To Ken's question of whether we would welcome the participation of RPI faculty or students in the Bedework project, the answer is a resounding “yes”. There are some barriers to participation, which I will address, but one of aspects of community we were looking to address with Bedework was reconnecting with our own local community at RPI.
As an administrative unit with responsibilities for running centralized services, we do not provide direct end user support. Consequently it is sometimes difficult to feel connected with the academic life of the university. We seek appropriate opportunities to work with students, such as on Bedework, as it draws us back in to the primary mission of the university. Working with students has been a very positive experience for us.
Impediments to wider academic participation in Bedework include administrative policies with respect to funding of graduate students, as well as a university wide effort to provide additional opportunities for undergraduates to participate in faculty research programs, which are for credit.
In some respects our project might be less appealing to students than some other opportunities on campus. Bedework is an enterprise calendaring system in the J2EE environment. It is a little harder to make a contribution immediately in this environment than perhaps with a desktop application, for example.
There are other programming opportunities on campus which are less constraining than working on Bedework. Bedework, exists, has an architecture, an implementation, and an implementation team already in place. The Rensselaer Center for Open Software (RCOS) ask student to propose their own projects, and essentially to manage their projects themselves. The Rensselaer Union, which is student run, and the student government also initiate sprogramming projects for students which are student managed. Some students work for companies in our incubator program (http://www.rpi.edu/dept/incubator/homepage/), and others program as part of their co-op assignments.
Last year we just missed the deadline (our “bad”) for Goggle's “Summer of Code”, which would have afforded us another opportunity to work with students, albeit not necessarily RPI students. We do have an undergraduate working with us now, for money, not academic credit, and we have been approached just recently by a graduate student who was interested in Bedework. As I noted previously, his participation would likely be informal.
As I reflect on our current situation, I think it is possible that we might have been more successful bringing people from our own campus into the project had we concentrated less on trying to build an external community for Bedework.
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