[TOS] introducing an opensource related effort at Stanford

Luis Ibanez luis.ibanez at kitware.com
Thu Feb 16 18:02:14 UTC 2012


Hi Jay,


                                       Welcome to TOS !


You will find that this community has been quite busy creating materials
and running experiments in the past several years, and we are all very
eager to share.


Here is some information about the Open Source Software Practice
course that we have been doing at RPI since 2007:

                     http://www.opensourcesoftwarepractice.org/

We are now using Moodle as the course LMS:
https://www.opensourcesoftwarepractice.org/moodle/

and host additional information in a class Wiki:
http://public.kitware.com/OpenSourceSoftwarePractice/index.php/Spring2012/Main_Page

Course notes are available here:
http://public.kitware.com/OpenSourceSoftwarePractice/index.php/Spring2012/Course_notes

All of these materials are publicly available under
the Creative Commons by Attribution license.


In this class we cover:

* Economics / Peer-Production
* Copyright / Patents / Trademarks
* Licensing
* Open Source Business Models
* Software Quality Control
* Community Development
* Practical use of software tools
   (revision control, bug tracker, continuous integration...)

Many of these sessions are delivered by Kitware developers and managers,
based on their experience with Open Source toolkits and applications:
http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html

This makes the course to be a very down-to-earth experience.


Students also work in class projects with existing Open Source projects.

Last Fall and this Spring, students have been working with VistA, the EHR
of the Department of Veterans Affairs that is being open sourced in the run up
effort towards an unified iEHR system to be shared across the VA and DoD
medical centers.

http://www.osehra.org/
http://public.kitware.com/OpenSourceSoftwarePractice/index.php/Spring2012/Course_Project

There is plenty of room in this project to have students from other
universities.
We actually estimate that a community of about 6,000 new developers will be
needed in the next couple of years, just to properly sustain VistA. The large
majority of them should be college students.

More details here:
http://opensource.com/health/12/2/join-m-revolution

Just like the HFOSS initiatives, these are the kind of projects that provide
technical challenges to students as well as positive social involvement.



As an additional activity of the course, we have from time to time
invited speakers on campus.

This year we are lucky to have Richard Fontana, Counsel from Red Hat,
and David Wheeler, who as you may know, is a great advocate of the
adoption of open source in Government and Defense.




We are happy to share more details about the things that we have tried
in the class and about how good or bad, the outcome has been in every
case.


    Best,


         Luis



--

    Luis Ibanez, Ph.D.
    Technical Leader
    KITWARE Inc.
    luis.ibanez at kitware.com
    518-881-4912


----------------------------------------------------------------
On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Jay Borenstein
<borenstein at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I teach in the computer science department at Stanford. Of particular
> note, I teach a couple of senior and master's level project courses
> designed to expose students to "real world" software engineering
> experiences. This has been well received by students and industry
> alike.
>
> The above is good, but there is an even better model out there;
> specifically, I believe there is a opportunity to further improve the
> quality of the educational experience we are providing to our students
> while also creating an influx of positive contributions to open source
> projects. I'm very excited about this and that's what brings me to
> join this list.
>
> Realistically, I expect a great deal of execution pain around making
> this happen.  But, I think the potential payoff is so good for society
> that I remain very motivated.
>
> Current status: The first small step being taken is a project team
> from one of my existing project classes is working on an existing open
> source project this year rather a typical industry collaboration.
> This has necessitated the grafting of curriculum typically used for
> industry collaborations to something that fits an open source project
> model. We are learning a ton about what is needed to make this work on
> a bigger scale.
>
> In the long term, I'd like to see my project teams at Stanford
> collaborating not just with the open source project maintainers, but
> working in teams that incorporate students at other universities as
> well.  I think this will introduce all sorts of interesting new
> dimensions to the experience...But, that's a long way from here.
>
> For now, I'm pleased to virtually be a part of this group. I imagine
> and hope I will meet a number of you at SIGCSE in a few days. Please
> don't hesitate to reach out if this sounds interesting.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Jay
> --
> Jay Borenstein
> Stanford University
> Dept of Computer Science
> borenstein at cs.stanford.edu
> c: 650.776.6473
> _______________________________________________
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> tos at teachingopensource.org
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