 All right, so my clock says 11.30, and we're going to go ahead and get started. I have the honor and privilege of introducing myself, so. Hi. My name is Tom Cowley. I am the Education University Outreach Lead at Red Hat, and for the past two years and change, I've been working on trying to promote open source in higher education. We do a little bit in K-12 too, but that's a much harder problem to solve. We'll talk a little bit about that. Today I'm going to talk about free and open source education success stories, but before we get into that too deeply, I want to give a little bit of background in a sort of pseudo-academic way. I am not an academic. I just learned to speak a little bit of their language in order to communicate with them effectively. But we're going to start with an assertion, and this is one that is somewhat controversial, but I have never been able to find anyone that has been able to counter prove this, and all of our interactions have really backed this up, which is that most computer science and engineering graduates, especially in North America, never learn about open source. Now, this does not mean they're not using open source. Plenty of them are. Linux is fairly common in higher education. A lot of what would have been Unix Labs 10, 15 years ago are now Linux Labs, and so there's a pretty good representation for people that have Linux. Plenty of people use Firefox. There's even a high number of exposure for projects like LibreOffice, and certainly in some of the research fields and statistics and biology and chemistry, you see a lot of R. And so it's not that open office or open source rather. It's not that open source isn't out there for the students. It's just that they don't understand how these tools, these software components are any different from anything else that they're using. It's just this is what we learned in class. This is a tool. There's no discussion about how it is any different from any Microsoft or any Adobe or any proprietary tool that's out there. Now, let's contrast that with this fact. In the Black Duck survey from 2015, when they pulled companies and asked them the question, how much do you run on open source? The answers were you run nothing on open source. You run partially on open source. You run entirely on open source. And if you sum up all the number of companies that said they were either partially or entirely running on open source, that was 78% of the companies that were surveyed. Now, I would argue that the other 22% of companies were misled because they probably have some open source in their environment they just didn't know about when they answered on that survey. But we all know how reliable CIOs are about knowing what's actually running in the data center. But 88% of companies in the survey said that they plan to increase their contributions to open source projects. And that's an interesting stat. So, if we take these two stats with my lovely little pie chart, we can make it another assertion which is that employers are actively using and increasingly contributing to open source projects. To be competitive for IT jobs, students need to be familiar with open source technologies, tools, methods, and communities. Because it's not just use, it's also the act of making those changes back to those communities. Now, if we take our two assertions and we put them together, we have a problem. And it's great that students say, well, we use Linux, yeah, we use R, but when that company wants to take that next step and say, well, you, CS graduate, will be helping us to contribute back to this open source company, they have no idea what that looks like or why that's different or what they need to do to be successful in that arena. And in fact, a lot of what computer science teaches them is how to code on their own. They get told, do this task, right, this bubble sort, do this operation. It's learning a specific operation so that they can have that skill in their toolbox. But at the end of the day, they did it in their own computer by themselves. Maybe if they're lucky, they're in a group with two or three other people on a major project. But oftentimes, those students are still doing the same tasks just in a group. They're not really collaborating in that effort. It's just, we're putting you together so we don't have to grade this so many times. We can only grade it a certain number of times. And oftentimes, the examples that the students are being given to do in these classes are ones that haven't changed fundamentally since 1986. And that's so the TA can grade them and then the teacher doesn't have to come through and do it. And I appreciate that teaching is a very hard job. I'm not here to tell people that teachers are bad and that they do a terrible job, but there's a certain amount of active involvement that the students are missing out in when the lesson doesn't change from year to year. And one of the things that I hear often when I talk to educators is that they're very concerned about things like stack exchange. They're very concerned about these sites that exist on the Internet where when they go, they find all of their end of semester lessons. All of those end of projects that they've been using since 1986 are sitting on stack exchange and well-meaning people on the Internet have gone, well, here's a very elegant solution to that problem and pasted code. A couple of professors told me they found their entire set of problems and they assigned the students over the class from the last semester uploaded in to GitHub with Solutions. That student's already passed. They can't go back and be like, you're cheating. They're done. They're gone. They uploaded them as a courtesy to the next class. So how do they solve that problem? How do they address that? What do we do about this? And that's where Open Source plays an interesting role in this conversation because it complicates matters. It adds pain to those educators who want to do things, but the rewards for the students and for the educators can be significant if they're willing to try something different. Now I know I just said try something different, an educator in the same sentence, and that's normally a way to set yourself up for failure, but more and more they are realizing that they cannot continue to teach computer science in the same way that they have taught it for the last 20, 25, 30 years. That they're going to have to innovate in order to have the teachings be continually relevant so that when students graduate, they have useful skills so that diploma means something. There will be no shortage of CS jobs. However, if schools do not produce students that have the skills that these jobs require, then those degrees will be less and less valuable. I'm not one of those people that's going to say whether the academic system is going to be torn down and reinvented in a Khan Academy style way. I'm not smart enough to see the future that far ahead of me. But I do know that these schools do not want to be considered redundant. They want to have that degree matter and they want their programs to be something that a student wants to go and take because there is no shortage of places where you can get education and information about computer science outside of the traditional four-year degree. My team at Red Hat was created in 2013 and the goal was to take an engineering team and proactively establish relationships with Red Hat and academia. Now, traditionally, when a company does outreach to a school, it is most often through two entities on both sides, the corporate relations office from a college and the recruiting team from the HR department. And they have a lovely meeting in which they buy each other dinner and then they say, this is how many students we want to fill in this many jobs and this is what we're going to do at your career fair and that is that. It is a very cold and clinical relationship. It is sort of boring, honestly. We had no interest in doing that and we really wanted to try and take a different approach. Our main goal was really to promote free and open source software tooling methods and culture. And if we don't sell anything, that's fine. And if we don't hire anyone, that's also fine. Now, sure, Red Hat is very interested in hiring talented students. We are very interested in filling our internship roles. But we have a lovely team of people that will do that and I don't have to worry about it. What I do want to worry about is thinking about a long game because internships and hires are short game. I want to think about what we can do to improve the situation so that I never ever have to sit at a career fair and have a student come up to me and when I ask them if they've heard about open source, tell me, oh yeah, that's Facebook, right? That's where I share my pictures. If we do not invest in educating and teaching our students how to be collaborative members of a digital world, we are failing