NSF has a new program titled “Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE)”. The goal of the program is to “…harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance.” I am happy to announce that the Runestone Academy has received a POSE Phase I grant to create Open-Source Ecosystem (OSE) which will support the expansion of the Runestone Academy community. The Runestone Academy blog describes details of the grant.
Runestone Academy is a Learning Engineering and Analytics Portal (LEAP) that supports the application of evidence-based educational approaches currently for math and computing topics. Additional topics may be under development. Best of all, Runestone learning is free!! And as a sneak preview, our next TOS Time discussion will be led by Jan Pearce from Berea College who will relate her experiences in both using Runestone Academy as well as supporting student contributions to Runestone.
The CIO of the U.S. Department of Defense, John B. Sherman, has released a memo titled “Software Development and Open Source Software“. This document identifies that The Department must follow an “Adopt, Buy, Create” approach to software which gives priority to open source software when looking for software solutions. This means that DoD must look to open source first, before creating in-house solutions for software projects. It also opens the door for DoD funding of open source software in the case where an application provides much of the needed functionality, but needs further development to meet the need.
We will once again be hosting a TOS Time. The event includes two things. For the first part of the event, our own Steve Huss-Lederman will provide us with an introduction to the Open Energy Dashboard project which he maintains. This project has supported involvement by students from a wide range of academic institutions and Steve will share both how to get started as well as commenting on his experiences with the project.
The second part of the event will be open office hours for instructors to ask questions and talk about their experiences in supporting student involvement in open source projects. If you have encountered a roadblock or just want to know how to better support your students, come join us!!!
Time: 4PM eastern time Date: Thursday September 22nd Location: Zoom – email heidi and she’ll send along a zoom link. Agenda: 4:00 – 4:20 Steve Huss-Lederman – Open Energy Dashbord 4:20 – 4:30 Q & A 4:30 – 5:00 POSSE office hours
The 2022 UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium will be held September 27-29, 2022. The event will be a mix of in-person, hybrid, and fully remote activities. Organized by the UC Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and CROSS, the event will include keynote speakers, expert panels, and technical workshops, as well as poster presentations highlighting the work of our Open Source Research Experience students. If you are able to attend in person, there will even be an Oktoberfest barbeque on the evening of the first day of the symposium!!
Don Watkins, who has a long history of using open source to educate in the K-12 domain, has an interesting article on How I get students excited about math with Python and Raspberry Pi. Its a great article both on supporting student learning as well as how to teach using the Raspberry Pi.
Hilary Carter, vice president for research at the Linux Foundation spoke with The New Stack’s Makers podcast about the increasing need for open source developers. Hilary identified that open source program offices (OSPOs) can play a role in developing in-house capabilities. She also described that developers are concerned with keeping current with cloud native growth and with the increasing emphasis placed on cybersecurity.
MIT Technology Review has just published an interesting article titled “The US military wants to understand the most important software on Earth“. The article describes how Linux underlies most computation today and as well as an effort by DARPA (military research) to understand how open source projects work. The goal is to better understand the risk involved in open source projects as well as to better identify and ameliorate malicious actors.
The Open Source Initative (OSI) and OpenLogic by Perforce have created a new survey to provide understanding of the state of open source software. The survey is open to professionals who utilize open source software as part of their work and seeks information related to the adoption and challenges of using open source software.
The survey should take approximately 10 minutes and the closing date is January 7, 2022. One lucky participant will receive a $200 gift card for completing the survey. Results of the survey will be available at the end of January 2022 in the 2022 State of Open Source report.
Deb Bryant, Senior Director, Open Source Program Office at Red Hat, mentioned TeachingOpenSource as one example community in her article “6 Examples Of Open Source Best Practices In Knowledge-Sharing Projects“. We’re in great company with the OSI, TODO Group, IEEE SA-OPEN, The Open Source Way, and The Open Organization.
This four-day online Symposium will provide an opportunity to learn about the research and incubator projects at CROSS, interact with CROSS faculty, graduate students, and affiliated researchers, and discuss future directions and collaborative research projects at UC Santa Cruz and other UC campuses. The program includes plenary sessions with keynotes and lightening talks, and a two-track workshop program. We look forward to seeing you at the Symposium!
BRUSSELS, 6/09/2021Today, the European Commission published a study on the impact of open source software (OSSand open source hardware (OSHon the European economy, conducted by Fraunhofer ISI and OpenForum Europe. Full report is available here. The study estimates that open source software contributes between €65 to €95 billion to the European Union’s GDP and promises significant growth opportunities for the region’s digital economy. To achieve that, the EU should actively engage in a transition towards more openness in its political and investment culture.
