MozillaWiki

Foundation:Planning:Education:Seneca

Revision as of 14:46, 7 January 2009 by David.humphrey (talk | contribs) (→‎Approach)

Since 2005 Seneca College has worked closely with the Mozilla community in order to create a set of Mozilla specific courses (see 1, 2, 3), engage hundreds of students directly in Mozilla development projects, host and record dozens of Mozilla events and talks, etc. Seneca's faculty and students are key contributors to the Mozilla project, and have gained significant experience bootstrapping new contributors into the Mozilla technology and culture. The resources, knowledge, and experience that has come from this work can be used around the world by other institutions and individuals who wish to also become part of Mozilla or otherwise contribute.

Overview

Vision

Students anywhere can take advantage of the Seneca / Mozilla learning model, accessing projects, community support and mentoring while participating in Mozilla.

Context

Mozilla's work with Seneca began with a research project that required knowledge of Firefox's source code. After the project was completed, it was clear that the knowledge gained about how to get started in the Mozilla community was something that should be taught on its own: Mozilla provides one of the best real world examples of a large open source code base that is actively maintained by a global community. At the same time it was clear that Mozilla itself, while good at the highly technical work of creating its software products, was not as good at helping new people to get started (i.e., many contributors find Mozilla on their own, and then teach themselves how to cope).

Seneca's goal was to work directly with Mozilla's core community vs. trying to impose an institutional agenda on the community. This meant adopting and teaching Mozilla's own tools (wikis, irc, blogs, planets, bugzilla, mxr, etc.) instead of trying to get Mozilla to use Blackboard or Moodle. Since it was easy for Mozilla to engage with the students, they did, and a healthy sub-community evolved. The model has been described in detail in a paper called, A Model for Sustainable Involvement in Community Open Source (pdf).

As time has passed, many generations of Seneca-Mozilla contributors have gone through the courses. The students have produced valuable contributions, for example: APNG, plugin-watcher, buildbot infrastructure, web tool improvements, core improvements, Firefox and Thunderbird front-end fixes, countless tests/docs and other QA related activities, etc. In addition, students have been hired as full-time Mozilla Corporation employees or interns, helping to validate the level and focus of the work they did while in the Mozilla courses.

The Seneca-Mozilla work has been praised online and in the media, and seen as positive by people who have participated. The work has also attracted attention from other institutions wanting to do similar work (e.g., universities in France, Japan, Canada, the US). Seneca has worked with many external institutions in order to try and duplicate the work, but to date no other schools have engaged on the same scale.

It seems that one of the main problems is that it is hard to find the 'perfect storm' of prof, contributor and institution: Mozilla is a complicated technology and community for newcomers. Seneca has evolved into this over time, but didn't begin as an obvious candidate for a Mozilla partnership. As such, it is believed that similar schools can grow into this work, especially if we can leverage Seneca's work and experience. It is hoped that by lowering the barriers to entry for students and professors, more will get involved.

Thesis

The best (or at least first) way to scale the teaching method, community infrastructure and materials developed at Seneca is simply to open everything up to students at other colleges and universities. In the short term, this will mean more students from more places participating in Mozilla. Over the long term, it may lead to more professors and institutions contributing to Mozilla Education in a bigger way.

Desired outcomes

  • gradually build up a 'self priming pump' for student involvement in Mozilla, with the pathway to participation becoming clear and systematized
  • more students participating from more places
  • professors dip their toes in the water with a few students, eventually becoming more involved
  • provide support (e.g., David and the Seneca-Mozilla community) to new students and professors in order to help them get started faster.
  • package and make available learning resources and tools specifically geared to new professors and students, and make sure that these are useful around the world (e.g., low bandwidth regions), for example, the Mozilla Developer Resource Kit and DXR.

How it will work

Scope

  • current focus is on computer studies, using XUL development as content
  • could expand to include other topics using the same method
    • open web technologies (for web design and tech students)
    • design
    • business
    • marketing

Approach

  • some kind of intake method of barrier to entry to make sure students are serious?
    • how do we find *good* students?
    • is there any difference for masters and undergrad students?
  • some sort of web page that provides an entry point for interested students, explaining the process?
  • self study (moodle?) or regularly scheduled online version of Real World Mozilla course based on the material Dave uses at the beginning of each course
  • regularly maintained list of features and bugs that students could work on, ideally with info on people willing to mentor
    • needs a bit more description and context than just a search in bugzilla, especially with respect to knowing who people will need to talk to in order to get started, what does and doesn't have value, etc.
    • Dave sitting on triage calls, at least for thunderbird and firefox
  • Seneca community infrastructure where students can sandbox -> #seneca, wiki, planet, etc
    • Seneca has already experimented with this in the past: students and faculty from around the world use #seneca; the Seneca wiki is open, and many community members use it; non-Seneca people have their blogs on the Seneca planet.
  • access to mentors -> how would this work?
    • The most effective way to do this is to support students and faculty to become contributors as quickly as possible. This means getting their work into bugs so that the usual Mozilla review system can take over (i.e., they cease to be students, and become regular contributors, helping the Mozilla community absorb them without the need for new categories of people). In addition, using communication tools like #seneca provides a way for "beginner" questions that don't belong in bugs to get asked with safety (i.e., Mozilla's main developer channels can't tolerate this sort of questioning in a sustained way).

Products / stuff we'll create

  • well maintained web presence that provides students (and professors) a pathway into Mozilla Education
  • a 'Real World Mozilla' self study course based on the first two weeks of what Dave offers … could be used for this purpose, but also others

Use cases

Student

  • student has one or more independent study or practical credits to complete
  • goes to Mozilla Education site run by Seneca, learns about how it works
  • applies for support / admission? how does this work?
  • takes the online Real World Mozilla course
  • picks a project, gets help finding a mentor
  • participates in #seneca etc. while doing project … also blogs
  • what else? how does it end? what if they are doing multiple credits?
  • <elaborate>

Professor

  • professor has a number of students they'd like to have participate, but isn't ready or able to run a whole Mozilla course
  • how do they get involved?
  • what do they contribute?
  • how does this become part of 'professor network' over time?
  • <elaborate>

Mentor

  • Mozilla contributor who would like to help, either in general or with a specific university (e.g. the Jason case)
  • <elaborate>

Resources

Things we have

  • seneca Real World Mozilla course (describe, why is it useful?)
  • active community infrastructure (describe, why is it useful?)
  • what else?

Things we need

  • what's missing? what do we need to build?

Financial

  • requires course release for Dave Humphrey to be doing this, especially if focused on outside students
  • students participation itself shouldn't cost anything
  • over time, other institutions may run Mozilla related courses, or at least part courses, using their own funds

Roadmap

Q1 2009

xxx

Q2 2009

xxx

Q3 2009

xxx

Q4 2009

xxx

Beyond

xxx

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