to educate them in the tools that they need to be successful in computer science and computer engineering. Now, whether they ever really contribute back to an open source project, I don't know, I can't predict the future on that. But I at least want them to appreciate why open source is different, why the free software movement matters, how they can incorporate those skills and knowledge into their own portfolio and actually have a portfolio when they graduate because computer science is a very creative endeavor and oftentimes we treat it like it's not. When we do an education, they come out and they give a degree from whatever school it is and they say, well, I'm a computer scientist now. And then they go off and they say hire me, I'm a computer scientist and they list off buzzwords. Take a digital artist. If a digital artist said, oh, I had no Photoshop. I had no GIMP. I had no Blender. I had no 3D Studio Max. Hire me. You would say no. Show me your portfolio. Show me the work you've done. Show me what you're capable of doing. But we expect computer scientists to act that way. We don't give them any opportunity to build up a portfolio. We don't give them the opportunity to say, this is what I'm capable of doing. And the net result is that we get all these computer scientists that show up and they hand me the exact same resume 150 times. Sometimes literally the exact same resume because they went through a little seminar course on how to prep a resume for a tech hire. I know, statistically speaking, in a group of five students that work together on a project, one of them is awesome. One of them is terrible. And the other three are somewhere in the middle. But I cannot tell you based on their work on the Pet Store project which means nothing to me and is irrelevant and I can't see the code for who is whom in that class. I need some way to visualize that. There is a common phrase that's going around in the industry right now which is the GitHub is the new resume. It absolutely is. I can count on one hand the number of hire education institutions in North America that I've come across that teaches Git even less that teach source control. They don't teach it. I ask, when do you teach Git? I went to SIGC which is the Special Interest Group for Computer Science Educators last year. And we had a big open-source bot and we brought in about 40 professors into a room and these are important schools. These are not, you know, Tidewater Community College. I'll love to Tidewater. But these are big schools. These are respectable schools. These are schools that if I drop their name you'd all be nodding along with me. And I asked them, how many of you teach source control? Two hands went up. And I said, two hands, when do you teach source control? And the one guy said, well, I don't teach it so much as I expect my graduate level students to know what it is. Okay, well, we're going to cross you off because that's not what I asked. And the other one was RIT. And I'm going to talk about RIT a little bit later about why they teach it and how it has been successful for them. I'll talk about that. It's important. So now I'm going to stop being all doom and gloom and talk about some actual success stories because I think it's important to get a little bit of framework in. We'll talk a little bit more about the problems we face after lunch. My co-worker, Jenna Likens, is going to give a lovely talk on some of the apparels that are really that problem. So this is just my little taste of her talk. So if you want to go deeper into doom and gloom and sadness, we will be handing out suicide capital later. But the Rochester Institute of Technology, they came to Red Hat when I was the Fedora Engineering Manager. And one of my direct reports was an RIT graduate. And he said, hey, so we want to do some OLPC work. We would really love to be able to make some fun apps for kids to help them learn on this platform. But we only have one XO unit. We only have one of these laptops. I'm thinking it really, really hard for us to code in a class around this because we only have one of these. Can you talk to those folks over at OLPC and get us some more? And I said, you know what, I don't really have to do that because we have about 30 that are sitting in the corner gathering dust. And we would be happy to give them to you. And so I just, you know, using my managerial privileges, I just sort of put them all in a box and mailed them all up to Rochester. And they were thrilled. And then they started teaching a seminar class on how to write little apps for humanitarian purposes to make students lives better, you know, in countries where this is their only chance at a digital education. And then afterwards they said, well, that was really cool. Could you like buy us pizza or something sometime? And I said, well, we probably could, but this is really fascinating what you're doing. I'd love to learn more about it. So I went out and I visited them and I met with the professor who was running all of the seminars. And he said, yeah, the students would really love it if you would buy them pizza sometime. And I said, well, can't we think a little bit bigger here than just some pizza? I mean, I will. I'll buy you pizza. But let's talk about what open source means to your students. What it means to your programs, how you teach it. And let's think a little bit bigger. And they loved that idea. And RIT is not a school that is famous for being computer sciencey. They are famous for game design. They're a game design school. If you want to be a digital game creator, author, you go to RIT and you can get a respected degree from that. So they were a little more willing to be flexible with what they do in a computer science context because they were interested in making learning games, not so much big data. And so the professor said, well, you know what we would be willing to figure out how we could make a name for ourselves to get people excited about what we're doing and we think open source might be an interesting way to do that. So we had a good conversation back and forth and I challenged them to come up with a five-year plan because I know academia moves slowly. And I said, come up with a five-year plan on how you think you can engage directly with your students to empower them with open source ideas and concepts. And they said, well, we could do a minor. No one's ever done one of those before. And I said, are you sure? And they said, you know, we think we can do it in five years maybe, maybe ten, but we could get there. And they talked to their students who were involved in this active seminar and the students were like, this is amazing. This is what we came to college for. This is what we really wanted to do. This is us changing the world. And they were like, wow, we didn't actually expect you to buy into that so quickly. But okay. So the students put together a plan and they worked with the faculty and they came up with a five-year plan on what a minor looks like in free and open source software and culture. And they actually got it done in three and a half years, which is pretty incredible for an academic institution, especially in a big state like New York that has to go through levels of bureaucracy in order to get any of these put into place. So they offered, and students graduated last year were the first minor in free and open source software and culture. And they didn't just have it be software. So it wasn't just we're going to do a class on Linux. It wasn't just we're going to do a class on system administration. It was really, let's understand how open source communities work, why they work, when they don't work. What does the governance factor into this? What do the history of these projects tell us about the future? What does it mean to practically be participating in open source? How do we engage with these communities? All of these questions are on the table and we worked with them to start creating curriculum and materials around that. And one of the things we set up as a foundational point when we started with them was we wanted to make sure that all the materials they generated would be open, would be creative commons, so we were not interested in helping Pearson, much love to Pearson, make money on textbooks. We really wanted to make sure that this was something that other people could pick up, learn from, derive from and work forward because we know what works for RIT is not going to work somewhere else. And they love that idea and they have been huge supporters of it and the students have embraced it. And so now they have a minor program that looks like this and I know this is a little bit hard to read. I mean big slide, lots of words. But the idea is that they structured their minor in a way so that obviously for the College of Computing Information Sciences there is one track, pretty straightforward. But they also created one for the College of Liberal