FOSS Contributorship Project
Throughout the semester, you will are expected to contribute to a FOSS project. Your involvement and experiences contributing to the FOSS project will fuel several blog posts, a final paper, and a presentation at the end of the semester. This project is a key component of the course. Let's go!
But first, a note: Your blog posts are critical to your success in the course. Beyond giving you a wonderful tool to broadcast your learning outward, the collection of blog posts you write will make writing your final paper much easier. It's becoming common for a series/collection of blog posts to be combined and turned into a book, and we're taking a similar approach to your final paper. The better you write in the beginning and along the way, the better your final paper will become.
The Contributorship project include three (3) deliverables outside of the blog posts:
- FOSS Contributorship proposal - Due January 31
- FOSS Contributorship check-in - Due March 6
- Final Paper - Due April 24
- Final Presentation - May 2 & May 9
Annotating the Rubric
The existing project description and rubric are outdated, and something that we should agree on before you begin writing your final paper and creating a presentation to match. I've hosted the project description/rubric document online, and we are going to make comments and suggestions before all signing off on it. Your work will be assessed by terms you and your peers agree with.
Follow this link to the document, and look for the Hypothes.is logo in the upper right-hand corner of your browser window:
Link to draft Contributorship Project Guidelines and Rubric (click)
But I'm not a programmer! Oh no!
Worry not. There are many ways non-programmers can contribute to FOSS projects such as bug-hunting, user experience design, instructional/educational materials, and so on and so on. More or less every FOSS project can benefit from having more friendly, intelligent folks working on them, and each of us will find a project they can meaningfully contribute to.
As an example, I chose to contribute to Mozilla's Open Badges project while taking an earlier version of this very course back in 2012. Open Badges were relatively unknown at that time, and the first version of the Open Badges spec (open standard/format) was still being developed. Very few people were aware of what Mozilla was trying to build, and the FOSS technology supporting the "Open Badges Ecosystem" was a bit clunky. Over the course of the semester, I participated in weekly conference calls with the core team developing the project. Other community members just like me joined the calls, too, and shared their own experiences trying to make Open Badges easier to use and easier to communicate to their own institutions and organizations. I did some evangelizing, wrote up my thoughts about Open Badges on my blog, and created tutorials to show people how to understand and use Open Badges without needing to grasp the highly technical stuff (which I didn't fully grasp at the time, myself).
What I didn't realize until after the semester ended was that much of the value I took away from the experience was in learning how FOSS communities work.
My goal is for you to experience this for yourself, too. Many FOSS projects "work open" meaning that community members can come and go as they please, contributing to the project in small or big ways. Development and communications are transparent. They use FOSS tools to get work done, and operate as a distributed team of volunteers. They push towards common goals, and working openly helps them achieve more without a traditional hierarchical structure.
Even if you do not choose to remain active in the FOSS community you join as part of the project, you will be better off for having done so in this course.
Potential FOSS Projects
Here are some ideas of FOSS projects you can contribute to:
- Firefox - Mozilla's flagship Web browser for desktop and mobile
- LibreOffice - The FOSS productivity software suite
- D3.js - A Javascript framework for visualizing and manipulating data in the browser
- Semantic Media Wiki - The software that Wikipedia and thousands of website run on
- Sakai Project - The learning management system software that UH's Laulima runs on
This list is by no means exhaustive. If you know of (or find) a FOSS project you'd like to contribute to over the course of the semester, don't hesitate to inquire with the instructor.