Marketing goals, revisited: the 4 Foundations

[Mel Chua]

(I'm pulling out one section of the thread for a moment, but hope 
discussion continues on the other ideas brought up as well.)

>> I'd love to get a marketing class working on this - actually, I
>> would love to see a case study (see
>> http://www.hbs.edu/mba/academics/casemethod.html) on Fedora.
>
> What would be really interesting is feeding back the process for
> meeting this goal into a discovery of what worked to captivate and
> motivate college students to follow through with a contribution.
> Maybe that's what you mean by the case method?  It's hard to tell from
> the page in question, it's a bit vague but I'm guessing you have some
> experience with or knowledge about the method yourself.

What I think you're talking about is a case study - documenting what we 
do as a way to make it easier for others to follow. I think we should be 
a case study of how open source projects can interact with the case 
method of teaching, which is a particular thing.

The case method is a particular way of teaching that I believe is mostly 
associated with MBA programs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_method. 
Most of the cases I've seen come from Harvard, which has an extensive 
collection of them 
(http://www.hbs.edu/mba/academics/howthecasemethodworks.html, 
http://www.hbs.edu/learning/case.html - for an example, see 
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5466.html for an explanation and 
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5466.html for the abstract to an actual case.)

Think of a case as... an .rpm for curricular content for MBAs. It's a 
format and delivery mechanism schools are used to. (Someone who actually 
has an MBA may want to step in and correct me at this point.)

There's one on Red Hat, though it's 10 years old by now: 
http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/web/product_detail.seam?R=600009-PDF-ENG&conversationId=630649&E=35930

There's also one called "Linux in 2004": 
http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/web/product_detail.seam?R=705407-PDF-ENG&conversationId=630649&E=45690

Here's the interesting opportunity: these cases are written about 
companies - there are no cases (yet!) about communities doing many of 
the same things The Open Source Way.