Extending the initiatives promoted by the Free/Libre/Open-Source Software Special Interest Group (FLOSS SIG), this organization will actively engage the open source community in a sustained relationship and help extend the movement's ethos in a variety of ways:

• making suggestions for the future development of open source software and services;
• offering rhetorical, analytical, and other nontechnical advice and support;
• describing how we use open source tools in our classrooms and scholarship;
• committing to an ongoing, long-term partnership with the open source community.

OSAAC argues that teachers and scholars of writing need to move beyond...

being passive users of open source products and actively engage the open source community.

If we remain passive users, our use of open source products risks being exploitive--that is, we take from the community without returning anything of value to it. Despite our collective lack of technical skill in programming, as a field we possess a range of experiences, expertises, and points of view that are of value to the open source community. Among the things we have to offer are:

• an understanding of audience and its importance to design and writing;
• expertise in composing technical manuals, white papers, documentation, etc.;
• expertise in composing promotional and public relations materials.

Working with the open source community holds great promise for students. Beyond giving them real world experience in composing a range of documents, exposure to the open source community's ethos of collaboration and its citation/documentation practices dovetail with the kinds of attitudes towards writing and intellectual work that teachers and scholars of writing advocate. We feel that engagement with the open source community can give students a deeper understanding of what it means to collaborate with others and to engage with a diversity of intellectual perspectives in a respectful and productive manner. We thus propose that the Consortium develop a set of guidelines for assigning course projects that require students to work with the open source community.