Question: What educational resources and tools does the open source software community use to help people learn and know about open source software projects?
This type of learning is usually self-directed by individuals. This presents its own set of challenges, including finding out where and how to ask questions.
The open source community has well-developed terminology and cultural mores dealing with "newbies". Some sites specialize in interacting with them, such as the "KernelNewbies" website, and to a lesser extent the "Kernel Janitors" project. There are also established traditions, from the concept of "Netiquette" (online etiquette and the required enculturation of those new to technical online forums), through the tradition that developers are notoriously bad at documenting (and attempts at refuting this), to the old adage "Don't ask questions, post errors" (a very effective way of getting domain experts to provide the information you need; they often ignore questions but are quick to refute inaccurate information, although overuse of this technique can rapidly become annoying).
The primary documentation resource for the open source community is the Linux Documentation Project. It acts as a central clearinghouse for third party documentation efforts, and it has a newsletter. It even includes documentation on how to write documentation. There are several established, traditional forms of documentation specific to this culture, including the HOWTO, the FAQ (Frequenty Asked Questions), the README, and expected home page formats and features for project websites. Documentation also comes in different flavors: the difference between a reference and a tutorial is quite important, as is the difference between technical documentation and end-user documentation.
Note: the premier open source project is the Linux operating system, and other projects often get discussed in the context of that project. Due to the freely redistributable commodity nature of open source software, anything that can be used with the Linux operating system tends to get bundled and distributed along with it. Thus many "Linux" sites actually have a significantly wider scope than the community's flagship operating system project.
The primary print journal of the open source community is "Linux Journal". The primary online journals include Slashdot, Linux Weekly News, and Linux Today, all of which have an editorial staff approving external contributions and use a live peer review mechanism allowing user comments to be attached to the articles. (Slashdot's moderation system also allows users to rank the comments, although not the articles.) Each is searchable.
The nature of most online publications like Slashdot is closer to a "clipping service" than a peer reviewed editorial journal. Their primary function is to provide brief summaries of interesting topics, with links to further reading, and a forum for the site's users to discuss the article in question. Some websites exist entirely to condense detailed technical discussions into a more concise, easily understood form. The "Kernel Traffic" summaries are a good example of this. Some sites which primarily produce their own content also include a clipping service feature, and some of their content involves condensed reports about things their clipping service provided links to. Linux Weekly News and KernelTrap would be examples of this.
The primary conferences (which publish conference proceedings) include Ottawa Linux Symposium, LinuxWorld Expo, LinuxTag in Germany, and (historically, now defunct) Atlanta Linux Showcase.
In-person interaction is the exception, most interaction is done online, through email mailing lists. End-user support and education is a subsidiary function of these mailing lists, subordinated to the primary task of coordinating the activites of experienced developers. This "sink or swim" approach can create signicant friction, but the fact that the most knowledgeable people spend their time in fora requiring the most knowledge to participate is not a new problem.
Some companies have stepped forward to offer training sessions, primarily for a corporate audience. Book publishers like O'Reilly publish technical books which are well respected. But these are generally seen as either introductory or supplemental: the majority of learning in this niche is self-directed, a perpetual ongoing process of running to keep up with the rapid pace of development. Online resources are both primary sources in this context and the most current source of up-to-date information.
I'm unaware of any analysis like this already having been done, despite the fact that at last count somewhere between 10 and 100 million people knowingly use and develop open source software around the globe. (And many more use it unknowingly, it not only powers the majority of the internet but it's embedded in an increasing number of retail electronic devices). Most of these tools and techniques were developed in an ad-hoc fashion, and learning to use them is still a challenge in and of itself.
I'm not quite a domain expert in this area, but I'm as close as you're likely to find who is interested in doing this kind of research and analysis.
The primary audiences are the authors and recipients of the educational resources being covered. (These groups overlap significantly, often in slightly differing contexts. A given individual must both learn what others know and communicate what they themselves know in order to function.)
The secondary audience is professional educators studying different educational contexts. The distributed, individually self-directed open source model is very different from traditional cirriculum-driven study, but has some common features.
This paper aims primarily at documenting and to a lesser extent analysing the status quo in the knowing and learning associated with open source software development. It does not aim at making recommendations for changes. Mostly, I'm focusing on the process by which the users and developers of open source software come up to speed with it today.