Teaching Open Source has a POSSE

...First order of business: learning to talk. Where do the smartest people in the open source world hang out, and how can your 18-year-old students rub elbows with them on a level playing field? The current answer is to plunge into IRC, which gave us a rich and chaotic introduction to the dynamics of remote communication. When Bryan Behrenshausen and a team from opensource.com intermittently pulled professors out for mini-interviews, their collaborators would be momentarily baffled until they looked up and realized the missing colleagues were no longer at their desks.

We then saw the need to explicitly signal your status online. When questions to one's partner were answered by random channel passers-by, we saw the power of "open by default" in a public room. Our group was fortunate to have Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith and Design Team lead Mo Duffy present on having a good open source online presence—how to ask questions, how to find answers, and how to navigate a swarm of messages and find the signals threading through the noise.