A small group of Computer Science (CS) professors gathered at Red Hat's corporate campus in Raleigh, North Carolina from July 19th to 24th for the Professors' Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) 2009 workshop. The program focused on educating CS professors about open source development, including practical ways to get students involved in open source projects and how to integrate open source methodology into the classroom experience. The participants deemed the event a tremendous success and plan to continue it next year, hopefully expanding to new locations and fields of study.

POSSE 2009 was an outgrowth of the TeachingOpenSource.org site, a new, open community of teachers and software developers collaborating on educational issues. TeachingOpenSource.org's other projects include mentoring programs and producing teaching materials, but POSSE was its first attempt to gather educators and open source advocates for face-to-face meetings.

Hands-on introduction to open source

POSSE facilitator Greg DeKoenigsberg said that Red Hat intentionally kept the pilot event small in order to "do it right." Due to a pair of last-minute cancellations, five professors were able attend the week-long workshop, joined by a small contingent of Red Hat employees and by David Humphrey and Chris Tyler from Seneca College, two CS professors with firsthand experience teaching open source in the classroom.

The program for the week started by covering the basics of open source software itself, but devoted most of its time to concrete examinations of how open source projects function, from coordinating geographically dispersed teams with online communication tools to build tools and source code management, to packaging, debugging, and testing tools. All sessions were designed to be cumulative, not a la carte; the participants were given overnight assignments based on each day's events and the topics built in complexity over the course of the week.

The final sessions dealt with integrating open source software into classroom situations, including finding projects in which students can participate, setting expectations, assessing and grading student participation, and interacting with the broader open source community while running a classroom project. At the Friday wrap-up discussion, the professors presented course outlines, discussed what they had taken away from the week, and how to get faculty colleagues involved.

Attendee Matthew Jadud from Allegheny College described the event as "a huge win". Although he had open source experience through several years of working on the Transterpreter virtual machine project, he said that he still went into POSSE 2009 with questions about how best to interact with and sustain open communities, adding "we got that in spades." Seeing up close how large-scale open communities operate was a revelation, he said. "There is a difference between 'knowing' and 'understanding'. I think I *knew* some things about open development processes, but now I'm beginning to *understand* a few, and can see more clearly what I don't understand. That's an exciting feeling. ... And, in seeing it, it became less mysterious and more tractable."

DeKoenigsberg also regarded the event as a success, and noted that the information went two ways:

Education and the open source community

Bringing the education and open source communities closer together is a win-win scenario, said DeKoenigsberg. Participating in open source gives students the opportunity to work in real-world coding projects, on a real-world scale, that the classroom simply cannot emulate. "The upside seems so huge," he observed. "Students get invaluable experience. Open source projects get badly needed help. Moribund CS programs, most of which are struggling with slumping enrollments, get a shot in the arm."

The difficulty, he observed, is practical. "Over the last few years, I've had discussions with a lot of professors on this subject. Their responses have been largely the same: yes, they're interested in open source; yes, they'd love to teach it to their students; they don't know how to get started; open source is intimidating; they don't have time to dig in and learn." Professors have significant demands on their time outside the classroom, he added, making it difficult to acquire the knowledge necessary to guide students around open source.

POSSE tackles the challenge of winning over professors by putting them in touch with like-minded peers, he said. "That's the hypothesis of POSSE: that professors will respond to other professors, and that a community of professors working together to solve these problems will be more successful." Humphrey and Tyler's work at Seneca demonstrates that teaching open source participation in the classroom works; their students have a proven track record of success contributing to Mozilla and Fedora, respectively.

Bringing the two communities together involves more than just reaching out to professors, however — open source projects must look for ways in which they can foster mentoring relationships and be more accessible to student participation. DeKoenigsberg cited Mozilla as an example of a project with good student outreach. "Mozilla does a good job of this in a number of ways; they have a special tag in Bugzilla that can denote particular tickets as 'student friendly', which is something we're hoping to replicate in Fedora."

Mozilla and Fedora were the two projects spotlighted in POSSE 2009, but it was a pragmatic choice. "We certainly don't want to limit professors to participating in particular communities," DeKoenigsberg said. "We used Mozilla and Fedora projects as the mechanism to introduce professors to open source development, but many professors may already be engaged in research that leads quite naturally to interest in other communities."

Planning for the school year and beyond

The professors that attended POSSE 2009 are making their own plans for integrating what they learned with their curriculum, although the integration might be difficult for the coming semester. Jadud said that he plans to use open projects to a limited degree in the coming term, most immediately in the data structures class, where he plans to have students study the Mozilla codebase (among others) so that they can read and learn from structures used "in the wild".

Further out, he plans to apply POSSE's lessons to Transterpreter, but would also like to collaborate on coding projects with some of his colleagues at Allegheny. "It may be that we can renovate our technical writing course so that our students are working on and contributing to living, community-written documents while learning to write and edit technical prose. Mind you, this was a revelation for me at POSSE, that these large projects have so *much* going on, there are many, many ways to get people involved."

For its part, TeachingOpenSource.org plans to keep in touch with the POSSE 2009 participants in the coming school year, working with them in the classroom. The group specifically wants to hear from open source projects that would like to work with a class of CS students for an entire semester, and are willing to provide mentoring, but individual mentors and guides are encouraged to join as well.

Other efforts still to come include a collaboratively-drafted textbook about teaching open source and associated classroom reference materials, and a one-day Teaching Open Source Summit to be held in October at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium in Toronto.

Those who could not attend this summer's inaugural workshop need not worry, more events like POSSE 2009 are in the works. DeKoenigsberg said that the group is already planning to expand the reach of next year's POSSE beyond CS, to include professors in technical writing and other related fields. It also hopes to run multiple POSSE sessions, although the limiting factor is currently the number of professors actively involved in open source software. As with its other projects, TeachingOpenSource.org encourages anyone who is interested in helping to organize a POSSE event in his or her own area to join the mailing list.

As DeKoenigsberg observed, when one asks open source developers how they learned their development skills, most reply "I taught myself". Although the open source community's ability to apprentice and mentor to new recruits is admirable, it does little formal recruiting and training. At the same time, thousands of CS students come up through college programs that focus mostly on proprietary tools and development models. Better integrating the two communities could expand the open source talent pool, and equip students with more skills as they prepare to enter the job market.