Open Source Educator (Part Three: OLPC Intern) March 1, 2011

<polyachka> what is Fedora vs Sugar?

<mchua> The Fedora, Sugar, Fedora+Sugar focus is definitely an artifact of myself and Sebastian spending so much time on POSSE, because that’s exactly the intersection of the two communities we work in.

<mchua> Well, Fedora is a Linux distribution. It’s an operating system, and its mission is not education, but instead to rapidly advance Free Software (and content) as much as possible. In part by making it easy for people to run and get their hands on the good stuff – trying to make our packages as up-to-date and close to upstream as possible, that sort of thing. The two projects intersect in Sugar on a Stick, which is a Fedora spin. Which means that it’s a custom Fedora version that’s designed to boot Sugar by default and run Sugar activities.

<polyachka> to me Sugar is for children, is there anything similar to it but for adults, like college students and above? I mean from the user perspective

<mchua> Well, if you’re looking at Sugar as a platform with open and extendable tools that people can use for learning… I would say that really, any open operating system can serve that purpose for older folks.

<mchua> I used Fedora myself in college. And the community is also really supportive of newcomers, encourages people to learn and play and explore.  (this isn’t limited to Fedora – lots of other open source projects have great supportive communities too!)

<polyachka> where did you go to college?

<mchua> In Needham, Massachusetts, which is a suburb of Boston. I attended Olin College (
http://olin.edu
) which was brand-new at the time, I was in their second-ever graduating class.

<polyachka> and what was your major?

<mchua> My major was somewhat arbitrary – I couldn’t decide, so I used a dartboard to decide for me. But the dart landed on “Electrical and Computer Engineering,” so that’s what my degree says.

<polyachka> so how did you get into the project with Elsa?

<mchua> It’s actually where I learned a lot of the ways of thinking that have come in handy for me in open source. I was the first Oliner who got involved in OLPC.

<mchua> Nikki Lee came along shortly afterwards, and she started the club that got Elsa Culler and others involved.

<mchua> Ian Daniher and Sebastian Dziallas did a sort of reverse migration, getting involved in OLPC and Sugar first, and finding out about Olin through that, and now they’re both students there.

<polyachka> when did you get involved?

<mchua> I started becoming an active contributor when I was 20 – my senior year of college, very start of the spring semester… so that would be January, February, 2007.  Just kept on showing up at the office in Cambridge pestering people for things to do.

<mchua> I realized the engineers there were all overworked and couldn’t handle volunteers much, but that there was this army of engineers who wanted to volunteer help, and a bunch of work (Activity creation, for instance) that wasn’t getting done.

<polyachka> and what did you do?

<mchua> So the first big thing I did was to organize the first OLPC Game Jam, which was at Olin the summer I graduated.

<mchua>
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Game_Jam_Boston_June_2007

<mchua> It was a win-win for everyone; the volunteers showed up, the engineers showed up and taught everyone how to make Activities, and by the end of the weekend we had a bunch of volunteers who could make Activities. And they went on to teach others (Wade Brainerd, one of the original volunteers from that Game Jam, went on to be the first leader of the Activity team, and so forth).

<polyachka> that is really cool

<mchua> It’s just about unblocking people who want to do good stuff, that’s all. Easiest job in the world. You’re letting people who want to do work, do work.

<polyachka> I couldn’t agree more!

<mchua> Well, a little after that – I kept showing up at the office in Cambridge, sitting there and working on whatever seemed most useful… at some point, Walter Bender (who was still OLPC’s president at the time) walked up to me and said “here, sign this, we’re going to hire you… and can you go to Taiwan in two weeks?”

<polyachka> sounds great to me! 

<mchua> So that’s how I started my official tenure at OLPC – right after I signed my internship papers I jetted off to represent OLPC at Wikimania in Taipei. They brought me on full-time later as a QA/Support engineer.

