Idea: Fedora Contributor Classrooms

[Justin W. Flory]

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=                           Quick Summary                            =
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1) Online university meets contributing to Fedora (kind of)
2) Join process: Move from wiki to more modern + centralized "course"
3) Improve process to jumpstart new contributors
4) Four main questions to answer
5) Opinions / thoughts very welcome *

* Longer email, but worth the read!
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Hello all,

This idea originates from a discussion Gabri (mailga) and I had in 
#fedora-join today.

Gabri pointed out the availability of a variety of different "online 
classroom" type of applications or websites. They're pretty commons 
nowadays, with things like Udemy or Coursera being used to let people 
take full-fledged courses in any subject they want (sometimes at a cost, 
sometimes not).

The article that started this discussion can be found here:

 
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2011/02/seven-free-platforms-for-teachin...

It's easy for someone to create a "course" in anything and set up a 
series of lessons or classes for their course. They can be in different 
formats depending on what suits the topic best.

The connection of this to Fedora that Gabri pointed out is that it may 
be something to look into to have a "Becoming a Fedora Contributor" 
course in an environment like one of these. The purpose of doing this 
would be to create a "curriculum" of the tools, resources, and 
information needed to be jumpstarted as a Fedora contributor.

There could be a general course with a few different lessons of 
different things in Fedora, and then perhaps subgroup-specific lessons 
about how to get started with a specific subgroup, e.g. Design, Kernel, 
Marketing, Packaging, CommOps, etc…

This would intend to replace the often decentralized wiki articles that 
accomplish the same thing. As it is becoming more well-known, the wiki 
is sometimes a difficult place to store useful information because it 
can be so difficult to navigate. Most subgroups have some sort of 
"Joining" series on the wiki, but finding all the pages can sometimes be 
a challenge.

The needs for something like this would be as follows:
1) Create a series of "lessons" for newcomers to follow in order to be 
"ready" to contribute to what interests them
2) Courses / lessons easy to update and keep current with the fast-paced 
speed of Fedora

Gabri also linked this article which may of use of finding a platform we 
like, should this be something we are interested in:

     http://blog.capterra.com/top-8-freeopen-source-lmss/

However, to the point - now what? There's a few questions I think we 
need to answer?



   1) Is this something we think would be useful to pursue?

   2) If so, what is the scope we want to pursue? Start small and see if 
it works well, then try a wider adoption?

   3) Is this something we would have as a long-term goal for 2016 for 
every subgroup to try to adopt (with the assistance of CommOps)?

   4) Are there any downsides that stand out by trying to pursue an 
online "contributor classroom" sort of style versus using the wiki?



I think these are the core questions we need to answer to move forward. 
This may be an interesting discussion topic for a meeting if there is 
support for the idea.

And Gabri, feel free to chime in and add anything in case I missed 
something. :)

Interested to hear your thoughts!

-- 
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7(a)gmail.com