can we make it possible for this to change?

Chris talked about the success Seneca College has had working with upstreams like Fedora, Mozilla, and OpenOffice. For instance

• Half of Mozilla’s build team is composed of Seneca graduates.
• Students who hacked on Firefox helped to close gaps in the university’s infrastructure. After reconciling bugs in their “Learning Management Software”, Firefox became the standard browser for staff all over campus.

The latter example brought up an interesting point – FOSS collaborations in education are actually three-way relationships: the academic experience (teachers/students learning skills), the FOSS community they work with, and the school’s IT department that needs to deploy infrastructure, and can oftentimes use the code produced and maintained by the first two groups.

At this point, the panel session concluded, but we left with our list of FOSS/edu partnerships to start or continue, and we’ll see where the conversation goes from here.
   
Panel participants:

• Mel Chua, Red Hat/Fedora/Sugar Labs – POSSE ninja and FOSS + Edu geek in general. Sugar Labs board, Fedora Marketing. Community engineer.
• Chris Tyler, Seneca College/Fedora Project – Professor, author, open source contributor, Fedora board member, event organizer, one of the founders of teachingopensource.org
• Mike Quin, University of Stirling Sysadmin, freenode staffer
• Laura Quin, Writer
• Geoffrey Anderson, Rochester Institute of Technology – Database Tutor and Lab Instructor, Student in MS in Information Sciences and Technology — Ubuntu and Oracle enthusiast
• Kingdon Barrett, Rochester Institute of Technology – Computer Science Major (Bachelor) Graduate in August 2010.  Specialize in Virtualization and Web Software, EliveCD user!
• Luke Macken, RIT Computer Science Alumni, Python Ninja @ Red Hat, Inc.
• Remy DeCausemaker, Hacktivist & Storyteller, FOSS@RIT (http://foss.rit.edu)
• Mo Morsi, Syracuse University Alumni, Deltacloud / Ruby developer @ RH
• Stephen Jacobs:  FOSS@RIT.edu, Game Design FOSSProf, Open Source dilettante http://foss.rit.edu, https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/fossrit.
• Devin Zuczek: DLC Solutions/Drupal developer, CE/CME
• Jonathan Dahan: Stony Brook University CS/Digital Arts hacker
• Jonathan Simpson (JonathanD) freenode/fossevents and fosscon

Learn more:

#teachingopensource on irc.freenode.net
teachingopensource.org
teachingopensource.org/POSSE

We’re looking for:

• schools to match with FOSS communities for a POSSE
• FOSS communities to match with schools for a POSSE
• infrastructure + support for folks who are teaching open source

If you’re interested, please swing by and say hello!

I’m not sure what they need, if anything. I’m not sure if they need to run proprietary software for some specific fancy lab machines (but they no longer have any fancy lab machines, so I am guessing “not right now”). Bea reports that they have not really used computers in the chem department in the past, but we wonder if this is due to software being downright too expensive – most of the students at the university can’t afford computers, so this is definitely talking about shared computer use in classrooms and labs. There are some nice chemistry programs packaged in Fedora that would be useful; that list is probably out of date, and there are probably more programs out there. For instance, Avogadro, a molecular editor (below).

So this might be an opportunity to help by getting an university-branded Fedora chemistry Remix on some machines in the new building, so that they don’t have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for proprietary programs. Might be an opportunity to help. We don’t know if they need it, we don’t know what they need, we don’t know if they’ll even be receptive to the prospect of free software, we don’t know if they have computers for their buildings…

However, spinning up a remix prototype is quick, so I’m going to toss one together to give Bea and her professors and classmates an idea of what that might look like. I’ve got some free time on Wednesday and over the weekend, so I need suggestions for packages to include (or software that isn’t yet packaged but should be included, since I can include non-packaged stuff on account of this being a remix). If nothing else, it’s something that interested students can explore while they, y’know, have no classes to take.

I will be pulling packages into the kickstart file off this list, so either add to it (if you have Fedora wiki edit privs) or post comments here (if you don’t) and I’ll put everything there that fits in, do a quick rebranding test to slap the uni logo on, redo the default bookmarks file, check to see if the software works, and ship it off for them to try and holler back about.

Thanks to Andrea Hickerson for nudging me, via her remote presence, to actually take good notes today – I hope Antonio Mondragon’s remote presence tomorrow will do the same. Remotees keep me honest about “upstreaming” our conversations and our notes to the broader community, where more people can benefit from them in – including us, the original participants in the conversation, since we’ll get to hear more thoughts and feedback from more people.

Speaking of Andrea, professors of Journalism, English, Technical Writing, and so forth may be interested in the comment I left on her blog post from today, which points to several projects that she might want to look at for her students to join (complete with “join” URLs, mailing list info, and individual names and links to contact information from folks I think are good starting points within those communities).

Pascal (Fedora Weekly News), Robyn (Fedora Marketing), Sumana (GNOME Journal), and others in the “writing + FOSS == WIN!” domain -  if you’re looking for new contributors, Andrea Hickerson and David Shein may make good folks to ping; they both teach in the writing-esque sphere at the college level and are keen on getting their students into FOSS contribution.

00:18  * mchua has had a great day.
00:19 < mchua> When college professors start high-fiving each other across the classroom like excited kids because they got a button to work on a Sugar Activity, and then head out for ice cream, it is a Good Day.

I’m too behind/tired to be more verbose – turns out it’s difficult to simultaneously teach at and document a POSSE (probably due to that blasted 3 hours of driving per day – will hopefully do better next week). But betwen Friday noon and Sunday at 6 when the RIT one starts, I’ll spew logs from this one.

Theme: “Development”

Big idea: Sometimes, you’ve just got to dive in and work on the code… together.

Skill: Making contributions to an open source project “in the wild.” (In this case, the Measure Activity.)

Full logs:

• Peter Robinson on Spins, Remixes and release management
• Demo of IRC logging bot (zodbot)
• IRC logging bot tutorial, FOSS events, maddog’s talk

Of the three, the notes for the last one are the most interesting – the notes for maddog’s talk are essentially a paraphrased (brief) transcript of his 1.5 hour presentation on “how FOSS teaches you twice.”