[TOS] looking for feedback on ideas for an open source development course

Luis Ibanez luis.ibanez at kitware.com
Sat Mar 9 22:56:24 UTC 2013


Sebastien,

Congratulation on your new course.

You are welcome to take a look at our class at Rensselaer Polytechnic

https://www.opensourcesoftwarepractice.org/

The Moodle site is here
https://www.opensourcesoftwarepractice.org/moodle/course/view.php?id=4

and the Wiki is here
http://public.kitware.com/OpenSourceSoftwarePractice/index.php/Fall2012/Main_Page

The course notes are here
http://public.kitware.com/OpenSourceSoftwarePractice/index.php/Fall2012/Course_notes

You are more than welcome to take anything that you find
useful or interesting. Please feel free to copy and remix.


We will be teaching a similar course at SUNY-Albany in the Fall.


    Best,

        Luis



----------------------------------------------
On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 5:23 PM, Sebastian Benthall <sbenthall at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I'm a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information and have been
> getting encouragement here to teach a course on open source development
> targeted at students in our Masters program.
>
> 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.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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?
>
> governance:
> Freeman, J. The "Tyrrany of Structurelessness"
> Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons (?? haven't read yet, looks good.  I'm
> thinking excerpts)
>
> 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?
>
> 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)
>
> international participation:
> Tahkteyev, Y. Coding places. (excepts)
>
> something on gender in open source?
>
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