POSSE 2009 Sunday

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Sunday schedule for POSSE. This day starts the week with an evening welcome session.

[edit] Welcome and Introductions

Evening Session

This session will introduce the participants, the subject, and the program for the week.

  • Welcome (GDK)
  • Introductions and Icebreakers
  • Open Source and Teaching (brief)
    • The rise of Free Software/Open Source in Computing
    • Opportunities provided by Open Source:
      1. Large, production-quality codebases
      2. Real users and real user feedback
      3. Global development teams
      4. Distributed development teams
      5. Predefined, working production processes
      6. Many ways to get involved (development, testing, optimization, porting, documentation, localization, art, ...)
      7. Low barriers (in one sense) to get involved - no need to ask for permission/approval, just start working
      8. Market penetration not yet widespread - plenty of strategy projects/opportunties here!
    • Challenges of teaching in an Open Source community:
      1. Many projects not really set up to handle an influx of newbies (yet)
      2. It's real world -- unpredictable, frequently-changing, and the communities involve unpredictable people
      3. Learning to work within the community is time-consuming and means less "academic information" can be crammed in (not necessarily a bad thing, but perhaps a problem for Programming 101 or other information-heavy courses?)
      4. Codebases can be overwhelmingly large and contain some really bad code
      5. Community schedules are sometimes flexible/moving and often do not match academic schedules; release dates may extend past finals week, mentors may have to disappear mid-term
  • Plans for the Week
    • General schedule: Start at ~9:00 am, wrap up in mid-/late-afternoon, overnight deliverable
    • We will be working inside two communities (describe briefly - more detail on Monday):
      1. Mozilla
      2. Fedora
    • All content is on the wiki (will be explained in detail on first day)
  • Handouts
    • Contact info
    • URLs for the course (wiki, planet)
    • Account information on server

After-Session

  • Installfest, for anyone interested or needing to update their laptop configuration -- any combination of:
    • Fedora Linux + development tools
    • (Windows) Firefox, Putty (optional: mozilla-build, VS)
    • (OSX) Firefox (optional: Development tools, XCode)