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

[Mel Chua]

(Trimming email for length -- these messages are getting quite long and
sending me "please moderate! files too large!" notices)

> context: I think most of these students anticipate going into product
>  management or UX design, rather than engineering... 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.

Matt Jadud may be able to speak to this more -- he taught a UI class 
where the students worked on Getting Things Gnome: 
http://twotentesting.wordpress.com/

FOSS projects are HUNGRY HUNGRY HIPPOES for UI/usability work, in my 
experience. Mo Duffy and the Fedora Design Team 
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Design) may have some thoughts if you 
pop into #fedora-design on freenode (Mo's nick is mizmo, if you haven't 
yet met her).

Also, last time I checked, Terri Oda desperately wanted people to 
redesign Mailman's awful awful interface 
(http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/devs.html).

Fedora and Mailman are two large, high-impact, "your work will be used 
daily by hundreds of thousands of people" projects where you could 
likely find good projects that blend front-facing design with 
code-writin' and patch-submittin'.

> 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.

If you think you could pull this off by instrumenting mailman, 
definitely talk with Terri (terriko on freenode). It would be frickin' 
awesome to look at web community formation by using data from existing 
FOSS projects (and if you do, CAN HAZ COAUTHOR PING PLZ 'cause I'd 
*love* to work with you on this). Dave Neary pointed the list to 
http://libresoft.es/research/projects/flossmetrics earlier (an open 
source project from the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid) which may 
be another interesting starting point.

Anyhoo, point being -- even with these ideas, you *can* (and I would 
personally say "should") build on existing work by an existing community 
that will maintain it after students graduate.

> 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.

They'll need to grapple with this even if they work on an existing 
project -- it's the sustainability of their patch/plugin/etc. It's all 
about "how do I make my code live on beyond me?"

> 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.

Aye, that's why you really want to audition communities beforehand (now 
is good timing), as you've intuited. More info in the paper "How to 
involve students in FOSS projects" (which we really should make open 
access -- but you'll have access from Berkeley), 
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6142994

> 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.

+1 to that, btw.

> 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?

Dreamwidth makes a pretty good case study for this. :) I'm glad you're 
thinking about gender representation as an issue to tackle -- I was just 
told at PyCon that the Ada Initiative will be releasing some "tiny 
challenges" on this topic soon... haven't seen them, but they might make 
interesting activities for your students to do?

I like that the question you're asking seems to be not "how do we drag 
more women into FOSS environments??!?!" but "how do we make FOSS 
projects into environments a gender-balanced population will feel safe 
in and drawn to?" Making things better for women == making things better 
for human beings; a lot of quiet guys, less-bold white folks, etc. are 
equally excluded by some aspects of FOSS culture, and I wonder what the 
people in your class will be like.

> 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.

For the record, I (think I) agree with you (based on reading the above 
statement and from having talked with you a bunch about this stuff 
before off-list).

> 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.

This is an awesome convo. Thanks for kicking it off, Seb. I especially 
loved your last few sentences (above) and wanted to point out that this 
is a good FOSS-culture lesson to specifically teach your students -- the 
pushback (from both sides) is a sign of caring. :)

Which reminds me... if there's a way for us to watch your class next 
semester (if you'll have a blog/website/Planet/etc for it, or will be in 
a particular project's IRC channel, etc) I'm pretty sure folks here 
would love to know -- I know I would.

--Mel