Open to educators and OS community members, this will be a constructive conversation about the role of higher education in OS communities and best practices for sustainable future relationships. We will look at existing OS efforts in academia, and explore how to enable wider collaboration. The conversation will be facilitated by the Clinic for Open Source Arts (COSA) and the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS).
Questions include:
How are higher education institutions engaging with OS ideas, and tools?
What is their role currently and what could/should it be?
How is academia perceived by the OS community? What barriers impact collaboration?
Can educational institutions become more central to open source sustainability?
What needs to change in the ways we define research to encourage contribution to OS projects?
How do we better define the process of educational institutions as part of the pipeline of OS users and contributors?
The conversations will be rich no matter the number of participants and the questions do not need to build on each other. It will be okay if people come and go and the main challenge will be to make sure that if there are many participants, they all get an opportunity to express their thoughts and ideas. One way will be to manage the chat and the voice/video channels so that those who feel more comfortable expressing themselves via text can do so and are heard. We will also use breakout sessions to allow for more detailed and varied discussion between participants. We also see this as way to connect a diverse set of individuals interested in future collaborations and discussion on this topic.
We're hoping that many efforts and discussions will continue after Mozfest. Share any ideas you already have for how to continue the work from your session.:The facilitators will collate the notes from the conversation and share them out publicly in multiple venues as one step in continuing and long term efforts to encourage a healthier relationship between Higher Education and Open Source. We also expect this discussion will enable individuals from around the world to make relevant connections that can further efforts to strengthen the relationship between academia and OS communities. To help continue the work set forth in our session, we plan to provide information and resources, including details on existing fora for discussion and support, for those interested in furthering these efforts.
Professor of Emergent digital Practices at the University of Denver and Director of the Clinic for Open Source Arts.
Stephanie Lieggi is Assistant Director of the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS), part of the Baskin School of Engineering (BSOE) at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC).