Hi Sebastian,
On 03/09/2013 11:23 PM, Sebastian Benthall wrote:
I'm a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information
<http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/> and have been getting encouragement
here to teach a course on open source development targeted at students
in our Masters program.
That's great!
There are a few other Masters programs I know of that you might be able
to leverage (links below).
Our Masters students come from a variety of backgrounds and are required
to pick up some coding skills during the program (though some come in
with more engineering background). It's a professional degree that
culminates in a technical project. Often the emphasis of these projects
is on design, but many of the students have expressed frustration at not
having more of an opportunity to hack with constructive supervision.
I'm coming from a background of FOSS development, project management,
and business, but have never taught a course on this before. I wanted
to send out my rough ideas for a course proposal and invite any feedback
of any kind on it.
I'd be really interested to see any currently existing course syllabi or
material, but am not sure where to look.
The three axes of open source development are:
1. Tools and processes - things you don't learn very much in college,
like patch review, bug trackers, version control, mailing list best
practices, which are basic pre-requisites for participating in an open
source community
2. Communication - The human issues related to co-operation,
negotiating, governance, communicating well in written English - a skill
which is unfortunately undervalued in computer science degrees, in my
experience
3. Technical competency - Perhaps the least important of the three, but
there's a basic level of skill which is related to what you do learn as
an undergrad - understanding design patterns and principles, being
comfortable in both procedural and object oriented code, understanding
the syntax of a number of languages, and being comfortable in the
technical documentation for any given computer language, even if you are
not fluent in the language.
Those Masters programs I mentioned are:
Masters in Libre Software:
http://docencia.etsit.urjc.es/moodle/course/category.php?id=22
Masters in free software engineering:
http://dpt-info.univ-littoral.fr/mediawiki/index.php/I2L:Accueil
Good luck with the course! The outline you have below certainly gives
you the opportunity to address all of these subjects.
*Summary:*
This course is a hands-on exploration of the theory and practice of free
and open source software (FOSS) development. Students will collaborate
on the design, development, and marketing of a new open source software
project. Practical work will be organized around themes of project
management infrastructure, community self-governance, and engineering
education through open source participation. Supplemental readings will
explore business models for open source software organizations, the open
source "ecosystem", and hacker culture. The (admitted ambitious) goal
of the class is to launch a broadly usable open source project that can
be used as part of iSchool Masters projects, faculty-directed research,
and beyond.
[There's going to be a lot of prep work on my end figuring out what a
plausible project for this might be. I'm thinking something along the
lines of a lightweight pluggable mailing list solution, but I'm open to
other ideas...]
*Format*:
The class will meet twice a week: Once in a classroom to discuss
readings, and once in an IRC channel to discuss progress on development.
*Grading*:
Grading will be based on X% class participation, Y% on open digital
participation (blog posts, issues, mailing list participation, commits)
and Z% on student's assessment of their peers [according to some
algorithm I've haven't put enough thought into yet].
*Readings and Topics:
*
for everything practical and then some:
Fogel, K. /Producing Open Source Software/
what else?
Karl's book is the ultimate reference for most of this.
Some related reading:
* Team Geek
* The Art of Community
* Open Advice
governance:
Freeman, J. The "Tyrrany of Structurelessness"
Ostrom, E. /Governing the Commons /(/?? haven't read yet, looks good.
I'm thinking excerpts)
You might like "The Starfish and the Spider" (although many projects are
more spider than starfish).
/business models:
Pentaho's Beekeeper stuff:
http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/BEEKEEPER/The+Beekeeper
Asay, M. something by him like
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10244853-16.html
-- stuff about Red Hat?
-- stuff about Twitter, GitHub?
-- stuff about Mozilla?
Stephen Walli's blog "Once more into the breach" is an excellent
reference for open source business model thinking.
classical (?) texts:
RMS. Something. Or maybe just stuff from here;
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
ESR. /The Cathedral and the Bazaar/
culture:
Coleman, G. something?
Kelty, C. /Two Bits/. (excerpts)
You might also like to add
http://oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/index.html as "additional
reading"
international participation:
Tahkteyev, Y. /Coding places/. (excepts)
something on gender in open source?
Good luck!
Dave.
--
Dave Neary, Lyon, France
Email: [email protected]
Jabber: [email protected]
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