Arts so that people who were not traditional computer scientists had the opportunity to be exposed to what free culture looks like because the movement that we have in the world today is bigger than software. It is what you see at Maker Faire. It is what you see in Creative Commons remixing. It is in all of these other places that you don't ever have to write a line of code to be touched by this movement and we wanted to make sure that was reflected. And then we bring all of these people together at the end of the minor and they work together on projects. So you have graphic artists and designers and technical writers and they're working together with computer scientists, information scientists, people who are all creative in their own ways collaborating towards goals and the goal that mattered for RIT was humanitarian goals. They wanted to make the world a better place. That started with the OOPC initiative and it's moved on into a number of different areas where in the project phase of the minor these students basically pick a project that they think is going to make the world a better place in some form or fashion and they actually make it happen and they put it out there in open source. And because the students are not just studying theory they certainly do plenty of that but they're putting it into practice in meaningful real world ways. They're interfacing with existing upstream projects and creating upstream projects of their own. They have a portfolio at the end of this minor that's meaningful, that's realistic. They can point to other communities and say, I worked with that community. Now, do all of them get patches accepted upstream? No, absolutely not. But that's not a measure of success and we're very clear to make them understand that you're not a failure if your patch wasn't accepted. You're not a failure if you didn't write a patch and you did a contribution in another way. They learn to collaborate with people on the other side of the world with different experiences, with different knowledge, with different languages and be successful at that and learn what works and what doesn't work through practice, not just through theory. It's not just memorizing a textbook and saying, Linux kernel people talk like this and GNOME people talk like this. It's not like that. They actually actively participate and they run a lot of hackathons which they love doing. So they actively say, okay, guys, we were going to do what we were doing informally. We're just going to do it formally. It's that they were getting all their friends that were interested in this new room and they were hacking on it and now these things are more formal. They're called hackathons and they invite everyone to come and hack on it together with them. And like I said, HFOS is a big part of this. HFOS is humanitarian for an open source software. Now, in academia, if you want to do anything, you usually have to get a grant. And if you say, well, I just want to work on open source and free software for a while, you're probably not going to get a grant. But if you add that little H, capital H, all of a sudden, the NSF is a lot more interested in talking to you about your grant. Your grant has a much greater chance of being accepted. I'll talk a little bit about a group that's doing this specifically later in the talk. But when they do HFOS at RIT, they start by saying, here's all the materials we're going to cover in this specific example of how we're doing this HFOS project. The repo for all of this is GitHub. Please, everybody fork this. Now, this circles back to Git at RIT. And one of the things when they started doing the open source miner, they were introducing Git very late in it. They were introducing it in the project phase. They were like, okay, we're going to start using source control now. And students were having a lot of trouble understanding Git and how it was complicated and the practical uses of it. It was slowing things down. And they were a little frustrated because the educators felt like the students should be picking it up quicker. But when they stood back and we all looked at the program as a whole after the end of the first year, what we discovered is that students were struggling with the concepts of open source and communities as well. It wasn't coming to them as quickly as we thought they would. And so I suggested a radical idea that they introduce Git at CS1 and that they introduce Git Hub specifically at CS1 and that they start with it early and they not teach it as a computer tool, but they teach it as a collaborative tool. That they walk into CS1 for the first day and their first assignment is going to be to fork a repository from Git Hub and put your name and where you're from in it and then merge it back. And they started doing these sorts of things and they started having their students check out their homework assignments by forking the homework from the main repo, making their changes, pushing them back as pull requests into the model. And the students started to do this and they really, you know, they had a little bit of ramp up but they were comfortable with it because when you're in CS1 I think you're a little more open-minded to the world being different from what you were expecting. And by the time they got to a point where they were needing to practically use source control they were ready and by the time they were starting to have conversations about what open source meant the answer from the students was, oh yeah, we kind of figured that was coming. We kind of saw that when we had this collaborative tool that we were all using together. It kind of made sense. We kind of assumed that was the way it was supposed to be happening. And that's a great world view for the students in this program to have and it really has made their program very successful. So when they get to this HPOS course they fork the course repository. They do things like take attendance with bots on IRC. They have, the students have customized these bots to make it easy for them to check in the class so that the teacher no longer has to do a roll call. Students adjusted this idea because they felt that there was too much time being taken away by calling roll at the beginning of class and we can get a bot to do that. They submit their homework, pull requests, patches. And then one of the things they set up was is they said, look, we're not going to penalize people who don't get patches submitted upstream but instead we're going to give unlimited extra credit for any upstream patches that you do get sent out there. You don't need any of this extra credit to graduate. You don't need it to graduate with an A. But if you do it, we're going to encourage it. We're going to help you and we'll give you extra credit for it. Also give them credit for hackathon participation. Again, no one has to participate in a hackathon if they don't feel comfortable with it. But if you do, you get extra credit. So let's contrast that with another school. Also in New York, Rensselaer Polytechnic. Rensselaer was doing fine, had a student successfully graduate and he went off and started a startup and made a lot of money when his company was bought out. And he decided he wanted to give a little bit of money back to his school. So he went back to them and he gave them a million dollars. And he said, I'm going to give you a million dollar gift and the only thing I expect later, I require that you do with this money is that you do something to promote open source. And so the school kind of looked at this rather large gift and said, well, you know, we should do something with that. That's open source. Anyone know open source? Anyone? Anyone? Okay, all right. Let's hire somebody. So they hired somebody who knew open source and they said, okay, congratulations, you have a million dollars and we need you to do something with open source so we can spend this money. So they created the Center for Open Source Software. And they thought, well, you know what would be great is let's provide a space for students to build open source things, build little projects. And they structured an entire model around project-based. Now, this isn't a class. They don't get credit for it, but they do get paid for it. And so the students have an opportunity to work in groups with mentorship to create open source projects. And they practice their skills. This is sort of late in their cycle in academia. They're almost graduating by the time they do this. But it gives them a great opportunity to build something they can point to as a resume point. Now, later they ended up adding some possibilities for credit because students were really interested in getting those last little credits out of this and so they turned it sort of into a credit or stipend thing. But only one out of 10 students actually claims the credit. Most of them want the cash. And when I reached out to talk to them, I said, hey, it looks