Seneca's Open Source Initiative - Perhaps we should start something similar here?
Seneca has been doing a lot of work with the open source community which has been brought into the spotlight recently by Metronews. Seneca (see: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Main_Page), in my opinion, is providing an excellent example of an educational organization that has chosen to officially embrace the open source initiative in Canada, potentially offering some insight into how we could preemptively model our own initiatives from - if that is a path we choose to take. An example of their Seneca's work is illustrated in this article (this is not a rickroll by the way - thanks Mike! ;)) which depicts how Seneca is promoting their students to participate in the Mozilla project.
There are a lot of good potential projects being brainstormed on this site - many of which carry the open source tone - should we should start up a team here to foster underground projects? The mic is yours...
Tags:
- Michael Moncada's blog
- Login to post comments
- 474 reads
Comments
TeachingOpenSource.org and TOSS09/FSOSS
Greetings from Seneca! Your post reminded me to share a couple of things that might be of interest...
(1) A group of 130 or so professors, Open Source community leaders, and representatives of Open Source companies are collaborating around http://TeachingOpenSource.org. This is a {vendor,project,institution}-neutral initiative that grew out of discussions at FSOSS, OSCON, and other events last year. Everyone interested is welcome to join.
(2) The Free Software and Open Source Symposium is taking place here at Seneca@York on October 29-30 (call for presentations recently went out). TeachingOpenSource.org is organizing a summit on the 29th as a pre-FSOSS event. Since OnLinux is on the preceeding Saturday, and there are a couple of other events in between, we'd like to create the Toronto Open Source Week from the 24th to the 30th. Anyone interested in holding an event is welcome to add to the event calendar.
URLs:
Teaching Open Source: http://teachingopensource.org
FSOSS: http://fsoss.ca
Toronto Open Source Week planning wiki: http://torontoopensourceweek.pbworks.com/
OnLinux: http://onlinux.ca
Welcome!
Hello Chris and welcome to our grassroots community here at U of T. I'm surprised that you found us that quickly... either that or you really care about the public reputation of your project. :)
At some point it would be great to get your input on how the whole thing started at Seneca. In particular I am interested how open source became an academic interest, rather than just a means to an end. Quite frankly I am hoping to elicit academic support here at U of T as well.
Academic Support
Hi Rouben! You can't stay unnoticed for long on the web :-) ... I've been following TKF for a few weeks.
We'd be glad to get together with you sometime and talk about academic support for open source. (Do check out TOS too, though -- this is a topic that comes up all over the world).
Welcome Chris!
Thanks Chris, and I extend my welcome to you as well. I too share the same sentiment as Rouben and would love to join both you and Rouben (time permitting) in a discussion about academic support but in addition it would also be great to discuss some of the strategies your group used to encourage students, get staff and faculty involved (and keep them interested) as well as educative techniques you used to educate those who would be new to this type of initiative.