On Wed, 2011-01-12 at 06:21 -0500, Sebastian Dziallas wrote: > Subject line says it all. :) Seriously, Mel and I have been talking > about this more and more in Doha, since we're pretty sure that > there'll be a higher amount of requests coming in starting in March > (when we push strongly for further POSSEs, but also work on an open > textbook related talk at EduComm), and I figured I'd just give it a > jumpstart. > > I created a wiki page for an Infrastructure Team here: > http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Infrastructure_Team > > So. I know there's been previous conversations about this (and, as a > disclaimer, I know that I won't have the time to lead this) and I'd > like to ask people to put their names there if they are interested in > working on this. Basically, what's the latest state here?
Karsten had talked about heading this up and doing something with OSUOSL, but I haven't seen anything further on this for a while. There are three separate questions that need to be addressed: 1. hosting - where is the TOS.o infrastructure going to be hosted? 2. team - who's going to be involved, and in what ways? 3. services - what is the TOS.o infrastructure going to provide? On (1), I'm approaching Seneca about hosting TOS.o there, in the absence of forward movement elsewhere. On (2), I've had several students ask about volunteer sysadmin/netadmin opportunities involving open source. Double win: experience for some students and labour for the team :-) They will need some leadership, and I'm willing to put some personal cycles into that. On (3), I really (really, really) don't want to see TOS.o create any sort of sandbox functionality that duplicates what the open source communities are providing nor insulates students and faculty from involvement in real projects. It is *far* too easy to go off in a corner, play on a toy project (that no one will ever care about) using GIT and place it under an open source license and pretend you're doing open source; I would far rather see students jump in to an actual community that's doing something real. There are plenty of opportunities at every level of involvement and skill to absorb thousands of students, especially if faculty take the time to get involved in the community first. Having said that, I'm not convinced about the value of things like git repositories or trac instances, since those things are provided by the communities (if you're hacking LibreOffice, use their infra; if you're hacking Firefox, use their infra; if you're creating your own open source project, **YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG**, and there are lots of places that will give you infra, such as github and sourceforge and fedorahosted) -- though I waver on that and can see that there might be some useful places for those types of services. I can definitely see the value in providing things such as Planets. -Chris _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
