HFOSS - Interview with Greg Dekoenigsberg (Red Hat)

Here is the interview I did to Greg and if you don't know who Greg is, here is a little biography.

Greg is Consulting Community Architect at Red Hat. He was the founder and first chairman of the Fedora Project Board, the governance body for the Fedora Project, which now has over 13,000 volunteer contributors. He also serves on the oversight board for Sugar Labs, the organization that drives development of the Sugar educational platform. He has been with Red Hat since 2001. He blogs at http://gregdek.livejournal.com.

You can watch the following video interview or read his answers in this blog post.



This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

What's the big picture opportunity in connecting education and open source?

• every senior capstone project that is not open-sourced is a gigantic opportunity wasted
  
• students are able to produce really good work that can benefit the world

What specific projects or courses are you working on that make the link between open source and education?

• Greg says that they are working with Chris Tyler from Seneca College on how the Fedora community could get involved with higher education
• Chris has been able to bring his students to the Fedora project with a deep understanding of the project and has become a board member
  
• take what we have learned from Seneca in the last year and provide other professors that embedded "bootcamp" type of experience
• Greg mentions that until you have not lived the open source experience is really difficult to teach it

Do you have any advice on how Mozilla could best engage with educators and students?

• currently Mozilla is leading the way
  
• we have to find out how to do more of the same in a scalable way
• give to as many professors as possible the experience to be in an open-source community
  
• he suggests that we have to demistify the scary parts of open-source

NOTE: Modified to add license note