like you have this very interesting project going on. Love to figure out how we can partner with them. They said, can you give us another million dollars? And I said, what? What? And they said, well, we ran out. We were out of money. We don't have the million dollars anymore and the students still want to get paid. Can you give us another million so we can keep doing this? And I said, well, I like you guys, but I don't have that much in my couch cushions. So we met with them and we talked with them about what we could do to maybe fund some of their students, not all of them, but really to build something out that brings in other industry partners so that more people could fund this work and it wouldn't just be one giant fund of money. And so that maybe we could talk about adding curriculum, adding formalized things, doing some of what RIT was doing over at Rensselaer. And they love that idea. And so this year was the first year that they've launched a course an Introduction to Open Source. Not so much Introduction to Linux, but more introduction into how communities work and how they can collaborate with those communities. Now, Oregon State University, the people who work there, they are disreputable. They are shameful. They, I can't stand to be in the same room as them if we're being brutally honest. No, I'm just kidding. Lance is sitting right here so I have to be really nice to Lance. At Oregon State University, they created something called the open source lab and Lance could do a much better job talking about this than I could, but I will fake it and hopefully I will not mangle it too badly. One of the things they knew is that they saw that there was a lot of open source projects that needed a good hosting home. And as lovely as SourceForge was back in the day, under statement of the year, there was no good things for projects that needed to be a little more nimble with a little better hosting environment. Nor did folks have a lot of money to spend on hosting. And hosting has gotten cheaper over the years, certainly, but it was not cheap back in the day. And they also wanted to give an opportunity for students to learn the sort of skills that would prepare them for being system administrators, IT people, to work in a nimble environment. And so they did something very clever, is they basically bootstrapped a hosting company inside of an academic institution. And they let the students work directly with professional staff. In fact, their ratio is four to one, students to staff, professional staff. And they run a really solid, tight ship hosting company that hosts a lot of successful open source projects. And they, over time, have adapted to be DevOps as DevOps is a cool thing. They kind of, I like to say, they were doing DevOps before it was cool. And they figured out a lot of what worked with these projects that had expectations and being very professional about it so that these students have gone on to do a lot of amazing things and been very successful on a number of fields. They also have had open source as part of their curriculum since 2005. And a lot of this has been at the graduate level, but they do have some good, solid coursework happening at the undergraduate level. There's a professor there who's taught a course on open source development that's been very exciting. And all of his materials have been available under open Creative Commons licenses. So they do a lot of really interesting, solid work around open source. And in fact, they actually have paid hands-on learning. So these students are not just toiling away to get this experience. They get paid for the work because they work hard. And when they pair this up with their formal courses around learning system administration, the industry pretty much knows that if a student comes out of OSU in this program and they work in the lab that they're going to be a really solid system administrator. They may even hire in at above a junior level. Another thing that they do that's really solid is they run a lot of bar camps and a lot of hackathon-like events. And this brings in a lot of people from a lot of regional schools and gives them the opportunity to really take advantage of the expertise that these students have and that they share. And they get this hands-on experience that is really rare in academia. They are learning things that a lot of companies expect they're going to have to train the students to do over the first six months to the year of a job. It's one thing to say, well, I have my LPI certification in Linux and then have that company go, well, great, we're going to start you at 35 and you're going to be a junior admin and we're going to hope you pick it up when you get along. The certifications are good. I don't mean to badmouth them. I mean my company sells a ton of them. But you cannot take away the value of hands-on experience with modern tech, with real-world environments, with stuff where when it breaks, people get angry. The last story that I'm going to tell about schools before I get into some of the programs is Penn Manor High School. Penn Manor decided that they were going to take a proprietary application for the teacher's grade book and convert it over to a lamp stack. And this was in 2001. And this was primarily motivated by two things. One, the individual who was working on this project was a big free software advocate and that never hurts. But the other thing was that they had no money. And so the two combined together is sort of the perfect storm for, let's try something and see if we can make it work. The teachers loved it because they could customize it for their use cases. They really had input in the way that they wanted to be successful. They were spending way too much time working around the grade book system that was there that they had bought with no ability to customize it. And then all of a sudden they were saying, well, what would work well for you? How can we make it work better for you? And their lives got better. So over the years, they started changing out some of the rest of the infrastructure. So they started phasing out one proprietary thing after another. They put in Moodle. They put in WordPress. They put in Coa. They took out the phone systems and put in free software phone systems. They took out all of their, what would have been, proto cloud and put in own cloud. And then they said, well, we've got all these labs and all this infrastructure that's running exclusively fast. What about the laptops that we hand out to the students? Now they were using aging MacBooks in 2011 when they got to this point. So this is not an overnight thing. This is 10 years in the life of a K-12 school. And they said, well, let's try and give the students something else. So then when those MacBooks were done and they weren't going to pay for them anymore, they replaced them with Lenovo ThinkPad. They put Xubuntu on them and they customized them based on what the teachers said they needed for the class. They went around to all the teachers and said, what do you need your students to be able to do on their laptops? And it worked really, really well. In 2014, they rolled out a one-to-one laptop program and they expanded it to their middle school in 2015 which means they were not just at the high school level, they were dipping into the middle school across the street. At the end, they have 3,600 student computers that are running exclusively for in open-source software. And then they said, we're going to go past this. We're going to let the students be responsible for maintaining these laptops. And they created the student tech team and they give these students the opportunity to basically work as apprenticeship to the tech staff that's in Penn Manor so that they can fix their own computers. They can repair them. They can put replacement parts in them. They can maintain them. They can fix the issues that come into the help desk. The students learn all about how the technology works at a very low level that often is missing at the K-12 level where they don't get that expertise. Computers are black boxes that we don't break. These are computers that were broken and we fixed. All of their efforts around open-source. All of their models around open collaborative communities. When someone figures out how to fix something, they immediately start sharing it back. They talk about it. They tweet about it. They blog about it. They collaborate with each other so that nobody is an expert and the rest of the people are leaning on that person. Now, I'm going to show a very short video. I'm going to try. I'm going to hold the mic up to it because I think this video is worth explaining. It's a very good job of getting us where we want to understand that conversation. Here to the open philosophy, we decided early on that we wanted... And here's where we broke from the tradition. During our class meetings, we spoke with all of our high school students