Open Source Educator (Part One: Red Hat) February 26, 2011

I heard about Mel Chua in open source circles and asked if I could interview her on IRC. Here is part one of our interview:

<polyachka> Good morning! Where are you now?

<mchua> I’m sitting in Raleigh, NC at the moment. I tend to move around a lot, though.

<polyachka> and where is your home?

<mchua> The internet. I don’t really have a place I consider a (geographic) home base at the moment… been moving and traveling quite a bit. I’ll be settling a bit more in West Lafayette, Indiana this summer to start my engineering education PhD studies at Purdue University, though.

<polyachka> but where did you go to high school?

<mchua> Aurora, IL. I lived away from home for high school; it was a residential public magnet – my family didn’t live in Aurora.

<polyachka> by traveling you mean going from one project to another for Sugar?

<mchua> Oh, my travel isn’t for Sugar events these days. Mostly for work, and to see family and friends on occasion.

<polyachka> what do you do for work?

<mchua> My dayjob is working for Red Hat’s open source community team; I’m responsible for the company’s education strategy.

<polyachka> interesting

<mchua> So I work with professors who are getting the students in their classes involved in open source communities, and help them figure out how to do that. One of things I do is teach summer workshops for those professors – many of them have never been open source contributors themselves, so during the workshop we have them go into an open source project and make a contribution of their own.

<polyachka> how many people work for Red Hat?

<mchua> I think somewhere around 3,200 worldwide at the moment…

<mchua>Last summer, one of the workshops we ran (in Worcester State, Massachusetts) featured Sugar Labs as the community to get involved with. And Peter Robinson and Walter Bender were my co-instructors, with a lot of remote support from Sebastian Dziallas. Professors were patching Walter’s “Abacus” Activity, editing Sugar on a Stick documentation and using it for testing – good stuff.

<polyachka> so is it a big trend for professors- to learn about open source? Surprising, as all they publish is not open source…

<mchua>  I wouldn’t say it’s a “big trend” yet, but we’re hoping it will be. It’s certainly a growing movement. There are professors who contribute to open source as a hobby, and there are professors who research open source as a career.  So it’s not just CS professors – economics, sociology, etc. researchers look at our communities as well. Apparently we’re rather fascinating.

<mchua> And open source communities have characteristics of a lot of things they’d like their students to experience – real world projects, distributed collaboration, things for building their portfolio, etc.

<mchua> The Teaching Open Source (TOS) community,
http://teachingopensource.org
, is a gathering of these professors and open source community members working to support them – great group, the Worcester State crew from the Sugar workshop hangs out there as well. (It’s an open community that centers around academic rather than code projects, basically – everyone’s welcome to join.)

<polyachka> what was your favorite workshop?

<mchua> My favorite workshop would have to be POSSE – that stands for Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience.

<polyachka> where was it?

<mchua>It’s been taught a number of times. The first time was in Raleigh in July 2009. It’s been to Singapore, Cape Town… I taught the last one with Sebastian Dziallas in Doha, Qatar.

<mchua> Yeah, he and I have been revising the curriculum for the past year or so to make it more scalable and understandable (and teachable by people who aren’t us).

<polyachka> where is Sebastian from?

<mchua> He’s from Germany, but is currently studying in Boston. You should interview him, actually – he’s the guy behind Sugar on a Stick. (and started Sugar on a Stick while in high school.)

<polyachka> so any favorite topics for workshops or projects?

<mchua>In terms of workshop topics… the most difficult thing for professors is not learning the tools – they already know how to develop software and all that stuff, some people already know what bugtrackers are (some don’t) – the hard part is the culture.

<polyachka> how many people are in one workshop on average?

<mchua>On average I’d say we have between 8-15 professors in a workshop. Local open source community members swing by, though, so when we all go out to dinner we’ll have 15-20. I think of the workshops as cultural immersions – open source communities have weird quirks that sometimes we forget the rest of the world doesn’t know yet.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY  
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/