I just sent an announcement to Planets Fedora and TOS about this one (http://blog.melchua.com/2010/09/07/fedora-classroom-tuesday-sep-14-at-160...) but I'll repost a bit here for those who don't read Planet. This is meant to be a Classroom session for interested people who are not *yet* Fedora (or FOSS - this generalizes to other open source communities as well!) contributors and want to start seeing how, exactly, these thousands of people from all over the world work together. I'm trying to log it in a way that will make it usable for introducing these tools to students in the future. It's based on the 1st-day curriculum of POSSE, for those of you who've been through one. Feedback and comments and such welcome, and if Fedora Classroom people can help me get this into the right places on the wiki I'd be very grateful. :) Thanks! --Mel --------- I’ll be running a Fedora Classroom on basic distributed communication tools and practices on Tuesday, September 14, at 1600 UTC in #fedora-classroom on irc.freenode.net. These (open source, of course) tools aren’t coding-specific – in fact, our design, marketing, etc. teams use them as well – so anyone interested in distributed communties I’m going to assume basic knowledge of IRC, because that’s how the session is going to be taught, but if you’re interested in this and new to IRC let me know ahead of time and I’d be happy to help you get set up prior to the session. Topics covered: 1. Fedora Classroom – we have a channel (#fedora-classroom on freenode) set aside for learning experiences, so if someone needs to teach somebody else something in a structured way, they go there, and other people can then overhear it. This is where I will be teaching the session. 2. Running realtime meetings and synchronous conversations on IRC with zodbot – we have a logging bot that sits in the classroom channel (and in other channels for meetings). Using inline conversation tags like “#action” or “#topic” or “#agreed”, it produces meeting notes and full logs. Never take meeting notes again! Side note: log archives make for educational reading sometimes, because they’re the times in the channel that others deemed interesting enough to log. 3. Collaborative text editing with gobby and Etherpad – we’ll be using this to take notes on the classroom session being held in IRC. I like getting hands-on as early as possible when I’m teaching. :) 4. Sharing what you’ve done (asycnchronously) afterwards: For Fedora, this is a mailing list; you say things like “I’ll be teaching a packaging class on Tuesday” or “I taught packaging class on Tuesday, here are the logs.” Individual participants in that class (especially if it’s a multi-class experience) tend to blog their reflections to Planet. All these things promote accidental learning – the chances of someone who’s not already involved stumbling across these people thinking out loud about what they’re doing is very high, so learning groups tend to snowball into functionality very quickly, and people generally have a high degree of peripheral awareness as to what’s going on.