about the program. We brought them together and we started that conversation with the words we trust you. One of the side-os was the fact that any one-to-one program where you're giving every child a computing device, that is fundamentally an instructional program. It truly shouldn't have anything to do with the technology. Not that the technology isn't important, but it's the learning that is the focus. We've always been looking at it from the standpoint of we have to educate students for life after high school. And with technology being such an important factor, about every job that the student's going to go into, it wasn't a matter of should we do it? It was more of when do we provide the students with the laptop? When you give students a chance to explore, you're teaching them to be responsible. And in their future, hopefully in their careers, they will have learned in my class and in their other classes how to be responsible if not going in there. So why would we ever consider giving a 15-year-old brute access to a laptop? I think the question we should be asking is why would we not give these ultimate autonomy and control over their technology devices? I think by unlocking devices giving kids truly open technology, it empowers them to not only understand what's underneath the hood, but understand that they can impact the world through software, through technology. They can be part of the decisions they're being made and not the results or the end user of someone else's decision, just for frame of reference. One-to-one help desk models are not unique. This model of having student apprentices is, I shouldn't say common, but it's not uncommon, right? The level we give our kids is uncommon, right? I think that's it. There is a cost associated with allowing a 16-year-old to completely dismantle a laptop. They could cook boards, they could fry things, the whole work could come out as a complete mess. And sometimes it does. But the power in that is that the student learned, wow, I cooked that board. Now I know how not to do that. Or I learned that's what I shouldn't be doing, right? The power is in the experience. I think it's a beautiful thing that the students are there behind the help desk because that flattens that, while it's just an adult telling us what to do. So, we've gotten the laptop in school. It feels like the teachers and students are a lot more connected. It was a new experience collaborating with a student on teaching and not just the teacher teaches students, but that he felt valuable in the class as well. There is no distinction. There's no distinction between the teacher and the student. Everyone is on equal footing and the best ideas win. How can that not make sense for education? For me to say this is how you do things, that would completely destroy any type of collaboration. My students, a lot of what they do is collaborate. I don't think that they learn the best from me. That's where I think it ties into not only the open source and the mentality of sharing and making it better, but then in addition to preparing them for those jobs that we don't know. I think we lost something when education became so recently formalized and we moved away from the apprenticeship model. We couldn't write a curriculum for this, no matter what we did, because the problems are different every single day. And not only the problems are different, they're different across multiple disciplines and subjects. So, our students are going to be faced with how do I solve x-application problem that applies to science and then turn around and say, well, this might be a network issue or maybe it's a hardware issue and now I'm working on a program that has remained to arch. How do you write a curriculum about that? We do repairs, we do software, we help any way we can, but just being here, just makes me happy. I think to help us just really help sort of introduce me to a work environment as a team. Program to me is just kind of a skill for myself. I'm not really assessed on whether I can memorize things for like a test, it's more of applying myself and, you know, accomplishing goals. It's not the normal class, it's completely different. This is one of those defining moments in my entire career. It's working with the initial group of students that were part of our one-to-one help desk. Here's an example, Ben is one of four core students that has been formed because he's really the futurist for the initial one-to-one help desk. My name is Benjamin Rwantama. I graduated in the 2014 year. He was a kid that didn't really like school. We would go into parent-teacher conferences and feel deflated at the end of them because they just didn't see Ben or what we saw at home. In my freshman year, I didn't really have too much of a focus. I was kind of just like, alright, I gotta wake up, go to school. He got an IEP, I think, in second grade for learning disability and then later he was diagnosed with AED. I remember sitting in an IEP conference with a guy in the counselor in ninth grade for Ben and her saying that, you know, Ben's not gonna be going to college and we shouldn't plan on that. We shouldn't focus on that and that really was hard. So, sophomore year we created the application. Junior year we did the showcase and then that summer we started working on the applications that we'd use in the student help desk. We kind of set up the building blocks that most of the students today follow. At the end of that year, we were at an IEP room with him and they were helping him plan out his next year classes and all of a sudden they wanted him to be in college, play tennis classes. My college professors definitely see that I'm a little bit ahead of the curve. The other students hadn't really had too much of an experience. They weren't really exposed to open source. I mean, just with this opportunity for him to showcase his talent, he didn't have that opportunity before. I would not be where I am today without the 1-2-1 program. But it was just remarkable how it changes the conversation. When you say to a student, you know, something, you're an important part of your own education. It's freeing, it's empowering, right? It makes them feel, I think for the first time they feel that education is not being done to them, they're actually an active participant in their own. And I think that's the power of trust again. Really cool story, really fascinating work that they're doing there. It's important to remember that Penn Manor is not downtown Philadelphia. Penn Manor is not New York City. Penn Manor is about as far in the woods in Pennsylvania as you can get. This is not a private school. Their biggest attended club is the FFA. So this is them exposing students that would normally probably never even think about a computer job to open source in a very powerful way. Now I'm going to finish my slides. If I can get it to go back where it was. All right. All right. Now it's important to talk about academic research too because that plays a very important part in higher education open source. We've partnered with Purdue, specifically with their Arcode Group. Arcode is the research center for open digital innovation. And one of the things I discovered when I started talking to academia, especially at the research level, is when I say open source they hear open innovation and they mean the same thing. So open innovation is the idea that we say open source applied to non-software. They go open innovation is open innovation applied to software. So we worked with them and we funded a research project specifically to provide some academic proof that open source works because everybody here knows open source works. But there's a lack of research academic published literature that backs that up. And if you don't have that then you might as well be buying the Gartner report to find out whether open source works or not. And so we'd rather invest our money in something like this. And so they're actively working at different governance models to determine what gets success in young communities. How do they cross the chasm into being very healthy, robust, large communities? What do large communities do well? What do large communities do poorly and succeed despite that? And really taking advantage of some of the new technologies that are emerging right now that are working with industries that are very used to proprietary models and methods. Specifically things like the telecommunications community coming in and doing software defined networking. What does that mean for them to be participating in open source and not just open standards and not just open standards? University of California, Santa Cruz has just created CROSS which is the Center for Research on Open Source Software. Santa Cruz is where Seth Wilde who was the creator of a little piece of software, Sage Wilde, sorry, Sage Wilde created Seth. And Seth is this amazing robust open source storage management