At the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference I met Dr. Lynn Keane who teaches at the University of South Carolina. She had mentioned in her talk on OpenOffice.org that students in her classes were writing documentation for OO.o. I mentioned some of Fedora’s ongoing work with Seneca College in Canada and how I thought that Fedora’s rapid release cycle might provide her students with more opportunity to see the full lifecycles of documentation.
We communicated via email and she invited me to speak to her class on September 10th.
Upon arriving she told me that there were 4 students who were going to do documentation for the Fedora project and that there seemed to be some interest for the class. I had prepped a short presentation about Fedora and Open Source in general. I talked through the event. I also had to rent an OLPC XO for the event and I showed it off - and of course there was general amazement at the device. Since this class was mainly a documentation and training class, I answered a number of questions from the students on the docs workflow and things of that nature. They also asked me about videos and screencasts, and I was thrilled to tell them about Fedora TV I provided everyone in the class with a LiveCD for them to experience Fedora for themselves.I sat down with the 4 students who were going to work on Fedora documentation. They struck me as competent and intelligent. They seemed to have an excitement about working on the project. I provided them all with Fedora tshirts, and we are schedule to get things moving shortly.
This struck me as a fabulous opportunity - not only did Fedora walk away with 4 contributors, but the 4 contributors are going to be introduced to OSS, and not just as a user. Working projects of Fedora’s scale and the number of different cultures around the world they’ll have to meet as well as the things they will get to learn should make this a great adventure for them.
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