On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 06:29:35PM -0700, tosmaillist.neophyte_...@ordinaryamerican.net wrote: > Welcome to the Teaching Open Source project, Shlomif. > > You've spent some time refining "How to start contributing to or using > Open Source Software", > http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/How_to_start_contributing_to_or_using_Open_Source_Software
And it's looking good; it seems to have a defined audience with beginning experience. Being distilled, it's useful as an introduction and director, and complements works such as the Practical... textbook and 'The Open Source Way'. Shlomi - one question that I have about the focus on the document. It includes contribute and use. I'm curious if you've thought about focusing it to just contribute, perhaps as: [[How to start participating or contributing in Open Source software]] Aside from the teaching of participation being more of the topic of this wiki and project, it also occurs to me that there are a huge number of documents and books and articles that focus on getting people to use open source. The gap is in how-to participate and contribute. I separate those two because participation is much easier and is the gateway to contribution -- most people participate lightly before they heavily contribute. (I explain this more in this blog post - http://iquaid.org/2009/04/14/community-sets/ .) As an example and contrast, here is a similarly purposed document with a different audience. The reader is expected to be already interested in contributing: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_be_a_successful_contributor Again, I see a complementary relationship. I see it somewhat like this, as a spectrum from very-new to very-experienced: (How to for very new)[..............](How to for very experienced) These sit on top of a number of longer reference works, such as Programming OSS or Practical OSS Exploration. Somewhere in the middle are handbooks such as The Open Source Way (TOSW), with the longer works providing a spectrum from topic-focused to broad-focused, all as a foundation: (How to ...)[..] (Distilled handbooks e.g. TOSW) (Programming OSS)[...](Practical OSS Exploration) Something like that. :) Cheers - Karsten -- name: Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener team: Red Hat Community Architecture uri: http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki gpg: AD0E0C41
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