to basically mean that you don't have to buy expensive storage anymore. You can just run software on just a bunch of disks and have it be as robust and reliable. And he worked on that for his research, his PhD research while he was there. And Sage is lucky enough to be independently wealthy and can do whatever he wants whenever he wants. But the average research student who does work around open source when they graduate has to go find a real job and can't do any more work on that project. And what they saw was that Seth was the exception not the norm and that all of these code bases were basically being left to rot published in papers but not being used. And there was no one to give them community, give them life, give them infrastructure. And so they created CROSS to basically act as a pre-incubator space for these projects so that they can fund these works to continue to grow to build the community around them. And then when they're ready to stand on their own feet, they can move out of this space and be successful. They wanted to make sure that Seth was the norm and not the exception. And that is something that just got started in August of 2015. Oregon State also does a lot of research around this on a range of subjects. They do a lot of work on what makes communities healthy, how they stay vital and what people can do to participate in them. They also did a lot of work on how to include senior age developers in these communities and what corporate influence means to projects like the Linux kernel. How effective are corporations at manipulating these open source projects for better or for worse? There's also a couple of communities of interest and volunteer groups that live in this space that are trying to sort of solve these same big problems that we're working on. The most notable is Open Hatch. Open Hatch is a nonprofit organization that's dedicated to trying to find homes for people who want to work on free software. Who say, I would love to get started but I have no idea where to go. They say, well, we can point you in the right direction. They act as that sort of starting point for people who are interested but don't know where to go to be a mentor and a guidepost. And so what they do is they match newcomers to projects that match their interests and they say, well, we have all these little tasks that need to get done in all these communities that we know are healthy, robust and friendly. Pick one of these that looks good to you and take it on. And they also do a lot of really cool education events. They do this thing called open source comes to campus where they work with students that are interested in having an active demonstration of open source tools and ideas on campus for a little multi-day workshop and then they come and facilitate this workshop and bring all the materials. They bring an educator and they work with the mentors and the students on campus and they have a lot of really good success stories around doing this. And this often inspires the schools to think harder about what they can do to better incorporate open source into their own model. So this is a great little seed to plant in a lot of environments. And they've run the open source comes to campus workshop. 51 schools and they've partnered with 31 women in computer science organizations. So it's a very comforting and friendly way for a lot of people who feel like they wouldn't otherwise be comfortable speaking up to have a venue to talk about open source and to talk about what a collaborative model works. They also do a really solid get tutorial. And that's good because a lot of schools, the professors don't know get. And so it's very hard for me to convince the professor to teach get when he doesn't know it. And we really believe based on what we've seen at RIT and some other places that the earlier you can introduce students to source control the more effective they are at understanding a collaborative model and the better success they have in working with open source communities. Now there's also the teaching open source community which is an online community of interest for professors and institutions and communities and companies to come together and make the teaching of open source global success. This was launched in 2009 based around an NSF grant to better prepare educators to have what they need to be comfortable to teach open source. And that was what the educators said. They said the barrier is not so much the lack of available computers. We've got the computers. What we don't have is the comfort level that we can go in front of the students and teach them open source because we don't feel comfortable doing that because we don't know it well enough ourselves. So the teaching open source movement really said we need to create methods for educators to teach each other how to be successful at understanding open source and how we can teach it to our students and how we can involve them in that process and not just have it be the open source textbook is right there please read all of the chapters in it and study it. There will be a test at the end of the semester. And so one of the things they came up with was this workshop called Posse which is the professors open source software experience. It was originally the professors open source summer experience but then it stopped happening in the summer and it was happening all the time and so they changed the summer to software. And this is something that Red Hat supported in its early stage and we continue to support. It's also completely funded by NSF grants. So what this means is if you're an educator in North America and you want to learn about how to teach open source you can come to this workshop and the grant will fund you to come and learn how from other professors how they have taught open source successfully through a workshop that's both online and in person and continues a cohort relationship with the instructors after the workshop is complete. So they really do understand that not every school is going to be able to do what RIT did. They're not going to be able to create new courses around open source. A lot of schools are going to have to figure out how they can incorporate open source ideas and concepts into their existing course structure and the whole point of this workshop is to help those professors and educators feel comfortable doing that. Now there's a couple of gaps that are out there and I wanted to highlight these some people ask after this presentation. From academia there's still a lot of places where it's hard to make the case for open source related curriculum. The textbook industry is pretty thick in there and so there's a lot of people that say well we want to make sure that we have valuable intellectual property and the materials that our educators create that we can sell later and rather than use profanity to respond to that argument it would be a lot cleaner to be able to point to a lot more success stories. So I think that problem will go away over time and we'll be able to point to these success stories but it's also the case that a lot of educators have a not invented here syndrome going on where if they don't write it they don't want to use it. I asked that same group at SIGC how many of you go to the internet and look for materials for your class to use and they said no we don't do that maybe an image here or a little thing there or a book there but we really write our own content we do it all. So every time a CS professor is teaching they're reinventing the wheel every single time in little baby steps. There's also a lack of curriculum for related disciplines that aren't computer science. Open source matters in business it matters in marketing it matters in community management it matters in a lot of other ways. Free culture has effect on those spaces collaborative communities have effect on those spaces but it's often not covered and there's a lot of material that could be generated there that's missing. There's also a lack of mentors for students that participating in open source projects I often talk to upstream and they say yeah we would love to have students coming out their mentorship program and how they could work directly with students and they go quiet. They don't have a structured mentor model for working with students and that's a big thing we would love to see change. In research often times academic research is not intended to be practical. A lot of schools are very proud of saying we don't do we don't do practical applied research no no no other lesser schools do that. They need to get over themselves and so there's also not enough people doing research around open source and why it works and how it works. Don Foster is doing some amazing stuff right now that is desperately needed and there's a number of other schools that are starting to tread in this space but there is this belief in our industry that marketing surveys are good