Education

Unix Philosophy #12, Rule of Repair: "When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible." This applies to both code and culture; when someone gets stuck and hollers for help, they are helping their community find and fix a participation process bug. However, the new contributor on-ramp pipeline is particularly tricky to debug; potential participants often struggle in silence, giving you no indication of their presence, let alone why they were unable to begin working with your project community.

There's a DIY electronics revolution going on, and it's powered by free software. The hardware is cheap, easy to find, and easy to program. It's also a great way to get kids learning the basics of electronics, and the joys of participating in the open source software community. In this talk, Leigh will cover how to introduce kids to the Arduino microcontroller platform and to participating in the community around it on the web, mailing lists, and IRC.

While somethings require luck and timing, nothing happens unless we make an effort to be present when people are gathering. In this presentation we'll cover techniques you can use while we discuss actual events. Answering the question... How did one seemingly random meeting result in Rochester Institute of Technology students being some of the first to receive FOSS development course work as part of their formal education?

Developers write documentation. Technical authors write manuals. But in a perfect world, your users read software self-help guides. Consumers expect documentation to reflect the sophistication of the software they are using, and will abandon an application if they cannot easily find the answer to their problems. If we really want world domination of free and open source software, we need to have the self-help guides worthy of our code. In "Self Help Guides for World Domination" we'll take a look at the strategies and tools needed for really awesome documentation.