This was an interesting semester. This was the first complete semester that Kyle Smith and I were the Student Directors of COSI, and so there was definitely an adjustment element to the semester. Overall, I think we succeeded in two main areas:
The first action Kyle and I took was to dissolve the team structure COSI had. Although the teams were very helpful to use to divide up work and keep members busy, they did not seem to promote new ideas. We went in favor of the project based system that COSI started with and hope to see many new projects form in the future. This semsester was very internally focused, so much of the growth we could have seen can be attributed to that.
Kyle and I tried to take steps to ensure the future of COSI. Early on, we picked up the work that Steve and Bryan started in writing grant proposals to different areas of IBM in order to provide COSI with a long term goal as well as short term hardware. Several of those proposals are still in the works and we hope to see them come to fruition before we leave.
We also started putting in place standards for those taking COSI for credit. Previously there was no set structure in terms of what was required for students -- it was more of an "arbitrary" grade given by the general consensus of Jeanna and the Directors. We required all students taking COSI for credit to journal their progress in a weblog (courtesy of Bryan) so that we would be able to keep up with their day to day progress. This helped immensely in giving us a snapshot of what people were working on.
Kyle and I also set up bi-weekly (which moved to weekly) COSI workdays on the weekends to give members a forum in which to work. We would guarantee that we would be in the lab and available for questions, and it gave us a good time to ge together and work face to face outside of the meetings we held. This was a very positive improvement as we saw good attendence for the majority of the semester.
The first direction we took COSI in initially was to get to work on revamping our current infastructure. The website and our other web services were in need of repair and updating, and so we took the time to do both. The website was totally redone and content rewritten. Kyle focused on the design, while I focused in rewriting the content.
After this was completed, I took the time to make our file mirror (available at mirror.clarkson.edu) an offical Gentoo and Fedora mirror, as well as provide a more updated mirroring experience. In the three months that we have been official, we have been responsible for over 4TB of traffic off-campus. Toward the end of the semester, we began to talk to Gnome about mirroring their files as well.
We also ran a set of workshops in order to write scripts that automatically backup our server machines to increase redundency. All our machines are now backing themselves up monthly and a DVD is automatically burned with the data.
COSI started running "bimonthly" (it was the goal, but we didn't always meet it) workshops to teach others about open source. A Fedora install tutorial was very popular -- it was requested twice. We also ran a workshop on system backup and wanted to do a "moving to Linux" tutorial.
Originally we had planned to run another workshop for IT professionals (similar to what was run in Spring 2003), but due to some communication problems we were unable to get everything together in time. We plan on holding the workshop next fall on the topics that they have requested.