[TOS] cross-country capstone projects

[Asheesh Laroia]

Excerpts from Greg Wilson's message of Fri Dec 04 11:17:36 +0000 2009:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Asheesh Laroia's post about OpenHatch reminded me that I've been meaning 
> to write as well.  Over the past year, we have been piloting a new program 
> in which senior undergraduates from several different universities work 
> together on open source projects.  Each student registers in a project 
> course at his or her home institution; students are then put in teams of 
> 4-6 that span several schools to get some hands-on experience with the 
> working practices used in distributed teams.

That's thrilling.

> This term we had 45 students from 14 universities on 8 different projects 
> ranging from geospatial database extensions and configuration tools for 
> the Mozilla Thunderbird email client to soccer-playing robots: 
> http://ucosp.wordpress.com/2009-fall has the complete list, along with a 
> map of schools taking part.

What a nice list! I'll be following your blog for updates...

> The students who took part have been posting their thoughts about what 
> went well, and what didn't, on the blog (http://ucosp.wordpress.com).  I 
> think it makes for interesting reading; in particular, it seems that the
> biggest issue students faced was getting started, and projects that gave 
> them a handful of clearly-defined microtasks early on seemed to do better 
> than ones that gave them more freedom right off the bat.

There's a lot of really interesting feedback here. I'll see if I can summarize
some tidbits and post them to the OpenHatch blog so people who read that know
what a great project you've put together!

> If that's correct, then an aggregator for bite-sized starting points like 
> the one Asheesh & friends have put together is going to help grow the 
> community a lot by improving newcomers' chances of being successful early 
> on.  I'd be interested in thoughts about how we could get more FLOSS 
> projects to tag bugs for OpenHatch to pick up...

I'm *really* happy to see that your students seem to have picked up on the
same idea I have.

One thing I'm learning is that *many* projects already tag such bugs, but they're hard
to find. So we're putting out call to projects, asking for their help finding all
the projects that do tag bugs with "bite-size" or "easy" or something like that.

If today goes as planned, I'll write that up and post that to this list by the end of
the day. Help from you guys in getting the word out would be great!

-- Asheesh.

-- 
Beware of low-flying butterflies.