CHAOSS Education Project

Project Goal

The goal of the CHAOSS Education Project is to develop easy-to-use educational materials for open source newcomers and maintainers, and we need your help to create these materials.

Starting and navigating open source can be challenging for several reasons. In response, the CHAOSS Education Project aims to develop materials to bridge these gaps for everyone. The CHAOSS Education Project is designed to help people join open source projects or communities, providing much-needed information for people to ensure an easy start in open source. Specifically, we propose to help high school and university students, open source project maintainers, and anyone interested in participating in and contributing to open source projects. The CHAOSS Education project strives to make open source more understandable by providing educational resources and support to bridge the knowledge gap often found when hoping to participate in an open source project. The CHAOSS Education Project also provides opportunities to interact face-to-face with some CHAOSS leaders and enhance your learning experience with easy-to-access content.

The CHAOSS Education project currently offers short video recordings as resources to help people participate in open sources

These focus on general open source contributions and a more focused overview of contributing to the CHAOSS Project. They offer detailed information to help you begin or solidify your journey in open source. In the future, we also plan to add half-day workshops.

Delivering CHAOSS Education Project via Videos:

With short (5-10 minute), straight-to-the-point videos starting with Open Source 101 (Basis of Open Source). A video format has a few advantages:  

• • Flexibility: Videos can be accessed at any time and from any location.
  • Availability: Once created, videos can be easily distributed and reused.
  • Scalability: Videos can reach a large audience without the need for physical attendance.

The CHAOSS Education project is designed for everyone, but it primarily targets newcomers to open source, as well as maintainers and other people who are interested in learning more about open source and CHAOSS. It’s crucial to stay engaged with this project because the workshops and 5-10 minute, self-paced learning videos help you avoid the frustration of unanswered questions and quickly get you up to speed in navigating open source projects. The CHAOSS education project is divided into modules and modules are categorised as follows:

1. Welcome to Open Source 101 – Taking that first step into open source.

2. All About CHAOSS – Learning about the CHAOSS community.

3. Practitioner Guides – Learning about metrics and how to implement them in projects.

4. More are on the way.

What’s there for open source beginners: 

• • A general knowledge about open source.
  • Clear explanations on how to start contributing to open source or building a career in it.
  • Easy access to resources and direct guidance, covering everything from Open Source 101 to advanced topics.
  • Deep understanding of CHAOSS metrics, software, and programs.

What’s there for open-source maintainers:

The CHAOSS Education project offers materials to help maintainers mentor and guide contributors and opportunities to contribute to the CHAOSS project. It also provides materials to help maintainers learn about metrics and how to implement them in their projects. Lastly, CHAOSS Education courses can be used as training materials for your projects. 

Getting Started with the CHAOSS Education Project

Over the last months we have worked on getting these educational videos ready, it has been an awesome journey and ongoing project. Finally, it is launched and it is hosted on Moodle platform.

The following Categories and topics are now available.  

Category 1: Welcome to Open Source101

1. 1. How to Start a Career in Open Source
   2. Introduction to Open Source & Collaboration Platforms
   3. Popular Open Source Projects
   4. Open Source in Business
   5. Open Source Security
   6. Newcomers In Open Source

Category 2: All About CHAOSS

1. 1. Introduction to CHAOSS
   2. CHAOSS Governance
   3. CHAOSS Context Groups

Category 3: CHAOSS Practitioner Guides

1. 1. Introduction to Practitioner Guides
   2. Contributor Sustainability
   3. Responsiveness
   4. Organizational Participation
   5. Security

To consume these courses you will need to create an account on Moodle following the process below. 

Process of Signing up to The course Platform (Moodle)

1. 1. Use this link to create an account and sign in.

2. 2. It opens your dashboard

3. 3. Navigate to the Home page

4. 4. Select a course category, and expand to see the list of courses.

5. 5. Enroll in a course

6. 6. All the courses enrolled in will appear on your dashboard

Have fun Learning!

Interested in Contributing to the CHAOSS Education Project?

We know that different people are more comfortable with some activities and less interested in others, so we’ve broken the video tasks into distinct components, and you can choose to participate in any or all of these activities. Here are the 3 different ways you can contribute to this project:

• • Write a Video Script: If you know a lot about an open source topic and want to write down what the person should say in the video, even if you don’t want to create the slides or record the video. The material must be very specific about open source.
  • Create a Slide Deck: If you like creating slides (with your content or using a script someone else provided). Again, the material must be very specific about open source.
  • Turn the Script and Slide Deck into a Video: If you love recording videos, either from a script/slide deck you created or from ones created by someone else (you don’t need to know much about the topic to record the video).

How can you get started?

• • Complete this form to let us know what kind of contributions you want to make.
  • Read through the README.md file and Contributing. md file to learn more.

The Education repository contains guidelines, templates, and instructions with all the details you need to write a script, create a slide deck, or record a video. If you have any questions, you can join the Slack CHAOSS #education channel to ask your questions. 

We hope you have learned a lot from the available courses, watch out for more. Also thanks for your interest in contributing to CHAOSS Education and other open-source projects.