Week 1 Shift: Induction

Accounts, project choice, and the undertaking you sign before this course lets you near anybody else's community

22 February 2027

Two hours, most of it admin, and the admin is the point: you are about to be turned loose on communities of real people who did not consent to being coursework.

Before the Shift#

Read the policies page in full, particularly the contributor undertaking. It is short and it is binding.

In the Shift#

Create your account. Use a name you are willing to keep — your contribution history is public, permanent and attached to it, and a throwaway handle signals exactly what you think of the people reading it.

Choose your home project from the four we support: English Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, a subreddit of your choosing with more than 10,000 subscribers, or an open-source repository with a published contributing guide. You will stay with it until week 12. Declare it and say in two sentences why — “it was the easiest” is an acceptable answer if it is the true one.

Then find the public record: the modlog, the deletion log, the recent-changes feed, the closed pull requests. Every remaining week of this course depends on you being able to read what a community has already refused.

Afterwards#

You leave with a signed undertaking, a declared project, and nothing edited. Editing is week 3. The two weeks in between are on purpose.