The Developer-in-Residence model came up during the POSSE meeting today. Continuing that discussion ... the Dev-in-Res is, in its most basic form, very straightforward:
* A full-time open source developer is co-located at a .edu either full-time or most-time (4 days/week?) * The dev has release for a certain percentage of their time (perhaps 20%) to build community through three things: *# Guest lecturing *# Be a technical resource (e.g., available for consultation and mentoring) *# Enabling the local faculty and students to closely observe a real open source developer in action (may involve additional blogging or other communication) (I use the term "developer" loosely here -- it could be any type of full-time OS contributor, whether a documentation writer, UI designer, kernel developer, or whatever). I think that this model has the potential to help deepen the connection between an educational institution and an open source community for a very low cost -- it's manageable for most schools to provision an office (and phone, and internet connectivity, and a workstation) and I suspect that most open-source companies, which typically have remote-worker arrangements in place, could easily relocate a dev for a year. There will also be liaison/release costs on both sides, of course. However, the low barrier-to-entry can hide potential problems -- I think a school will need a solid open source context in place for this to work well, otherwise it will fall flat; POSSE could play a valuable role in building that context. A developer-in-residence program would work at Seneca now, for example, but I think it would have had little value five years back. -Chris _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
