Fantastic job, and well done in taking real, practical and positive steps to get people involved.
Giving people the underlying skills of git, bug trackers, etc, means you're giving them the chance to join in and learn the other things that they can learn simply by participating in open source.
I do a similar thing in math, giving people the basics of proof techniques, math notation, how to read math, etc. The kids can be amazingly responsive, and it's incredibly rewarding.
I love this idea! In the PHP community we've started to have more and more talks show up on the conference circuit about getting involved, but this is even better. I bet in every major city there's people who would be interested in getting involved in open-source who aren't going to go to a conference just to find out, but they might spend a day or two some weekend doing just that.
I can't wait for the material for this to come out. It'd be great if it was on GitHub or some similar service so we there's an open source way to get people into open source.
Great idea - there are a lot of available programming cycles from students who otherwise spend time on personal projects or games. And while that's of course fine, it would be even better if they were contributing to FLOSS. Both for FLOSS and for themselves.
I tried to do something like this with IEEE student branch of my college (in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar or Mehesana, Gujarat, India). I could have got student from all over the state with all the 13 SB in the section. But the problem is, there is simply no speaker. Back in 2005, Indias first Drupal Bootcamp was organized by our college, but after that no such event has taken place.
Nobody ever had to teach me these things, I taught them to myself because I have a little thing called motivation. Do we really want all of these students who couldn't even be irked to learn about something as simple and ubiquitous as version control wasting everybodies time?
This sort of ignorance isn't even caused simply by a lack of interest in open source. Without these very basic skills being covered by this, you're pretty unhireable.
Giving up your weekend to learn to contribute to open source does require motivation. Whether you do it through instruction or self-study is a matter of preference. That some people are not good enough to contribute to open source because of their learning style is a poisonous attitude.
As I stated, this isn't an issue of learning how to contribute to open source. The skills they are teaching here are required for any job in industry, open or proprietary. And _yes_ it requires motivation, as I stated. These people lack it.
>That some people are not good enough to contribute to open source because of their learning style is a poisonous attitude.
You may not like it, but it's true. How can you expect someone who can't learn on their own to understand your codebase enough to make meaningful contributions?
The most important skill you can have is knowing how to teach yourself new skills. If you don't have that, there is a very real, and very low, limit to what you can realisticly contribute. This applies both to the industry in general, not just open source.
I agree that open-source contribution requires a willingness for self-directed learning. But I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that these students are unmotivated.
Incidentally, I first learned subversion from a student-run session on contributing to open-source, similar to the one the author ran. I went on to spend hours deciphering and studying an open source project that I was particularly fond of. I've since contributed to several open-source projects, all by teaching myself the codebase and toolchain as required.
Dude, they're in school. Do you complain to their computer science teachers, because self-motivated students should be able to learn CS themselves? It may be true, but that doesn't mean that the teachers or students are doing something wrong!
As for the ability to learn on their own, perhaps they are spending their own time learning interesting things rather than learning shell scripting or how to use git.
Learning computer science is not about learning version control systems, or even programming. Computer science educations should focus on the theoretics and math behind all of that.
Teaching version control to computer science students is like teaching calculators to mathematics majors.
Giving people the underlying skills of git, bug trackers, etc, means you're giving them the chance to join in and learn the other things that they can learn simply by participating in open source.
I do a similar thing in math, giving people the basics of proof techniques, math notation, how to read math, etc. The kids can be amazingly responsive, and it's incredibly rewarding.
Well done.