Kickstarting the Fedora Campus Ambassadors program

[Colin Zwiebel]

Ryan,
Sounds cool!

Sorry, just joined the list and am probably jump some discussion. Don't
worry about filling in too much.

I admit, I need to do some reading on the ambassadors program, but thought I
would add
1) I would really like to see Olin students working on more OSS / Fedora
projects

2) I can list some issues I've run into in the past getting students to work
on said projects (may give perspective)


=== Background ===
Maybe a few words about me / Olin. First off, I'm an electrical and computer
engineering (ECE) major here at F. W. Olin College <http://olin.edu> (yeah,
that crazy 300 person college science experiment). Olin college doesn't have
a mainstream CS / Computer Engineering (CE) major, but many students use OSS
and most students do at least intermediary software.

Of our CS/CE/ECE majors, a large portion are hired for Product Management
and other, not-direct-code-monkey positions. Otherwise, Olin students to be
more system-level-thinkers (aka, holistic thinkers) then I find other tech
schools to be.

Olin College is somewhat of an odd environment. Some of my concerns are
shaped by Olin's ranking at #4 of the Princeton Review's list of colleges
where "students study the most"

=== Issues and Context ===
Time == huge issue. Last year I ran http://gurufest.org/ GuruFest. It was
very difficult to get only a handful of students--and we we're running
around with colorful XO laptops! A Fedora / OSS movement at Olin would need
to be very approachable and then develop into something meaningful (or at
least addictive).

Physical Immediacy, (IE, lots of projects... but within Olin). Alternatively
known as "casualty to convenience"
Another trend I've noticed is that students here tend to

== Areas of Opportunity ==

Hackathons == awesome.
We've had several, about 10 (3% of Olin you guys! :P ) usually stay the
weekend. Might be a good way to get people hooked. If not, we could choose
projects that are easy to jump into or do bug fixing?

=== Grand Challenges Scholar Program ===
Olin is starting our first "degree-with-merit" program. Students that
formulate an action plan and show significant contribution to one the
National Academy of Engineering's 14 "Grand
Challenges<http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/>."
can receive a special distinction on their diploma.

Some of these areas have real OSS potential. Personalized learning comes to
mind. Getting someone onboard with an OSS project for their
Grand Challenges Scholar action plan would be awesome.

=== Course Projects, a way to contribute? ===
I have always thought that getting students to work on OSS projects would be
a way to kill two birds with one stone. Surprisingly, I find that students
don't. Last year I tried to push people to do their Software Design projects
on something OLPC / XO related. They *had *to Python, after all! No bites.

There is a drawback in that student projects may result in small, badly
organized, and partially complete projects that then wither. But hey, there
are cases where someone falls in love with OSS or their project and it all
makes up for it.

An alternative is to tap thesis and capstones. Olin has an advantage here in
that we have a Design Thread that runs through our cirriculum. Doing a
CS-type capstone that emphasizes users or interface design or worldly impact
(instead of pure technical work) is smiled upon.

== Disclaimer ==
I'm trying to run a run a Drag Show and a few other things right now. So I'm
strapped for time. I think it would be good to start the discussion now
about college programs so that we can launch (F13 :P ) come academic year
2010-11!


Okay, enough thoughts from this poor mind for one night.

Cheers

Colin
http://zonion.org

2010/3/27 Mel Chua <mel at redhat.com>

> You might be interested in Campus Ambassadors. Ryan == supercool guy.
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Kickstarting the Fedora Campus Ambassadors program
> Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:00:12 -0700
> From: Ryan Rix <ry at n.rix.si>
> Organization: The Fedora Project
> To: campus-ambassadors at lists.fedoraproject.org
>
> Hello one and all,
>
> For about two months now, there has been a pickup in interest in Fedora's
> campus ambassadors program. I think that it is about time for us to start
> picking up efforts for the program. I'm going to go ahead and try to
> kickstart
> a bit of discussion about exactly WHO we are, WHAT we want to do, and HOW
> we
> will do it. Anyone feel free to jump in, as this is a discussion I'd like
> all
> current and prospective campus ambassadors to take part in.
>
> With that out of the way, I have a few questions to ask, and my answers for
> them.
> nt, I'm going to go ahead and try
> 1) What do you want to see in the campus ambassador program? What is our
> primary goal?
> 2) How (or should we?) differentiate from the main Fedora Ambassadors
> program?
> 3) How should we interract with the Fedora Ambassadors program?
> 4) What are our next steps?
>
> Thanks and best,
> Ryan Rix
> --
> Ryan Rix
> == http://hackersramblings.wordpress.com | http://rix.si/ ==
>
>
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