(I'm pulling out one section of the thread for a moment, but hope
discussion continues on the other ideas brought up as well.)
>> I'd love to get a marketing class working on this - actually, I
>> would love to see a case study (see
>> http://www.hbs.edu/mba/academics/casemethod.html) on Fedora.
>
> What would be really interesting is feeding back the process for
> meeting this goal into a discovery of what worked to captivate and
> motivate college students to follow through with a contribution.
> Maybe that's what you mean by the case method? It's hard to tell from
> the page in question, it's a bit vague but I'm guessing you have some
> experience with or knowledge about the method yourself.
What I think you're talking about is a case study - documenting what we
do as a way to make it easier for others to follow. I think we should be
a case study of how open source projects can interact with the case
method of teaching, which is a particular thing.
Think of a case as... an .rpm for curricular content for MBAs. It's a
format and delivery mechanism schools are used to. (Someone who actually
has an MBA may want to step in and correct me at this point.)
Here's the interesting opportunity: these cases are written about
companies - there are no cases (yet!) about communities doing many of
the same things The Open Source Way.