enough and they replace academic research. I would much rather be citing academic research in the first two slides of my deck rather than sliding the Black Duck survey it's easy to gain the survey. It's easy to lie with statistics. I want academic research a lot harder to disprove. We also haven't had a really good academic community survey. The last time anybody tried to do one was in 2010. We're overdue for one. So to finish this out there's a 64% chance you're still following with all the stuff I spit at you. I realize I data dumped a lot of stuff on you but there's a lack of statistical data on the value of open source and education. We're working on trying to solve that. We're going to 60 this year and we're going to ask all the professors information about how they use open source and hopefully be able to turn that into a publicly available data set and statistical report on what we found out at 60 and we hope to be able to share that next year at scale. So thank you very much for your time. If you have any questions I'd be happy to hear them now. Now I don't know if we're videotaping but I'm going to pass this lovely hand mic to anyone that wants to ask a question just in case that thing in the back is actually recording me. Hey. So I had definitely heard about Penn Manor before. I was very excited about that as a teacher who is interested in incorporating open source in the classroom. I had not heard it mentioned in connection with Red Hat. Were you guys involved in that change that they went through or are you guys just documenting it after the fact? So we were not involved. They did that all on their own. We thought it was amazing and we loved it. They don't use any Red Hat tech but we don't care honestly. Open source is an open community where it doesn't matter that they're not using open source as laptops. It matters more that they're teaching their students the value of working in an open community and so we are involved with them now and we are working on figuring out partnerships. One of the first things we did was we brought in another partner of ours which is Lowell Spot and ALF Objects. They make an open source hardware 3D printer and we encouraged them to incorporate this into their curriculum and we said why are you not doing open source 3D printing? Your students need to learn how to do that. We've also come up with a lot of interesting ideas for the farming communities that these students are part of and really tying that back into a bigger picture. So none of these things make Red Hat any money but we are actively invested in being a community participant with them to help them spread the open source vision because we would really love it if some of the other school systems that are around Penn Manor had started to adopt some of their ideas. The more successful they are the more other people will adopt it, the wider it will spread. So Charlie is a good friend of ours. I'm going to go out and meet with him and visit the campus in a couple months. Alright, so we're going to... More of a comment. I'm a researcher. I just finished my dissertation on open source. I'm an educator. I've been so for about 20 years. Okay? My question is, Red Hat or is there any other big organization that's really making a push to get open source in the public schools? I mean, I've been studying that problem. If you guys want something to put you to sleep, it's online. You can read it. You can read it because that story was my story 15 years ago. I introduced software to a couple of different school districts, a lot of non-profits, and the problem is that there's a big push. There's always an advocate. There's someone to kind of lead the charge, and then it dies because there's just not a deep enough tap root. Is there any plan by Red Hat, Canonical, anybody to really put some structure for it so that a school district or a charter or something can say, it is, but we need a structure so that we can get our teachers trained and then we can have something that's sustainable. Great question. Jenna has her hand finally waving behind me, so I'm going to let her answer it. I think you're looking at two different questions. One's at the K through 12 level, and K through 12 is kind of hard because then you are looking at all of the standardized testing and how do you cram open source into that model. It's also hard, and if you come to my talk at 1.30 I'll talk about all the reasons why it's hard, which is a little bit of a downer, but there's a puppy picture to make it better. I'm actually not joking about that. The interesting thing about the college issue is that there are guidelines for what you teach at a college level in CS and they're put out by the ACM. They're guidelines. Schools don't have to follow them. But one of the things that we're going to be working on with the policy team, with this group of teachers we have that are very invested in changing the way CS is taught is perhaps approaching the ACM with the idea that they need to over time change these guidelines. That will make a difference. When the guidelines change, the curriculum will change. I think that you clearly understand it's a very hard problem. There are a lot of environmental and political and social factors that make it difficult for technology to thrive at the K-12 level, not just open source. I think that one of the things that Penn Mentor has done so successfully to ensure that this project has been successfully running for 10 years in some form or fashion is that they have actively involved the students in this. When the students feel like they have a shape in controlling the direction of the program and advancing it and taking it into the new places, so that it's not just okay, we're going to be open source we're going to run LAMP stack. It is beyond that. It is more than that. It's a collaborative team effort with the students and the teachers seeing each other as peers. That's what makes that program more robust and have a much better chance of surviving because there's a lot of there's a lot of minds in that field. It's a very difficult challenge. Now as far as corporate investment, Red Hat is certainly looking at what that means and how we can work with those groups. It is a much harder problem because of the hyper local nature of these. There's a lot of K-12 institutions where I can't even come and speak to a class because I am not a parent of a student in that school and it makes it much more complicated for us to do that. But we are actively looking for schools that want to have that conversation that are open to having that discussion. We really want to find those schools that are able and willing to make that change to expose their students to open source and collaborative effort. All right. Okay. Good. I like the introduction that was doing Gloom but focused on the U.S. In the economic competitive models of trying to convince people of things, sometimes they compare us to other countries. So are there any other countries that are doing better in terms of integrating open source into curriculum? That's a fantastic question. So in the Czech Republic the Czech Republic you go to college for free. And so there is no... there is very little risk in changing their structure because people won't want to go to school there. And so they have a lot more flexibility and freedom in the way that they do things and because they're not tied to funding they're willing to be more innovative with their curriculum. So for example, the main technical institution schools in the Czech Republic are all actively teaching open source. They teach Linux system administration. They teach Python by having students work with upstream Python communities. And in fact, Red Hat has a number of professors that are Red Hat employees that are teaching in the college system. And so there is a huge open source community around higher education in that company. Germany is well renowned for its work at the graduate level with open source technologies. So there are cultural reasons. There are flexibilities. In some parts far more advanced. And in some places far more behind. France doesn't look at all like Germany with regards to open source. The UK has some schools that are well along the path and quite a few that are not. So it's not as if we can really point to any one area and say well, you know, Europe is just completely demolishing us. But they certainly have pockets of success stories that are in ours because of the societal factors that are in play. Yeah, India is a very, very interesting. It's very difficult to generalize about India because it's such a big country with so many people with so many different initiatives going on. Yeah. There are a lot of open source successes. There are a lot of open source failures. There are a lot of people who are trying. The successes tend to be successes that the school has chosen to figure out how to take control over their own destiny