[Fsedu-developers] The FSA philosophy

[Peter Minten]

Hi folks.

In an ordinary school there is a two level model with on the upper level the
teachers and on the lower half the students. The teachers tell the students what
they should know, give lessons, answer a few questions and review tests. This
model works pretty well if the students aren't interested in actually learning
the Art but only in making money, since it doesn't really require them to think
more than is necessary to become a business drone. The evolution of education
goes very slow in this model though due to the lack of true bi-directional
communication. Of course schools try to get some feedback through
questionnaires, but that's only a few statistics, not really helpful.

While the ordinary school model may work for ordinary students it sucks for
those that seek to learn the Art instead of just how to be a software engineer,
in other words hackers won't like it (I define hacker here as somebody with the
hacker mindset, no technical skills required). The FSA is a hackers academy, so
it won't use the standard cathedral (in a cathedral one speaks, the other
listen) approach. Instead it will take a bazaar approach (I assume everybody
understands 'the Cathedral and the Bazaar' terminology :-). However it will not
follow the standard benevolent dictator pragma that has evolved out of the
Bazaar, because customs have made the dictator far too powerful (forking is
regarded almost as a crime).

Chaos is self-ordening. I believe that when the infrastructure project (Forum)
is running the academy will organize itself. This is possible because of the
power of RDF to create webs. The FSA forum will be a special kind of forum in a
way that it stores all metainformation directly in the Forum database (note that
thanks to the agents design of GNU.RDF it will be possible to keep some data
invisible to unauthorized users). Since most of the metainformation will be
modifiable by all FSA forumapps the system will be hugely flexible.

But enough technical stuff, this mail is about the philosophy of the FSA. I
believe there are no teachers and there are no students. There are just hackers
which different skill levels in different areas. There are also no
super-teachers, rectors or whatever you call them. Everybody is equal.

If there are no teachers how will people learn? By teaching eachother and by
working together to create learning materials (like textbooks). 

If there are no teachers how can you get or fail a grade? By peer rating. It's
possible to keep a precise account of all the patches, comments, etc somebody
has contributed and how others rate them. Based on that information it's
possible to get a pretty sharp view of the skills of a person.

If there are no teachers who is going to be in charge? Nobody, yet everybody.
Imagine a book being like a tree, somewhere there is the start, which is the
root of the tree, then different branches develop. One book will probably go in
one direction, but it can be branched (forked) and that's a Good Thing. Part of
the FSA philosophy is that branching is not bad, it allows many different things
to be developed out of one root.

The FSA will offer space for books and patches to a book, which is not 'owned'
by anybody in particular, unlike savannah space. The same thing with wiki pages.
Thus it's impossible to create a strong central authority on the technical
level. Also the RDF web allows finding revisions of a book even if they are in a
not-so-common branch.

The FSA will offer space for programs under the same system as books (doesn't
differ much technically). However the search facilities for programs will be
even better than for books. Using the technology developed in the Introspector
project all programs will be open books for everybody.

In conclusion the FSA will carry out and implement the Hacker ideals as pure as
possible, without unnecessary constraints.

Greetings,

Peter