> > 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. > > That's a great idea! I certainly don't want to suggest that practice isn't central. But I know that reading up on FOSS in school prepared me well for my work in practice. Meanwhile, the literature has been moving forward since I was reading it; maybe the feedback loop will better inform the next generation. I like your way of synthesizing them.
> 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. > That's a great point. > 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? > I see your point here, and I don't disagree in principle. But for more context: I think most of these students anticipate going into product management or UX design, rather than engineering (though that's not the case for all of them; really, I should probably ask around to get a better idea of who wants to participate.) Some of them have already started working on an open source project, a browser-based e-book reader. So they may have expectations for something where the user interface has a lot of visibility, and they can take a lot of ownership over the 'product' design. I'm curious what sort of participation your students have had in the projects you are talking about. I guess I'm assuming it's standard ticket work--get an issue, write patch, push. Do the students get involved in the higher-level design decisions? I've found that's where some of the richer tensions of FOSS development are, but those can be very educational. (For example: "which available open source tool should we try to build this functionality on top of?" raises a lot of critical questions about the strength of community and place in the overall ecosystem, which you might not get when focused within a project.) 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. > I think you are 100% correct on this, knowing from painful experience with my own abandon-ware. My best gambit on this, if I were to go through with it (and you are all certainly making me reconsider!) is to try to get the new project to be something that could be something usable by faculty here for research, or as a foundation for future Masters' projects (they are required to come up with a final project). Two projects that have come up are a pluggable mailing list framework that could be used for running experiments on web community formation and UI (e.g., could make a plugin that tracks +1/-1 and provides a visualization for threads), or a platform for building web-based behavioral experiments based on game theory. In either case I imagine we'd build from a lot of existing open components, and face design decisions about when to contribute back to core libraries and when to focus on the app. Karsten's point on forking and pull requesting on GitHub is certainly relevant here. Long story short, I'm aware of the problems with abandonware, and wouldn't want to start a new project without a plan for sustainability. Though that's of course a really tricky question and by no means guaranteed success. But I'd like to give the students an opportunity to grapple with the questions about their own projects' sustainability. Maybe that's too ambitious though. > 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. > Precisely that. Some communities are more responsive than others to patches and external involvement. If the students are going to be participating directly, I'd want to be sure the community could handle it. I guess you've got projects in mind that are welcoming of students, and I shouldn't worry. Thanks for that. > 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. > All of that's fair. Perhaps it's hubristic of me to think that I and other FOSS developers I'd invite to speak in would be able to provide that experienced view as teachers. I'm ambivalent about the trade-off between learning open source practices and project development though. I guess I'm of the opinion that the social education learned in the crucible of community formation are as valuable as the technical ones. Speaking of social education, another issue on my mind is gender representation within the project. It's well known the ratio is bad in most software projects, but I'm wondering if I can get my class to be more balanced. I wonder what would happen if a new project were to form with balance representation, self-governing from the start? I might as well be open about my own ideological orientation here, which holds the self-governance of an open source community as really critical to what makes it special. I don't expect that to be a popular opinion in this community, and I wouldn't want it to get in the way of the education of the students, but there it is. > 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. > Thanks for these suggestions! They are very helpful. I know some of the students in this program are interested in microfinance in particular and so I'll look into that one especially. Thank you for engaging me on this; your remarks show deep insight and are very helpful. Please don't take my pushback as ingratitude--I'm listening very carefully. > 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-software-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-productand-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-successful(with > video), > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/78991/why-is-github-more-popular-than-gitorious, > 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 > > > _______________________________________________ > tos mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos > >
_______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
