[TOS] Fw: [Posse-south-africa] Sakai: 5 minutes of "experienced FOSS hacker, new project contributor" deep-diving

Gregory Hislop hislopg at drexel.edu
Fri Oct 8 16:46:37 UTC 2010


Hi Mel - 

Hope you're refreshed by time you read this!

Your post a really useful piece.  I can use it in class this term.  

I've taken to surveying my students about tool knowledge and I'm finding lots of holes in what they know.  For instance, almost none of them use IRC or know much about it.  And I saw that same gap at the Grace Hopper conference last week - Leslie Hawthorne asked a few tool questions (Do you use/know tool X?) at the start of a panel we did and very few hands went up for IRC.  So I have students developing small "getting started" notes for various tools (and we'll be posting them on SoftHum).  But this piece would be great to have them read as a scenario to deepen understanding of how those tools fit into everyday work in FOSS.

I've also developed a few "FOSS Field trip" assignments to have students observe/analyze FOSS projects.  This would provide a nice script for that sort of exercise too.

Cheers,

Greg Hislop

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Jan Wildeboer
Sent: Friday, October 08, 2010 12:09 PM
To: tos at teachingopensource.org
Subject: [TOS] Fw: [Posse-south-africa] Sakai: 5 minutes of "experienced FOSS hacker, new project contributor" deep-diving

Forwarding as requested by mel

Jan

----- Original Message -----
From: posse-south-africa-bounces at teachingopensource.org 
<posse-south-africa-bounces at teachingopensource.org>
To: Posse-south-africa at teachingopensource.org 
<Posse-south-africa at teachingopensource.org>; kwade at redhat.com 
<kwade at redhat.com>; mspevack at redhat.com <mspevack at redhat.com>
Sent: Fri Oct 08 12:07:18 2010
Subject: [Posse-south-africa] Sakai: 5 minutes of "experienced FOSS hacker, 
new project contributor" deep-diving

(I can't reach my RH email, so if someone could forward this to
tos at teachingopensource.org so it hits the main list, that would be great!)

I got bored while waiting for my flight out of Cape Town (to London, where
I have a lovely layover until 4am in my target timezone of EDT... I'm going
to have such awful jetlag when I get back) so I wrote up our 5-minute
improvised deep-dive from the final day of POSSE South Africa this morning,
complete with screenshots.

http://blog.melchua.com/2010/10/08/possesa-fri-5-minutes-of-improvisation/

"Today was our final day: as part of this, Tayo asked me during a coffee
break how I (as an experienced contributor) would get started with an
unfamiliar project. We called the now-caffeinated professors together,
threw my laptop on the projector, had Grant set a countdown timer for 5
minutes, and called out for a random project. “Sakai!” called Boniface.
“That’s… an open source project somehow related to education, and… that’s…
all I know about it!” I responded, and we all agreed these waters were
sufficiently unfamiliar to me to be a fair test."

Karsten, Chris, Mary, others - might someone want to turn this into an
osdc/edu article? I'm on a plane and sleeping off jetlag 'till Tuesday, at
least... need sleep/rest pretty badly at this point, but trying to pump out
content as I can.

Comments welcome; the objective of this exercise was to show a “think out
loud” from an experienced FOSS contributor, with the caveat that every
contributor thinks differently, and that every contributor comes up with
their own way of doing things as they go along.

--Mel
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