Sachiko Muto, the CEO of OpenForum Europe: “Open source offers a greenfieldadvantage for policymakers and Europe has the chance to lead.” The report recommends the EU to pursue a dedicated open source industrial policyand to include it in its major policy frameworks, such as the European Green Deal and the AI Act. It also recommends setting up a European network of governmental units dedicated to accelerating the use of open technologies,providing substantial fundingto open source support mechanisms and projects, e.g.through the flagship Horizon Europe program with a total budget of €95.5 billion for 2021–2027, and following the direction of open innovation in the bloc’s quest for digital autonomy.
To put the results into context, the economic value of open source software in the EU is equivalent to both air and water transport combined. EU governments and companies have already noticed the potential of Open by investing over €1 billion in open source development in 2018 alone. The data predicts that if open source contributions increased by 10% in the EU, they would generate an additional 0.4% to 0.6% (around €100 billion) to the bloc’s GDP. To reap these benefits, the researchers point to a need for a profound culture switch and significant investments in open technologies. Several Member State governments and EU institutions have already taken their first steps in this direction, and now the study equips policymakers with necessary evidence to scale up their efforts for the benefit of the EU economy and citizens
Rochester Institute of Technology is creating an OSPO! RIT is in the process of creating an Open Source Programs office. Details are provided in the Opensource.com article.
Update!!! The Atlanta University Center Data Science Initiative was the recipient of a recent grant from the Alford P. Sloan Foundation titled Open Doors X Open Source to infuse Open Source Software Development programming across the consortium. Principal Investigators Drs. Talitha Washington and Kinnis Gosha oversaw the 10-week postdoctoral program (Open Doors x Open Source) that provided an open-source development learning experience for 32 underrepresented computing graduates from various schools across the nation. The goal of the program is to leverage open-source software development to increase the number of underrepresented minorities who enter careers as software engineers. Additional funding to support the program was provided by Expedia Group and Dell Technologies. The Atlanta University Center Consortium is comprised of four Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs): Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Spelman College.
The Clinic for Open Source Arts (COSA) at the University of Denver is a center that supports the creation of free, open source tools for creativity. COSA:
Contributes to ongoing efforts to create and share digital arts using open-source digital tools.
Creates cross-disciplinary projects with University of Denver students and faculty and frequently collaborates with other scholars in the digital field.
Provides small grants and/or temporary working space for open source projects that add value to the digital arts field while collaborating with partner organizations locally and nationally.
Hosts a variety of summits, clinics and workshops ranging from hackathons to coding tutorials.
Builds communities around open-source tools for creativity.
OpenUK is offering a Kids Camp in July/August 2021, sponsored by Red Hat. The first camp took place 10-31 August 2020. OpenUK has made all content available to be used on an ongoing basis and freely downloadable via this web page. The camp delivered 10 Lessons with accompanying Ezines using the open sourced MiniMU glove kit designed by MiMU and Pimoroni. The camp and course are free to use but you will require a MiniMU glove and micro:bit to take part.
OpenUK Kids Camp is a GNOME Community Challenge, Phase three finalist.
Brandeis University’s Graduate Professional Studies (GPS) is looking for an industry expert in the Open-Source Software community to design and teach in the new Open Source Technology Management (OSTM) suite of course offerings. The specific need is to teach RMGT 290b: Open-Source Community Development
Course description: This course will enable students to understand the various roles in communities of practice supporting Open-Source Software development, adoption, and maintenance. Students will assess the characteristics, viability, and appropriateness of the community; how to participate in the community; and the implications of starting new (i.e “forking”) communities. In this course students will learn about different types of communities: management philosophies, community governance, communication strategies, and how they impact the roles and responsibilities of members, the expectations and responsibilities of participants, the motivations of different community members, and how such communities may align—or not—with corporate interests.
The goal of this program is to increase student capabilities in working in open source projects, add productive contributors to on-going projects, and further promote open source at UC Santa Cruz. CROSS has created a list of project ideas that can be used as a basis for student project proposals.
Several new resources have emerged recently that the TOS community may find helpful in getting students and others started participating in open source communities.
Marco Gerosa (POSSE alum), Georg Link, Gregorio Robles, Anita Sarma, Igor Steinmacher, Christoph Treude, Bianca Trinkenreich, Igor Wiese have updated the study on What motivates open source software contributors? One snippet of interest is that enjoying helping others (89%) and kinship (80%) rose in the rankings compared to surveys from the early 2000s.
Gustavo Pinto (POSSE alum) has written a book on Open Source Licensing 101 which provides a great introduction to open source licensing for students.
