On a weekend, I taught open source skills to CS kids. Thoughts?

Fantastic job, and well done in taking real, practical and positive steps to get people involved.<p>Giving people the underlying skills of git, bug trackers, <i>etc,</i> means you're giving them the chance to join in and learn the other things that they can learn simply by participating in open source.<p>I do a similar thing in math, giving people the basics of proof techniques, math notation, how to read math, <i>etc.</i> The kids can be amazingly responsive, and it's incredibly rewarding.<p>Well done.

I love this idea! In the PHP community we've started to have more and more talks show up on the conference circuit about getting involved, but this is even better. I bet in every major city there's people who would be interested in getting involved in open-source who aren't going to go to a conference just to find out, but they might spend a day or two some weekend doing just that.<p>I can't wait for the material for this to come out. It'd be great if it was on GitHub or some similar service so we there's an open source way to get people into open source.

Great idea - there are a lot of available programming cycles from students who otherwise spend time on personal projects or games. And while that's of course fine, it would be even better if they were contributing to FLOSS. Both for FLOSS and for themselves.

This is great. Kudos to you. Let me know if you ever need help running something similar in Boston.

I tried to do something like this with IEEE student branch of my college (in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar or Mehesana, Gujarat, India). I could have got student from all over the state with all the 13 SB in the section. But the problem is, there is simply no speaker. Back in 2005, Indias first Drupal Bootcamp was organized by our college, but after that no such event has taken place.

Nobody ever had to teach me these things, I taught them to myself because I have a little thing called motivation. Do we really want all of these students who couldn't even be irked to learn about something as simple and ubiquitous as version control wasting everybodies time?<p>This sort of ignorance isn't even caused simply by a lack of interest in open source. Without these very basic skills being covered by this, you're pretty unhireable.