[Osdc-edu-authors] Interested in Writing for OSDC-EDU

[Mel Chua]

Chris Tyler (Seneca College), Remy DeCausemaker (RIT), and I sat down in 
Chris's office in Toronto tonight and came up with a couple article 
ideas. Bouncing off to the metabrain for thoughts and help and all that 
good stuff, anyone feel free to grab any idea and run with it (we might 
at some point sooner or later, but are happy to be beaten to it by other 
folks.)

Ccing Remy because I don't think he's on the list yet (though he should 
be within a day or two. *coughRemycough*)

* (Needs Better Title): rationale behind things that frustrate open 
source communities, revealed. Basically, what things are going on behind 
the scenes at a school when they (for instance) take a really long time 
to implement a feature, or can't get a port open so students can go on 
IRC, or say "that's a great idea for a class, mayyyybe we could do it 2 
years from now," or why did this contributor who was doing an interview 
series disappear - things that seem bizarre and frustrating to folks 
from open source land? (Maybe the contributor needed to get IRB 
clearance to continue to interview community members from your project 
and was prohibited from making any further contact until then, maybe the 
course planning cycle is 3 semesters in advance and you've just missed 
the deadline, etc.) Matt Jadud started peeling back the hood a bit with 
his last article, I think we could use more of this.

* Students, Here's What We Look For In An Open Source Hire. Framed for 
internships/co-ops/new hires, but really this is no different from how 
any open source company would identify good people at any level - the 
motivation behind writing this is that the things students /think/ we 
are looking for are usually /not/ the things we are looking for.

* The history of CDOT (http://cdot.senecac.on.ca, likely best written by 
Chris and his colleague David Humphrey).

* Seneca's open source students: where are they now? (Remy's RIT 
Storytellers team could video interview Chris's alumni for this spot.)

* RIT's course --> co-op --> mentor-of-course ecology (article likely 
best written by Remy and Steve Jacobs and/or some of the RIT co-op 
students).

* CSH (Computer Science House, a special-interest living group at RIT): 
how do communities (companies, projects) tap these sorts of active 
residential groups of self-organized, talented young hackers? Why don't 
they already? (article likely best written by Remy and Luke, both CSH 
alumni - I'd also expect a lot of comments to be of the "oh, we have 
something like CSH at our school!" variety.)

This last one wasn't from the list tonight, but I was wondering whether 
http://blog.melchua.com/2010/02/16/how-to-do-stuff/ could be extended 
into an OSDC article - I need to make that slide set, but then I'd like 
to workshop it on this list if people are interested.

Done flooding your inboxes for the evening. :) Just finally got through 
my email backlog on this list.

--Mel

PS: Is there a better place somewhere to put this list? A wiki page or 
something?