Red Hat has produced a checklist for assessing the health of an open source project. This could serve both as a way for instructors to assess projects and as a possible student assignment to evaluate an open source community.
Citizen Statistician has written an experience report on Open-source contribution as a student project. A brief step-by-step explanation of student involvement in updating an R package.
The Institute of Applied Open Source at Johns Hopkins University in combination with the OSPO++ Network.is presenting an online Community Colloquium on Teaching Open Source for Educators Fri, 16 April 2021, 10:00 – 15:30 EDT. The focus of the event is on the who, what, where, why and how of teaching open source in universities. Topics include:
Software Methods
OSPO Management
Culture of Open Source
History of Open Source
Analysis of Open Source Projects & Health
Engineering for Scale with Open Source
Open Source Community Practices
The format consists of six different groups presenting open source programs with a 20 minute presentation and 20 minutes for peer discussion.
Google’s Summer of Code starts accepting student applications on Monday, March 29. The deadline to submit is Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 19:00 UTC. This year there are 202 open source mentoring organization with 31 organizations new this year. There are helpful resources for students who are interested in participating. There are a number of socially beneficial projects including:
CiviCRM – leading open source CRM for nonprofits worldwide
Our very own Mario Nakazawa from Berea College has been named to the POGIL Project Steering Committee. POGIL, standing for Process Oriented Guided Inqiury Learning, uses scaffolded, inquiry learning to support student learning. The CS-POGIL project provides learning materials for a variety of computing courses.
David Yakobovitch from the HumAIn Podcast interviewed Dr. Kari Jordan, Executive Director at The Carpentries, on how to get started in open source. The article also talks about how they are translating their existing in-person two day workshops to an online format while maintaining a diverse, inclusive learning environment.
GitHub has a GitHub Campus Experts Program which supports student leaders who foster student communities on their campuses in order to help other students learn industry skills and become better software developers. Applications are open now through February 28th.
To qualify for the GitHub Campus Experts program, students must meet the following eligibility requirements:
Be at least 18 years of age
Validate student status through the GitHub Student Developer Pack
Be enrolled in a post-secondary formal education institution
The saga continues!!! The FarmData2 project has been selected to continue to Phase 3 of the GNOME Community Education Challenge! The team of Grant Braught, Farhan Siddiqui, Michael Skalak, and Allen Tucker is one of only five teams to make it to the final round of the GNOME Challenge. The deadline for the next submission is March 1 and the winner will be announced on April 7th. We are proud of the work that Grant, Farhan, Michael and Allen have put into this effort and wish them success as they go forward in the competition!
The Geeks for Geeks site recently published a list of avenues for student contributions to open source projects. There are a variety of communities represented including Outreachy, Hyperledger, and the Free Software Foundation.
Outreachy has announced applications will open February 1st for their next round of internships that start May 2021. If you’re in an open source project interested in mentoring students, sign up here. Details about the internships:
remote internships with communities located around the world
diversity is supported: “We expressly invite women (both cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people to apply. We also expressly invite applications from residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.”
mentors from the community provided
3 months in duration
interns are paid $6000 USD
projects include programming, user experience, documentation, illustration, graphical design, data science, project marketing, user advocacy, or community event planning
Open Source 101 is a great way to get students started in open source. Produced by All Things Open, Open Source 101 is a one day virtual conference intended to educate students (and professionals) on how to get started in open source as well as sessions ranging from containers to security to licensing and more! Sessions are delivered by top experts in the country. This is a great conference as it is explicitly aimed at students. The University of Texas at Austin will be there. Join them for great discussions on how to get started in open source. Open Source 101 will take place on March 30th, 2021, and will be hosted virtually online, located in the heart of Austin Texas’ technology and entertainment district.
*Important update… this event will now take place February 24/25, 2021. Additional details will be forthcoming, but it will follow the same general format as originally planned in 2020*
GitHub’s latest “Classroom Report” indicates that students are increasingly likely to join open source projects with the most common programming language being Python. The results are based on a survey of 7070 students and 165 teachers who have participated in GitHub Education. Read the summary!
The HFOSS team of Grant Braught, Farhan Siddiqui, Michael Skalak, and Allen Tucker has been selected to continue to Phase 2 of the Community Education Challenge! The Challenge is supported by the GNOME Foundation and Endless and has the goal to engage new coders with the FOSS community. The Challenge is hoping to generate inspiring ideas that will appeal to the next generation of open source contributors.
