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

Mon Mar 18 20:51:44 UTC 2013

Let me start by saying this is a great conversation. I take all of your
comments in the spirit of exploring the space and I definitely don't see
anything that you've said as "push back". I am very much enjoying hearing
your thoughts and opinions and trying to understand your audience. 

+1 to what Mel said. Good thoughts! And working with Terri Oda would be
super. She has all sorts of enthusiasm and Mailman is a great project. 

As for the type of participation, my students have made code contributions
as well as adding to documentation and design docs. So they haven't been
involved in actually _making_ design decisions, but they've been the
recipients of others' decisions. For instance, they were working on
accessibility plug-ins for the Epiphany browser. But just as we started, the
Epiphany group decided that they were changing the architecture and were no
longer using plug-ins. That decision was a discussion point throughout the
semester. 

And because students were a part of the community, they got the "which
available open source tool should we try to build this functionality on top
of?" discussion via listserv and IRC discussions. So they weren't
participating in making the decisions (didn't know enough :-)), but they
were watching the discussions unfold. And I think that your grad students
would "get" more of what was going on than my undergrads. 

...
> 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 

> 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 think this is an interesting idea. My only suggestion there would be to
see if somehow connections to female members of FOSS project could be
incorporated. I'm thinking of creating a pipeline of more female
contributors and having contacts in FOSS projects would provide support
after the class ends. 

> 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.

Oh, I think that the self-governance, and in particular the meritocratic
approach is really important for students. I have used it to advantage in
classes. I also note that it can be a difficult balance to incorporate into
the classroom as it can be hard to align classroom deliverables with
items/facets that are valued by the FOSS community. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-
> bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Mel Chua
> Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2013 8:39 PM
> To: Discussions about Teaching Open Source
> Subject: Re: [TOS] looking for feedback on ideas for an open source
> development course
> 
> (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
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