One of our first goals for Mozilla Education is to make it easier for students and educators to get connected to Mozilla project work, and for the Mozilla community to get project ideas into the hands of new contributors. We want to be a conduit for communication between academics and the community. I’ve been doing this for a number of years now, and we have some informal means for doing it. However, we want to have this scale to a much larger group of students from many institutions.
Over the past few weeks I’ve had conversations about this with various community and education people, and gathered the ideas into a set of guidelines for marking bugs “good potential projects.” I’ve also filed bug 479062 to figure out which new bugzilla keyword to use, and get it added. Even as I write this I’m still getting good feedback and ideas (for example, should we actually be favouring a wiki over bugzilla so we can better annotate project work, and have it span bugs?), so please keep it coming.
There’s a number of ways you can get involved with this effort:
- Comment on the guidelines and/or in the bug — we’re hoping to formulate something that will be widely useful, not dictate how it needs to happen
- Start thinking about bugs or other projects that would fit with what we’re describing in the guidelines. We’ll want to get those bugs flagged as soon as possible.
- Once the keyword gets added, help us triage existing bugs and file new bugs using it. We’re going to do some work in the wiki to try and make it obvious to non-bugzilla users that these projects are available
Also, I’d like to invite you to join us in #education, where we are discussing these and other topics. Already we’ve met a bunch of new students and professors, and added a good group of Mozilla community people. The #education channel is meant to be a landing place for students and educators getting started with Mozilla. The Mozilla community is also welcome and necessary, as getting started with Mozilla means joining the community.
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Hi I had one more suggestion. Why only educators and students ? Even professionals who want to start with development in open source can be befitted. Only thing you need is little different approach to teach them. I meet lots of people who know javascript well. Some of them are really good at C. We need something like a tutorial with some exercises to get them started. (Ok…I am trying to get into some development with addons and firefox since last 2 years. Only issue i face is all material is fragmented and while doing research i get lost in huge pile of wiki docs.) I love approach like approach like mozqa-team-python-learning. Schedule something like this. Add some online course (based on questions asked etc.) like MIT course ware. Really we will have grate community who can contribute.
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[...] wrote previously about our plan at Mozilla Education to make it easier for Mozilla, students, and academics to [...]
[...] Mozilla Education offers the opportunity for such open source learning on a larger scale. Dave explains: “One of our first goals for Mozilla Education is to make it easier for students and [...]