As you may have gathered from my previous email to TOS, I'm hosed - the education stuff for Red Hat has grown far too large for one person (even a Mel) to handle alone.
What this means is that my "outward-facing" edu activity is going to drop for a bit while I take care of housekeeping in here (getting finances in order, making sure ) so if I'm not on IRC much, or flying around to visit schools, or sending out as many emails or replying to them more slowly, that's why. It looks like other voices are picking up on IRC and the list, though, so I'm not worried. :) I gotta take care of the finance stuff so y'all can keep doing the awesome fun stuff, so that's what I'm going to do, for as long as it takes, and... I'll re-emerge after that to join folks in the happy teaching festivities. If you need something you might normally have gotten from me, here are people good to ping for stuff you might normally ping me for - I'm in constant contact with these folks, too: * For anything financially-related, you can also ping Max Spevack (spevack on IRC, [email protected] email) - although Max is even more loaded down than I am with finance stuff for many things beyond TOS, so unless kittens will die *and* you can't find me, please just wait for me on this. * For anything POSSE related you would have poked me on for a "what's Red Hat up to?" perspective, you can also ping Sebastian Dziallas (sdziallas on IRC, though emailing [email protected] is probably better due to class scheduling) - he's going to be working for Red Hat doing POSSE stuff all summer and is just as up-to-speed as I am on the entire program and future plans for it. Past instructors and alumni also hang out on this list and in-channel and can (and have!) answered lots of questions about POSSE in the past... don't feel like you have to block on me or Sebastian to talk to anyone about POSSE, please! (But we do appreciate being kept in the loop, and this mailing list being cc'd on POSSE convos too.) * For anything Textbook-related, Karsten Wade has been the go-to person for ages and I've just been redirecting everyone who asks me about the textbook to him anyway. :) (quaid on IRC, [email protected] on email.) * For anything infrastructure-related, you definitely want to be talking to (Seneca Prof) Chris Tyler (ctyler on IRC), since he's the guy who runs all our infra and there aren't any Red Hatters with root on the machines as far as I know. :) If for some reason you need a Red Hatter with sysadmin expertise for something TOS-infra-related, ping Karsten or Ian Weller (ianweller on IRC, [email protected] on email may be better, again due to class scheduling) - I know exactly *nothing* about being a decent sysadmin[0] so I deflect all those questions to Chris and these guys and the #fedora-admin IRC channel anyhow. * POSSE alumni with quick "I'm looking for <this sort of resource> for my students" questions or "who can my students email their getting-started-in-FOSS questions to?" - hit up Ryan Rix (rrix on IRC, [email protected] on email, email probably better due to class schedules) whose Red Hat internship is to act as a "help desk" for those sort of questions. He's a Fedora and KDE guy and can also help you figure your way around any FOSS project in the style of http://blog.melchua.com/2010/10/08/possesa-fri-5-minutes-of-improvisation/. * If you're not in North America and are looking for a Red Hatter closer to your time zone to talk to about education, Harish Pillay (harish on IRC, [email protected] on email) is in Singapore and possibly easier to get hold of. Note that the fact that they're Red Hat folks is mostly incidental - the Red Hatness doesn't give you any magical special powers in TOS, nor does membership from any other institution, since this is a neutral spot and we're going to keep it that way - I've just heard some folks referring to TOS as "the Red Hat thing," which isn't true, and wanted to make sure we weren't making people feel crowded out. Anyhoo - hopefully this makes things more bus/raptor-proof... I've been nervous for a while that if I were hit by a raptor or eaten by a bus, TOS would fall apart - and that points to *my* failure to follow the open source way on the Red Hat education work I've been doing, so this is me trying to consciously change that. I haven't been good at radical transparency (it's easy to slide when you're "too busy doing stuff to talk about it!") and for that, I apologize to the community. Comments and advice, concerns, questions, and so forth welcome, as always. I always learn a ton from being here. :) --Mel [0] Seriously. I struggle to figure out CUPS and still don't understand SELinux at all and couldn't configure a firewall to save my life. I hope to take RHCE classes this summer to fix that. _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
