The Academy is a Catalyst initiative designed to provide training and work experience for young New Zealand technologists. The next Academy will be in January 2014.
What they are saying...
"The Academy can be summarised by two words: impressive and astounding"
The Catalyst Open Source Academy gives secondary school students a taste of real open source development through a combination of classroom sessions and hands-on project work. The aim is to get Academy students quickly to the point where they can usefully contribute to a real open source project. For example, previous Academy participants wrote unit tests for the Koha project, contributing to the overall quality of the popular open source library management system.
The Open Source Academy has been running annually since 2011. We are now in the planning stages for the 4th Academy in January 2014.
By organising and funding the Academy, Catalyst hopes to show young technologists how to participate in open source communities and to fully explore their passion for IT through freely available open source tools. We also hope to attract more talented New Zealanders into the IT profession generally, and particularly to meet the growing demand for open source technology across the public and private sectors, both here in New Zealand and internationally.
For more information and to express interest in participating, please send an email to academy@catalyst.net.nz.
Resources
Media statement announcing launch of the Academy, December 2010 [PDF 82 KB]
"School's in for open source advocates", Computerworld, 10 January 2011
Catalyst Open Source Academy in full swing
New software contributors through the Catalyst Open Source Academy
The Catalyst Open Source Academy was discussed in "New technology with Sarah Putt" in Nine to Noon Radio NZ on 26 January 2012 (at minute 14:20)
"Forget the beach, let's learn about coding", Interface Magazine, Issue 37, February 2012
"School's in for summer", Interface Magazine, Issue 45, February 2013