[WikiFM] WikiFm for Open Source content & knowledge Integration

[Valorie Zimmerman]

Catching up on email still, after returning home from Akademy.....

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 2:13 PM, Riccardo Iaconelli <riccardo at kde.org> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On 10 August 2015 at 15:02, jigar raisinghani
> <jigarraisinghani at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I had a brief discussion with Riccardo at akademy regarding promoting Wikifm
>> or WikiToLearn in Indian Institutes/Universities/Colleges and it made a lot
>> of sense especially looking at where the Education system or teaching is
>> going.
>>
>> I really liked the idea and have some thoughts on that. I am Jigar
>> Raisinghani, currently the maintainer of Calligra Sheets and have been
>> contributing to KDE for 4 years. Currently, I am working with Red Hat We
>> attend a lot of conferences like Pycon, KDE conf , Akademy etc and there is
>> a lot of content & ideas which come out of conferences but are never
>> documented or reused by others ( who aren't attending confs) and it would
>> make sense for University students if they want to know more about Open
>> Source products, upcoming technologies and how they can contribute. This
>> wouldn't be directly related to courses but there can be a section in
>> WikiToLearn teaching about Open Source Stuff.
>
> I think it makes a lot of sense! I would create a subsection under
> Computer Science/Computer Engineering, to make sure it's more visible.
> Maybe a section like the ones here? https://en.wikifm.org/Physics

I think it might make more sense to have Open Source (or Free and Open
Source) as a major heading, since far more than just computer science
students can and do contribute. I think Jigar makes and important
point - contributions to FOSS are often not valued in the educational
community, but they *can* be. What makes the difference is both
students and professors raising the issues, and supporting FOSS
projects. And both can create great pages or even sections promoting
FOSS to prospective students. Not just GSoC, but developing FOSS
projects as both a hobby, a contribution to the improvement of the
world, and a way to improve professional contacts and reputation.

>> I would like to give an example from the Indian Context. There are a lot of
>> reputed universities in India with great Global Rankings but the sad part is
>> that the awareness about Open Source is very less and it becomes difficult
>> to motivate people to contribute to Open Source and we definitely miss out
>> on potential developers. So, I feel such a section could be like a one stop
>> information source for potential open source enthusiasts. Also, a lot of
>> interesting stuff can be made available if people attending conferences can
>> make notes and post. Usually people write a blog which gets integrated at
>> the community level but not beyond. Hacker News is awesome but it doesn't
>> necessarily focus on Open Source and also its just announcements & news.
>>
>> So, I feel that adding a section of Open Source would make sense and also
>> help in promoting Wikifm or WikiToLearn.
>>
>> The idea can be refined further if it sounds interesting.
>
> The idea is very interesting indeed, and very much in the spirit of
> what we are doing!
> I encourage you to simply get an account and already starting defining
> and writing on a page what you would like to see, so that everybody
> can give you some valuable feedback. :-)
>
> For the conference notes, we can think of exploiting the User pages.
> They are collectable in a book and printable like any other, but they
> live in a custom namespace and (I think) serve very much the purpose
> of personal notes. They probably need a little bit of documentation
> and promotion to be used? Let's experiment! ;-)
>
> Bye,
> -Riccardo

My suggestion to Jigar: Set something up on Wikitolearn, and start
writing! Spread the word, and get people contributing. I think this
could be an awesome resource.

Valorie

-- 
http://about.me/valoriez