POSSE is Professors Open Source Summer Experience

and it's a one-week intensive bootcamp for professors designed to solve a problem

We realized a while back that many students who were getting involved in open source

weren't doing so as part of a formal schooling program.

And, at the same time there was a lot of value to

learning in open source.

There's a huge code base to experiment with,

a community of collaborators that can support

and encourage and aid learning. The problem was that

there were very few professors who were involved with

open source, and POSSE is designed to address that by

encouraging professors to, themselves, get deeply involved

in an open source community. It's not really

very different from developing software in another context,

except that in open source you've got the communications

and the community aspects. So, it's almost more cultural

than technical learning.

One of the participants from the first POSSE is a

professor with you at Seneca, Fardad.

Can you tell me a little about what he's doing now?

Fardad has taken a third semester programming course,

one of the core courses in our programming program

and added an open source component, almost as a

pre-open source course, so that students, rather than work

on their own little projects are instead collaborating

in small groups using open source methods and communication tools.

And it's really transformed that course. He's offered that

course for one full semester and he's into the second semester

and so far, the results are really quite astounding.

The student engagement is dramatically increased,

and the students are... pop into the IRC channel and you'll

see them late at night or on the weekends and hacking

away and by introducing open source concepts earlier

I think that we be able to prepare students to become

more deeply involved when they reach the later semesters.

One of the things that was interesting that came out

during the first POSSE was that, for me, I watched a lot of

the professors come in and go "We were thinking about

computer science senior capstone projects." But another

one was "Well, wouldn't this stuff be great for students to

learn how to write technical documentation?" Or if you're

studying human/computer interaction, have your designs

actually in a product by the time you graduate. Or if you're...

If you want to do QA when you get out, learn how to do

that on a real product that's shipping and you find the bugs

in. And so, broadening to a couple of other disciplines

and a couple of other teams that we know how to handle

very well, and in Fedora and in other open source projects,

that's going to expand the... instead of just reaching the

computer science majors and the computer science

department, we'll be able to get students that study other

things as well.

One of the Seneca students wrote the animated PNG

implementation for Mozilla. There was no animated version

of that except for the MNG format which was very rarely

implemented. So, one of our students, with the urging of

the Mozilla community, implemented a lightweight animated

format for that and since then that format's been adopted by

I think all of the major browsers.

Oh, wow!

So, there's more than 300,000,000 people directly using

that student's code and then many other people using the

Internet that have been impacted by it.

To go into an interview and be able to point to that and say

"Yeah, actually I wrote that software," or "I added a feature

to that software, fixed a bug, or wrote some documentation

for it," and then for the interviewers to be able to verify that,

and be able to see everything that they have done is

very powerful.

If there are professors that are interested in teaching

open source, are there other people that they can talk to about this?

The web presence that we created is called

teachingopensource.org and in fact the POSSE program

is accessible at http://teachingopensource.org/posse

So there's a fairly easy way for people to get in touch,

find out what's going on with the POSSE program, get

involved, and perhaps even host.

If professors are interested in doing something like that

at their school later on, then come, join the fun, say they're

interested, and can go from there.