Hi Folks, Seb, I do want to encourage you as you take on this course. I think you're doing a great job at thinking through the issues and how to fit the course to your student body. A few thoughts...
>The first is about the trade-off between assigning readings and practical >experience. What I'm hearing is a preference in this community towards practice, >which makes sense. But I think that these students--Masters students in an >interdisciplinary professional school--might be different from the undergraduate >computer scientists that similar courses are targeted at. These students will >have already been exposed to a lot of social science about IT, and are primarily >interested in getting interesting jobs coming out the program. IMHO, students at all levels will learn the culture more thoroughly by participating rather than observing. I taught working professionals for 11 years and have found that so. The academic in me applauds the use of reading to create a foundation. And then you could let students learn about how the theory in the readings is applied in the real world. Let them ask questions of the community about the theory and how it works. This should really enrich the discussion of the assigned readings. As for getting jobs, a student that has made a contribution, however small, to a large, ongoing, recognized project such as OpenMRS or Mozilla, will likely be welcomed more strongly than the student who went out and started their own project. The former demonstrates that a student can join and successfully operate in a large complex organization and make a valued contribution. The latter indicates that a student can develop a project. In addition, students may find jobs via their networking in the FOSS project. The FOSS projects frequently have a large number of professional developers in their ranks who can serve as resources and references. >Another thing I'm hearing is that contributing to an existing project is >preferable to starting a new one. That makes a lot of sense. But I also know >that what will excite these students is the development of some kind of usable >application that they can use in their portfolios. Students can be very excited by contributing to an existing project. Student projects typically only achieve prototype phase within a semester. But contributing to an ongoing project makes an already usable product more usable. I'm not sure how contributing to an existing FOSS project wouldn't be a usable application that they can use in their portfolios. Many students include a link to GitHub that shows their commits to one or more FOSS projects. Perhaps I don't fully understand? In addition, I note that creating a project for the sake of creating a project frequently leads to abandonware. Better that students have a contribution that they can refer to years in the future, a contribution to a still-active project. Many to most student-developed projects, even at the Master's level, end up dying, frequently because they don't have a defined customer or because there is no one to maintain the project after the end of the term. The exception to this would be if the project addresses a clear and outstanding need and has community to help maintain it. Just my opinions from the trenches. Heidi >I want to give them the >opportunity to build towards that. And while I see the point about how it's best >to learn from an existing community, I wonder if a project where everything needs >to be pushed back through an already large community would prevent them from >moving as swiftly as they'd like. Any advice on the kinds of projects that it's >appropriate to get students to work on? What I'm wondering now is if I can find a >way to frame the project so that there are real decisions to be made about what >gets pushed upstream and what makes it into the application. That would square >with my experience of trying to build new open source products, at least. I'm not sure what you mean by "moving as swiftly as they'd like". There certainly are a few bottlenecks in FOSS development, but these really are few. Mainly getting the committer to commit changes. Other than that, students can work as fast or as slow as they'd like. >What I had in mind with the idea of starting a new project was partly also as a >way to show why open source practices are the way they are. I mean, almost >immediately if people start developing they are going to run into the kinds of >problems that open source best practices are designed to solve. I guess I'd argue >that facing those problems and adopting norms to solve them is a very different >kind of experience than learning a set of practices from an existing >community. In the former case, the norms are real solutions, in the latter case >they may seem arbitrary. I agree that having students encounter the problems themselves will provide valuable experience. My worry is that without having the support of an experienced FOSS community, students may be overly frustrated. I would consider it better to have experienced folks to provide insight into solutions and alternatives to problems. In addition, it takes time to establish those open source practices within a project, perhaps delaying actual project development. >Admittedly what I'm drawing from here is experience being thrown into the deep-end >on building out new projects and interfacing with several smaller, idiosyncratic >projects. I wonder if this is a different open source experience from, say, the >experience of working with Linux. I'm very curious what projects you use for your >teaching, and how far out on the long tail of project sizes they are. I suggest working with a Humanitarian FOSS project. These groups tend to be very welcoming to students due to the projects' altruistic nature. I've worked with the GNOME Accessibility Team and they're a great group. Very welcoming of students. One benefit of working with the GNOME Accessibility Team is that they have a number of different projects with varying characteristics under the accessibility umbrella allowing students to select among a variety. Also OpenMRS (medical records systems), Mifos (microfinance), and Sahana (disaster management) are other viable options. On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 1:51 PM, carlsonp @iastate.edu <[email protected]> wrote: Some more references on gender in OSS (and STEM in general): Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer and Glott, Ruediger and Krieger, Bernhard and Robles, Gregorio, "Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study", University of Maastricht (2002), 69. Beede, David and Julian, Tiffany and Langdon, David and McKittrick, George and Khan, Beethika and Doms, Mark, "Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation" (2011). Nafus, Dawn and Leach, James and Krieger, Bernhard, "Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Policy Support" (2006), 1--75. Holliger, Andrea, "The Culture of Open Source Computing" (2007), 1--8. Powell, Whitney E. and Hunsinger, D. Scott and Medlin, B. Dawn, "Gender Differences Within the Open Source Community: An Exploratory Study", Journal of Information Technology Management XXI, 4 (2010), pp. 29--37. -Patrick Carlson