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1. Higher Education in the
Open Source Ecosystem
Exemplary Projects & People
Deborah Bryant

2. Goals for today’s talk
★ Share some examples of how higher education is teaching students about
free and open source software in ways you may not know about – both in
the traditional sense and in new (and open) ways.
★ Encourage you and / or your company to get involved with universities and
help level up the open source ecosystem

3. Preamble: Country Context

4. Open Source Ecosystems : Vendor View
Circa 2009
Missing:
Higher Ed as
a user,
contributor,
enabler and
intelligence
agent

5. Curriculum
& Project-Based Learning

6. “A student who worked in an IT department commented
that he is glad that we use and cover some Linux and open
source software because he is using it at his job
and he had to learn it all by himself. ”
Open Source Software in Computer Science and IT Higher Education:
A Case Study
Dan R. Lips and Robert S. Laramee, Portland State University

7. Oregon State University
Open Source Lab (OSL)
Global resource for high impact open source
projects
Student to professional staff ratio 4:1
OSL’s DevOps practice refined through project
hosting experience has evolved from practice to
the classroom and back
Computer Science and Engineering
Deep collaborative culture in learning
environment
Open source curriculum since 2005
Multi-disciplinary doctorate work includes
research on social and technical topics through
cooperation with broad communities

8. OSU Academic
Programs
Mentorship program (20 students/yr)
- OSUOSL; paid hands-on learning
Formal Courses (40-80 students/yr)
- Linux System Administration
- Open Source Development
Soon to be offered online,
available as transfer credit to
students at other universities
Informal (200-300 people/yr)
- Beaver Barcamp (yearly)
- Devops Daycamp (yearly)
- Devops Bootcamp (weekly)
Student requested classes
85-90% success rate
● 3+ contributions (code, bug
report or docs by week 10)
● 25%+ Women and minorities
Hands-on support to overcome social
and technical hurdles
Course materials online, free to use

9. OSUOSL
Provides student opportunity to gain
hands on experience in software
engineering and system administration
and work on key community open
source projects
Champions on-campus events such
as DevOps Bootcamp, educating and
fostering interest in contributing to
open source
Translates deep community and
technology experience into curriculum
Project
based
learning

10. Rensselaer Center
for Open Source
Software
Program’s goal is to provide a
creative, intellectual and
entrepreneurial outlet for students to
use the open source software
platforms to develop applications that
solve societal problems.
Students practice code review, work
on projects and learn both technical
and non-technical skills.
Students work for credit or stipend.

11. Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)

12. RIT
Academic
Programs
RIT’s Minor has both a technical and
non-technical track.
The final course in the minor is an
elective within the student’s major of
study, where they become the
classroom “expert” on Open Source
and connecting with upstream
projects.
Traditional
education

13. RIT
Student Projects &
Initiatives
RIT Students don’t just study theory,
they put it into practice. They
contribute upstream to projects like
the Linux Kernel, D-lang, Arduino,
Drupal, and many other FOSS
projects.
Students learn to use their hacker
powers for good, and work with public
sector and not-for-profit partners like
UNICEF, 18F, and One Laptop Per
Child.
RIT has run over 40 hackathons in
the past 5 years.
Project
based
learning

14. HFOSS at RIT
Working on humanitarian free and open
source software provides a real world
context for students to participate in
meaningful projects with concrete impact
while learning software development and
community skills.
● Students “fork” the course
repository to participate
● Attendance is taken by bots in IRC
● Students “submit” their homework
via pull-request and patch.
● Unlimited extra credit for upstream
patches and hackathon
participation. Project
based
learning

15. Academic Research

16. OSU Research
OSU graduate research has
addressed a range of subjects with a
focus on the vitality of the open source
software community including
diversity, barriers to participating in
community, inclusion of senior (as in
age) developers, and corporate
influence on projects such as the
Linux Kernel.

17. OSU Research to
Practice
Community diversity studies include
barriers to gender inclusion. OSU’s
Open Source Lab’s student
employees include 25% women on the
team, about double the engineering
student population and ten times the
industry norm.

18. Purdue Innovation
Research
Doctoral Research in Open Innovation
Communities
Funded doctoral research project will
compare new communities forming around
emerging open standards (lexampe: and
SDN and NVF) with existing communities
which also have large industry stakeholders
(i.e. OpenStack). Research will cover
● Governance
● Communications infrastructure
● Interact with standards body (NSF
NIST) to inform them of research
outcomes

19. Center for
Research on Open
Source Software
(CROSS)
University of California at Santa
Cruz
Emphasis on FOSS project evolution to
commercialization. Projects can come
from various sources and become
senior, M.S., or Ph.D. projects. The best
gets selected into the Incubator once
the student graduates, and then
released once it has a diverse open
source community
Influenced and inspired by the Ceph
project, it was seed funded 3mm, and
launched August 2015 with founding
corporate sponsorship.

