Education/StatusMeetings/2009-02-09

Mozilla Education Status Meeting - February 9, 2009

Agenda

1. Planning the initial version of the education.mozilla.org site

Notes

• Want to create education.mozilla.org as a way to provide an umbrella for all the various education-facing work that is happening with regard to Mozilla.
• What we might want to do long term with the site (e.g., structure, technical details of how it's hosted, etc.) is still not clear. However, we agree on the need to do something now and improve on it as we go.
• There was discussion of the number of current community efforts to do education work, and that it would be good to highlight these and provide some visibility, as well as to help foster a community around this work. It is clear that education.mozilla.org should support but not try to own all the activities going on in the community.

• In terms of what types of things could be part of the site, the following ideas were discussed:
  • learning resources and content for new individuals, students, professors to get started working on Mozilla projects on their own or as part of a class
  • an IRC channel to host the community and provide a safe place for students and others to get help
  • a blog planet so that work being done by students has visibility, but doesn't swamp http://planet.mozilla.org
  • potential project list (e.g., bugs, extensions, tools, etc.) so people can find things to do as part of course work without having to know the details of using bugzilla
  • active projects and/or active students. Listing current students and projects is one good way to keep track of what's happening, make students aware of each other and other work that might overlap, and help match-up mentors/students.

• A number of questions where discussed:
  • Should we consolidate or link to materials? A number of people felt that sending people away from a *.mozilla.org site made it harder for people to judge the quality of the material (i.e., "is this really recommended by Mozilla?")
  • Wherever possible we should avoid duplicating or replicating existing things. For example, http://mozdev.org already provides extension/project hosting, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org is the right place for work being done on Mozilla code itself, http://developer.mozilla.org has very good documentation we can link to, etc.
  • Will creating #education work, in terms of migrating people over from #seneca? It was thought that this could be tried and happen slowly over time. Eventually having a generic place for education people to meet is more favourable to #seneca, #nus, ..., all competing.

• In the interest of building this in an "open source" style, it was agreed that we should setup as much of this as we can now with existing pieces of Mozilla, and create it in a future-proof way:
  • Create http://wiki.mozilla.org/Education and use this as the top-level entry point
  • Create redirects from http://education.mozilla.org to http://wiki.mozilla.org/Education (see bug 477655)
  • Create a standard URL naming convention and structure such that we can create content in http://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/foo/bar and later move it if necessary and be able to get at it from http://education.mozilla.org/foo/bar
  • Create a planet to aggregate Mozilla-Education related blogs (see bug 477651)
  • Create a guideline in consultation with the community for marking bugs that may be appropriate for students working in a course (i.e., "potential project" or some similar keyword).
  • Examine ways to pull this project info out of bugzilla and have it show in the wiki. Gary Kwong is working on such scripts now.
  • Create a Mozilla Education mailing list/newsgroup so that discussions related to this can happen asynchronously (see bug 477812).
  • Create #education on moznet (done).