On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Mel Chua <[email protected]> wrote: I'll make suggestions on the reading list from the following perspective: Seb, you've drunk the FOSS Kool-Aid in both Practice and Philosophy flavors for years (that's why it's such a joy to talk with you). Your students are likely to come in with a minimal and stereotypical view of FOSS, and little in the way of relevant experience to make sense of these readings with, so things that are vital and rich to you may be abstract and meaningless to them until they get hands-on dev experience in an *existing* community (+1 to that suggestion, btw -- it's hard to learn French without hearing fluent speakers in conversation with each other!). I'd think of all these readings as reflection prompts on their experiences in FOSS through the semester (the same way reading about Chinese culture makes a lot more sense after you've gone to China). Grading (mostly for you, not your students): * http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=680 * http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/OSD600#Grading for everything practical and then some: * Fogel, K. Producing Open Source Software (+1; Karl is revising this right now, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kfogel/updating-producing-open-source-so ftware-for-2nd-ed) * http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/TOS/Practical_Open_Source_Software_Exploration /html/ -- note that this *is* unmaintained and outdated (see recent threads on this list started by students interested in reviving work on the project -- editing/updating might be a good "learn to use mediawiki" assignment). governance: * Freeman, J. The "Tyrrany of Structurelessness" (on Seb's original list, but I haven't read it) * Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons (on Seb's original list, but I haven't read it) * The Starfish and the Spider (parts thereof; easy-read book) * http://hbr.org/2001/12/what-leaders-really-do/ar/1 (not FOSS-specific, but short and a good discussion-starter on the "ask forgiveness, not permission" FOSS mentality vs the "wait for orders" students are often conditioned into) * also consider: how important is this in the grand scheme of the course? are you trading-off the pragmatics of producing open source in exchange for more philosophy time? (The philosophy may not make sense until they have experience with the pragmatics.) business models: * Pentaho's Beekeeper stuff: http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/BEEKEEPER/The+Beekeeper (from Seb's original list, I haven't read) * Asay, M. something by him like http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10244853-16.html (from Seb's original list, I haven't read) * You asked for stuff about Red Hat: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/how-red-hat-killed-its-core-producta nd-became-a-billion-dollar-business/ is short and readable * You asked for Twitter/Github/Mozilla stuff: this might be a nice Github reading/media bundle -- http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/32530/is-the-github-business-model-s uccessful (with video), http://stackoverflow.com/questions/78991/why-is-github-more-popular-than-git orious, and http://erickerr.com/github-is-eating-the-world from a HR point of view. Twitter isn't FOSS, but comparing it with identi.ca may be interesting; Mozilla you'll need to ask someone else for reading suggestions on. * In general, http://opensource.com/business may be a nice "find something interesting to read from here" spot * But again, is there a tradeoff between reading this and *doing* FOSS work? classical (?) texts: * RMS. Something. Or maybe just stuff from here; http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ (I'd specifically have them read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) * ESR. The Cathedral and the Bazaar (personal opinion: important historical document, BUT long and dated and the opinionated views of a single person who is often not transparent about clarifying his biases/positionality -- I know you're aware that not everyone sees the world like esr does/did, but if you choose this make sure your students also grasp the multivocal and often contradictory nature of FOSS culture, lest they think CATB is the Voice of God.) * http://www.thelinuxdaily.com/2010/04/the-first-linux-announcement-from-linus -torvalds/ culture: * Coleman, G. -- I love Biella's writing, but I'm not sure if her work is applicable for the course you described -- it's beautiful anthropology, but your students as new FOSS hackers won't recognized themselves in it -- yet -- so it'll likely remain theoretical rather than illuminating to them. I could see the epilogue on p. 207 of http://gabriellacoleman.org/Coleman-Coding-Freedom.pdf being a good "multivocality" counterpart to esr. Otherwise, I'd save Biella's work for another class. * Kelty, C. Two Bits . (on Seb's original list, but I haven't read it) * http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/the-cost-of-collaboration-for-code-and-art ("is this true? if so, why do FOSS at all?") * I'd have them choose an active project Planet feed to monitor each week for N weeks, summarizing X blog posts (X=3? 1-3 sentences per summary?) each week for the first Y weeks * and/or the above with a mailing list. A good first-contribution for a few weeks is a weekly digest/summary of list activity sent back to the list, playing the journalist role in the community (public) while learning basic tools in the classroom (private) -- see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue296?rd=FWN/LatestIssue for an example. international participation: * Tahkteyev, Y. Coding places . (on Seb's original list, but I haven't read it) * You seem to use a lot of book-like/academic-paper readings as opposed to live/less-formal data, like http://fedoraproject.org/membership-map/ambassadors.html (constructed via https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_ambassadors_map; possible discussion-starter on the impossibility of accurately tracking FOSS contribution/usage) something on gender in open source? * again, although I care *deeply* about this topic, I'm not sure if it's going to be illuminating for students who don't already identify with the FOSS movement, and worry that if a female student's first exposure to FOSS is "there are no women!" before she *actually* gets into it, that could be off-putting. Also, it's just damn hard to discuss. But if you want to plunge in... * http://infotrope.net/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon-keynote/ (excellent first overview of the situation, plus see comments discussion) * http://www.etsy.com/hacker-grants (what do you think of this program as a response?) * https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen (or this?) * http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassment/Policy (or this?) Also, +1 to guests from the FOSS world coming to class -- not just to lecture, but to plunge in and review/hack/tinker/dialogue with students as they do their hacking in the lab. Exciting times. Good luck! --Mel _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
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