Sounds cool, Patrick.

I think you're spot on that contributing to a wiki is a great way to experience the collaborative nature of open source, without needing a lot of coding skills. When you say that you would manage the "committer" role, do you mean that you would be the gatekeeper to getting changes into the "real" wiki? I guess that's a reasonable approximation of how open source code projects work, even if it's not very wiki-ish.

Do you have projects in mind for them to work on on TOSW?

Do you know about the School of Open at P2PU? http://schoolofopen.p2pu.org/ There may be resources there that would be useful to you.

On 7/30/14 9:48 AM, Patrick Masson wrote:

I'll be teaching a course at SUNY Albany this Fall, "Open Source Software Practices." The course is an introduction to the principles and practices of open source software communities, organized in four major topics: Economics, Community, Intellectual Rights & Business models.

I would like to employ team-based and project-based learning (hands-on verses lectures) within the course and thought it would be great to have the students "join" the TOSW project. As many of the students do not have a background in software development, I thought the TOSW project would be a great way to experience an open community without the technical barriers. After all, TOSW should be applicable to disciplines outside open source software, e.g. open hardware, open education, open data, open culture, etc.

This would be a great way for them to experience first hands and hands-on how a community works (or does not) and thus actually contributing to a project either through content or practices. As students trying to understand how and why open source works, they should all be valuable contributors in various ways: "testers," "QA" "documentation" "bug-reporting" and even "contributors." I think I would manage the "committer" role of editing the wiki--but I could see this ultimate role being an objective in the course.

Thoughts?
Patrick

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Patrick Masson
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