[Events] Motivating contribution in "open source comes to campus" by pre-exposure to projects

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hey all,

>From what I can tell, the teaching part of "open source comes to campus" 
is generally seen as a success by attendees.

The projects part is more of a mixed bag. Some people make really 
significant contributions to projects, and get a lot out of the event. 
Others less so.

One thing I'm thinking of doing is working with the local campus 
organization and the staff in attendance to make a list of, say, 7 open 
source projects that seem probably interesting to the attendees. Then we 
assign a task to attendees to download and use, or at least read the docs 
for, one of these projects, as preparation for the event.

That way, they can go into the event with some idea of what they might 
change, or what a given bug in the project's bug tracker might mean.

For example, if we tell a student to learn about GIMP, and they spend half 
an hour playing with it before the event, it would be more meaningful when 
they find a gnome-love bug for it and submit a patch.

(It also means we can plan better in terms of staff knowing what the 
development environment requirements are for projects students are likely 
to try contributing to. It also means we can better-answer a question that 
came up at UMD: "What kinds of open source software exist?")

I plan to go ahead with that, but thought I'd mention it here in case 
others have thoughts!

-- Asheesh.