with their own students and really have built those successes around that active investment. The failures have been when companies have tried to dump open source on them and walk away. And so there's a lot of opportunity, but there's also you want to make sure that you balance out. I'm a firm believer that you cannot have a lot of successes if some of the core problems are not addressed. There's a lot about clean drinking water. If there's rampant poverty, those are problems that are bigger to solve than why don't we have these kids contributing to the Linux kernel. And that you need to get a lot of the societal environmental factors in a stable place and then say, let's build upon that. You take control over your own life, take control of your own destiny. Let's introduce digital technologies and help you see how those can broaden your view of the world. So, you're next. Go ahead. Let's go to different groups. Innovate Pasadena. They want to bring technology here, but they really don't understand what the open source necessarily is, but they want the tech. So, same thing with LA. City of LA really wants to see LA become a tech center. Same thing with Long Beach and all these other places. So, you start approaching the people who are in the business community that are tied to the government and also the government community. I mean, LA had to open Data Hackathon, right? And so, you start approaching these guys. They want to play with it. Now, some of the people are really awesome. Like, City of LA had a gentleman who used to work for Code for America, who was their Chief Data Officer for about a year. And we've got a great, you know, CIO here in Pasadena who wants to actually do open data tracks over here. So, there's a lot of opportunities if you just go in there and look at things like the LA Economic Development Department. You'll find people there who are champions of technology for the youth. And by definition, if the youth get to play it's open for it. Think about it. They get to code it, right? Thanks. What do you talk about? All those iPads were so useful. Well, again, I think we're in a different position than what Apple was certainly in. But I think that there's time will tell as to what the repercussions of the iPad debacle and... Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I have a clear idea about what they want to accomplish. A lot of people just have this idea that, you know, give kids this thingy and then all of a sudden everything will improve, but you have to have some type of tech plan. You have to have that in alignment with your instructional practice. The key thing is that an iPad has really no effects in paper and pencil. I mean, if you're not going to change the way that you're going to incorporate technology into instruction, then basically you just kind of wasting your time. And that's, I guess for me, the frustration I've worked with school districts since 2001. And the number one thing is that people have this strange mindset that, well, we've given them computers and it's like, well, I mean, that's just like giving the keys to your car to a 10-year-old. Well, I've given him a car. I mean, he doesn't have the capacity to drive. He hasn't been trained to drive. He doesn't have the skills to use this device. And I think a lot of times, if you don't explain to a person that you have to have a plan and you have to have metrics to determine if it's effective, it takes work. It's almost like a person saying, I love fruit, I love fruit, but they don't realize you've got to plant a tree and you've got to water it and you've got to take care of it. No, no, no, I don't want to do all that. I just want the fruit. And it's really a weird mindset. And so you really have to take the time to help people to understand that there's a process involved in integrating technology into instruction and in making it meaningful. In terms of connectivity, I mean, I've done a lot with digital divide. What are some of the policies? That's part of LAUSD's problem. You go there, you can't even get to most things online and it's just locked down and it's been like that ever since I can remember. So the IT policies for connecting and whatnot, can you maybe talk about that? Sure. And I think that's definitely a huge environmental factor in the K-12 picture is, you know, if you can't collaborate because you can't take advantage of this fantastic internet that we have as scary as it can be, then you have a giant barrier to doing what you need to do to teach collaboration to understand that we take control by bringing people together and collaborating with those other people. So yeah, absolutely. I think that is a huge problem and it's one of the reasons why we have more success working with higher ed than we do with K-12 because there isn't that barrier to entry. I think that the internet is a big, wide, scary place and we need to be prepared to deal with it not hide from it. I personally don't buy into all of those policies but I understand why when you have a school district, obviously I'm not referring to LA specifically, but when you have a school district that at best has one full-time tech person working the entire district, how it is a lot easier to just lock that down than be wide open. And so that's one of the places where we as community can be involved in our own local spaces to say we know how to navigate the waters of the internet. We're willing to come and work with you and build a program around having our expertise, partnering with these school systems to come in and help you understand how you can build this collaborative, safe environment to work with other people in the way that it matters. Taking students on the internet to do open-source work at the K-12 level is a lot different of a conversation than taking them at the college level. It's a lot more tricky. It has to be a lot more nuanced. It can be done. Penn Manor has proved it. But you'll note that they don't talk a lot about how they're doing things externally. Their focus is on doing things internally and then figuring out how to share those communities with the world. All right. You, you. There was a gentleman a couple years ago at scale who was working at a K-12 situation and his solution was a net at the school that provided all the resources that the kids really needed and gave them the opportunity to learn collaboration without exposing them to the dangers. And he had a real definite plan as to how he walled off his network from the rest of the world. And I mean, he looked like a professional. He was a teacher who learned it all on his own. All right. So the person you're talking about is, I think was Jim Klein. He was CTO at a school. We actually had him come over to Arizona and talk his great, great talk here and so the one thing for K-12, how about moving upstream to teachers colleges. We've heard a lot of talk about computer science but if we get teachers using free software and understanding that before they get into the classroom so they're bringing that with them as the next generation. And then the other piece was you can't go to any school in the country and say, hey, you should listen to me. I can't go to any school in the country and say, hey, listen to me. But I can go to my kids school and I can go to the PTA and be participating in the PTA. We should be as parents we should be participating anyway because we want to know what the schools are doing for those of us that have some particular expertise, whatever that is we should be helping the schools with that. They can't afford to pay my rates. So, you know, I can donate that though. Absolutely good point. And I do think that there's a part of it where, you know, we as community participants have got to step up and say, how can we, you know, it's great that we think globally but we also need to think locally. On changing what gets taught in teachers colleges and with teacher certifications again that goes back to what is the, what are the current set of recommendations of what's being taught. And I talk a little bit about the ACM recommendations in my talk and why they are what they are. But at the moment it's a 518 page document adding anything is hard and it's an interesting discussion one of the ways that we think of getting around that or at least adding a parallel piece to that are these posse workshops where we teach teachers who are already in the field how to teach open source and that is a way to get that knowledge into the hands of the people who need it the most. It's also interesting to note that there's a lot of trends in modern computing about bringing the teacher closer to the students and making it a more collaborative learning experience things like, what's the no, no, no. Flip classroom. Flip classroom. When you talk long enough with the teacher about flip classroom you realize we're both talking in the same language with different words. Very interesting.