Drumbeat/p2pu/courses/ParticipatingFLOSSPort

The main goal of the course will be providing people who already have basic software skills with information that would help them get involved and contribute to free software and open source projects.

The course could be formally divided in a few modules and topics:

Part I - Introduction

1. Introduction to free software: a brief history of free software and its fundamentals. What is free software? What is open source?

2. Why is free software helping to keep and further the openness of the web?

3. Economy and free software: busting myths

Part II - Communities

1. Who is producing free software? Individuals, communities, companies, non-profits, governments

2. Community models: from small to large communities, from centralized to distributed decision processes to anarchy - how does all this mess work? Where can you help?

3. Community cases: from "students" and/or guests

Part III - Hands on Tools

1. Communication: IRC, mailing lists, bug trackers

2. Development: version control, building, debugging, submitting a patch

3. Documentation: wiki, TeXinfo, Doxygen, ecc

4. Localization: translation tools such as launchpad and translatewiki

Although, this is all I have in mind and I would be glad to have people sending patches to the content. I am more a developer than a translator or documenter, so I will probably want to look for more people to help me out on the latter topics.

There is a lot of documentation on this (formal and informal, of course), specially from the Free Technology Academy that we could use and improve.

I've taught this course as a workshop many times and it was a success, even with people who had never heard about free software.

I want to target the Portuguese speaking community, specially on the development topic, since we have lots of people here in Brazil translating and documenting, but not many developers, even if there are people with enough technical skills.

Although, it would be great to have it taught in English too, and I would definitely help out, but I cannot think of anyone right now.

Rodrigo