Recruiting Students (Campus Ambassadors)
by Jack Aboutboul
Hey All,
I'm sorry I missed the marketing meeting earlier today, but I was told
that there was discussion of recruiting students to help out with Fedora
and Fedora marketing efforts. I have been working for the past couple
of weeks to put together something modeled after the ambassadors which I
tentatively call "Campus Ambassadors". The mission of the campus
ambassadors is something similar to what Mozilla does with the Firefox
Campus Rep program--to have someone who can speak to the student body
about Fedora and represent Fedora at relevant campus events.
Also, I am looking to require campus ambassadors to hold one info
session or tech talk type thing per semester to make sure that there is
constant action and interest in Fedora.
There will be a community architecture team meeting in Raleigh next week
at which I would like to present the final plan for this and officially
launch. I have already been in contact with a number of students from
various universities (Berkeley, Oswego, CMU, Auburn, Texas A&M) and so
far there is interest.
Just thought I would kick the idea out to the list and see what people
had to say. My plan is to put up a wiki page for this tomorrow or over
the weekend, so that it can be presented next week.
Thanks,
Jack
15 years, 10 months
I was just thinking about a Fedora News Channel
by Markus McLaughlin
I too think there should a Fedora News Channel site covering success stories
with Fedora, Red Hat related news concerning Fedora, educational uses of
Fedora, multimedia uses, and FUN things to do with it as well.
If anyone loves the idea too, let's propose : FedoraNews.wordpress.com,
which anyone can add a blog posting, a photo, a video in Theora & QuickTime
from a FUDcon, audio using OGG Vorbis & AAC...
This site will automatically use RSS (which I add feeds to my most excellent
RSS reader : Rhetoris, for MACs,
which utiliizes text to speech.) *GOOGLE Rhetoris, Mac Users!* :D
Have a great Fourth of July!
Mark McLaughlin
linuxglobe.wordpress.com
Hudson, MA, USA
15 years, 10 months
Re: Recruiting Students (Campus Ambassadors)
by Chris Tyler
Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>
> I think there are a lot of people chomping at the bit to get something
> done. A framework to work inside of would help a lot. But beyond
> just being a rep... we need some guidance on how to tell students and
> faculty how to take on Fedora relevant work as academic projects.
>
> >From my personal point of view, I already know what Fedora relevant
> work I want to encourage students to work on. I don't need a list of
> ideas, nor do I need a list of mentors. I'm pretty sure I can find
> individual existing contributors who would take on a student if I
> knock on the right doors inside our project.
>
> But what I need to know is some advice on how to approach both
> students and faculty in a way that they continue to be open to the
> subtly corrosive effects of my continued manipulation. What are the
> selling points that I need to stress to the students? What are the
> selling points I need to stress to the faculty who are going to end up
> giving students some sort of academic credit and possibly a grade for
> the work as part of their academic career?
>
> -jef
Jeff,
I think the role that you mention here -- being a matchmaker between a
student, a potential need (project), and community resources -- is even
more essential than that of a traditional 'mentor'.
As for selling points for student-projects-within-opensource, there are
many; here are two:
- Open source projects give students an opportunity to work "at scale"
-- on projects which have a larger codebase, are more established, have
a larger user base, and which will have more real-world impact than most
student projects.
- Open source projects are "real world". The code has the warts and
twists and ugly bruises of real-world code that's been through a few
development iterations, which is exactly the kind of code that students
will encounter in industry (whether "industry" is running particle
colliders, modeling the stock market, or working on embedded systems).
--
Chris Tyler
15 years, 10 months
