Red Hat kicks off first POSSE in APAC
ConvergenceAsia staff
10/11/2009

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has launched the first Asia Pacific Professional Open Source Software Experience (POSSE), a boot camp for lecturers teaching open source courses in institutes of higher learning.

Held at Nanyang Polytechnic from 9 to 13 November 2009, POSSE is designed to immerse the lecturers in the global open source community and in real world open source development projects.
|
The boot camp, which has attracted over 20 open source lecturers from across the Asia Pacific region, is part of Red Hat’s Asia Pacific Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI) initiative to build vibrant open source communities for collaborative innovation.

Within the first year, Red Hat aims to offer training to up to 60 educational institutions across the region, through localised POSSE sessions in each country, and POSSE is one way of giving educators practical experience in open source communities and empowering them to bring the open source way to their classrooms and students.
Gery Messer, President of Red Hat Asia Pacific/Japan, said POSSE will provide an immersive environment for the lecturers to experience the power of collaboration, community and shared knowledge that is fundamental to open source.

“The long term goal is for the lecturers to bring their real-world experience into the classroom and to encourage their students to participate in actual community-based, open source development projects,” he added.

The programme includes intense participation in the Fedora project led by open source experts. The inaugural POSSE focused on participation in both the Mozilla Firefox and Fedora Project communities, led by open source experts with direct experience in those two groups.

POSSE was introduced in the United States in July 2009 and is known as Professors Open Source Summer Experience. To learn more about POSSE, visit http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE.

advertisement