[Events] Is "Open Source Comes to Campus" needed?

[Asheesh Laroia]

Excerpts from Jessica McKellar's message of Fri Feb 03 15:13:36 -0500 2012:
> I would love to see this happen and help craft the survey /
> investigate prior results in this space.

My thoughts on the survey are that we should:

* Try to ask questions that resemble to existing diversity-in-computing
  surveys, so that we end up with comparable results.

* Talk to someone who's active in FLOSS and social science, like Mako
  or Kevin Carillo (who I spoke with recently about a survey he's doing
  to understand how newcomers experience FLOSS projects).

* Ask some fairly objective questions, like:

  Have you ever taken a "patch" file and used it to modify a set of files, e.g. 
  software source code?

  Have you used a version control system, such as git, CVS, Subversion, hg, bzr, etc.?

  Have you ever filed an issue/ticket/bug to report a problem or feature-request
  for a FLOSS project?

  Have you ever read through a bug in an open source project's bug tracker
  in order to understand a problem with a program?

* Ask some fairly subjective, self-rated questions, like:

  Are you interested in learning how to contribute to free, libre open source software?

  For how many years have you (to your knowledge) used programs that count as FLOSS?

  Do you have personal projects that you have released as open source?

That's the kind of thing I'm thinking of; again, it's the kind of
research that would show us if http://campus.openhatch.org/ is a good
idea, and what sort of diversity impact it could have.

-- Asheesh.