20. Communities of Interest &
Volunteer Organizations

21. OpenHatch
OpenHatch is a non-profit volunteer
organization dedicated to matching
prospective free software
contributors with communities, tools,
and education.
It serves a unique and important role
as a starting point for new
community members and as their
guide along the way.
Community newcomers are
matched with mentors from projects
that pique their interest. OpenHatch
maintains reference resources and
channels to drop in for advice.
OpenHatch also creates educational
events and provides advice to
others so they can too.
OSI serves as Open Hatch’s fiscal agent.

22. OpenHatch
Open Source Comes to Campus
Open Source Comes to Campus is
a workshop to teach the tools and
culture of open source development
and to help students impact real
projects. Groups at 51 schools have
run this event, including 13 women-
in-CS organizations.
O.H. identifies sponsors and helps
organize the workshops.

23. Teaching Open Source (TOS)
Teachingopensource.org is an online community of interest for professors,
institutions, communities, and companies to come together and make the
teaching of Open Source a global success.
Launched in 2009, the site serves to gather and introduce, provide shared
resources such as course content, presentations, and reference models for
instructional programs.

24. POSSE
The Professor’s Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE), which is supported by Red Hat and
grants from the National Science Foundation, is designed for university instructors who want to
incorporate open source community participation into their computer science courses. POSSE
participants complete course prework online, attend an in-person immersive workshop, then form
support groups to help each other through the coming year.
It is difficult to create net-new university courses. POSSE provides a way to introduce open source
within the framework of existing curricula.
Working in the open source world can be a daunting proposition. POSSE gives professors -- who
have limited time to learn about open source and are often unsure how to get started -- a foothold.
http://redhat.com/posse

25. Open Source Ecosystem from a societal view (ICT)

26. Gaps

27. ✓ Making the case for open
source-related curriculum
✓ Curriculum for related
disciplines (business,
marketing, community
management)
✓ Volunteer mentors for
students participating in open
source projects
Academic Gaps

28. ✓ Converting Research to
Practice
✓ Thwarting marketing surveys
as spoilers for supported
research
✓ Last major community
survey: 2010
Research Gaps

29. 69%
Odds that you’re still tracking with this presentation by 3:30 pm.
(With little statistical data on the impact of open source in education, the
speaker felt compelled to throw a number in.)

30. RIT Open Source Minor Program
Teaching Open Source
POSSE
Women in Open Source Award-
academic prize
Summer Internship Programs
How does Red Hat
work with higher
education?
And why…

31. Your mission:
Support higher
education +
FOSS.
Volunteer.
Fund.
Host.
Mentor.
Teach a teacher.

32. Thanks!
Deborah Bryant
Open Source and Standards
Red Hat, Inc.
@debbryant
Education & Outreach
Team
Tom Callaway
Gina Linkins
community.redhat.com
Student Hacker Bus
Brazil

33. Thanks!
Questions?

34. For further exploration
Outreachy | www.outreachy.org
Women in Open Source Awards | www.redhat.com/en/about/women-in-open-source
Open Hatch | www.openhatch.org ,
POSSE | http://redhat.com/posse
Oen Source Comes to Campus | www.campus.openhatch.org
CROSS Center for Research in Open Source Software |
https://cross.soe.ucsc.edu/CROSS/

35. Topical Academic Papers
Open Source Software in Computer Science and IT Higher Education: A Case Study
Dan R. Lips and Robert S. Laramee, Portland State University
Teaching Evolution of Open-Source Projects in Software Engineering Courses Joseph
Buchta, Maksym Petrenko, Denys Poshyvanyk, Václav Rajlich Department of Computer
Science Wayne State University
Open Source Software Development Experiences on the Students’ Resumes: Do They
Count? - Insights from the Employers’ Perspectives
Ju Long Texas State University-San Marco

36. Photo Credits
OSU Research, OSUOSL | Deb Bryant
Academic Gaps | "Kaligandaki ghasa" by Michał Sałaban licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5
Research Gaps | Bryce Canyon, Andrew Smith, licensed under CC BY-SSA 2.0
Your mission | MI Rogue Nation, Forbes.com all rights reserved
Rensselaer Center For Open Source | facebook page

37. An Incomplete List of Universities with Leading FOSS Programs
(not included in this presentation)
University of Oslo
University of Madrid
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos https://metricsgrimoire.github.io/
Center for Open Source Investigation at Carnegie Mellon
*
hat•tip