The team is working on FarmData2 which combines two existing projects: FarmData and AnimalData. The project supports general farm management as well as assists in meeting the requirements for organic certification. A beta version of the back end for FarmData2 has been built on top of the FarmOS FOSS project and in collaboration with the Non-Profit FOSS Institute. Students from Dickinson College have begun engaging with FarmData2 this semester in our required sophomore level course “Tools and Techniques for Software Development” and will expand their engagement next semester in the follow-on course “Large-scale and Open Source Software Development”. These courses will develop the skills and competencies necessary for H/FOSS participation while also building technical and life-long learning skills. They will take this preparation into our year-long senior capstone where they will engage with and contribute to existing H/FOSS projects “in the wild.”
Congratulations Grant, Farhan, Michael and Allen!!
The National Science Foundation has awarded almost $2 million to thirteen researchers across 10 different organizations. The grant titled “Collaborative Research: OpenPace – Broadening Participation in Computing through Authentic, Collaborative Engagement with Computing for the Greater Good” builds on a foundation of four prior NSF grants for supporting open source for humanitarian purposes. The effort has as a goal to attract women and other underrepresented groups to computing professions via developing open source for social good.
The project team includes:
Greg Hislop, Wes Shumar – Drexel University
Lori Postner, Darci Burdge – Nassau Community College
Heidi Ellis, Stoney Jackson – Western New England University
Grant Braught – Dickinson College
Karl Wurst – Worcester State University
Steven Huss-Lederman – Beloit College
Wes Turner – RPI (Rensselaer Center for Open Source)
RIT’s open programs office has received a nearly $500,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to measure and strengthen support of the faculty and staff who do work in the open community. Our own Steve Jacobs, director of Open@RIT, and Mel Chua did the foundation work for the grant which will help create and strengthen contributor/user communities and open production pipelines to increase the impact of supported open work.
Anisha Swain is an Associate Software Engineer in the Performance and Scale team of Red Hat. In this article, she describes her journey to becoming and open source engineer. She recounts how she went from hating open source to loving it.
Check out Patti Ordonez’s segment on Computing for National Geographic’s “I Can Science”. She speaks eloquently about the need for women computing instructors. Go Patti! (Patti attended one of the first Professors’ Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) workshops.)
The Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities (SENCER) project is hosting their annual meeting July 30 – August 2nd. Our very own Clif Kussmaul will be presenting a POGIL session Saturday at 1:00 PM and an HFOSS session Saturday at 2:30 PM. SENCER is an organization that uses real world problems with civic consequence to promote STEM learning. “SENCER courses and programs strengthen student learning and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by connecting course topics to issues of critical local, national, and global importance.” Registration is only $50!
Software Freedom Conservancy is a not-for-profit charity that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Conservancy provides a non-profit home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects. Conservancy member projects include Git, Wine, and QEMU as well as outreach-oriented projects like TOS. Please consider supporting SFC as part of any end of year charitable giving you may have in mind.
Now available: a new, free-to-download, Creative Commons-licensed book about how open can work in education, called “The Open Organization for Educators.”
The next POSSE will be held in Philadelphia, PA June 17-19. All U.S.-based college-level faculty and instructors who teach computing are invited to join us! Join the over 175 instructors from over 150 academic institutions who are supporting student learning via Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS).
The next POSSE will be in New York City in January 2019. This POSSE will be hosted by the City University of New York and attendees will primarily be City University faculty. Faculty at John Jay College have graciously agreed to provide meeting space and serve as local contacts. Other U.S. academic organizations that would be interested in hosting a POSSE should contact the POSSE team. We expect to hold at least one more POSSE for individual faculty applicants later in 2019.
I discovered this interactive, online Git training tool: https://www.katacoda.com/courses/git and thought it might be of interest. The advantage (IMHO) is that students do not have to have anything other than a browser with an internet connection on their machine at all: no need for a CLI (or for everyone to be using the same CLI), etc. — you can even run this on a tablet or phone! (This isn’t the best of the katacoda courses I’ve tried — it still assumes more CLI knowledge than I’d like), but if you want students to be able to experiment and have everyone using the same setup, this might be an option.
Teaching Open Source is committed to our users’ privacy and protection of their data. On May 25, 2018, extensive changes in EU data protection law (General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR) go into effect. We are using this opportunity to make improvements for all users, not just those in EU.
We have updated the Teaching Open Source Privacy Policy to make it more clear what data we collect from you, why we collect it, and how it’s used.
These changes go into effect starting May 25, 2018 and you can find the new policy here: Privacy Policy
Sabine Wojcieszak, (Bologna POSSE July 2017), just published a blog post on her experiences offering a course tiled “Working in and with Free Open Source Software”. She describes her class and how she mastered being “productively lost”. Great job Sabine!! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/being-productively-lost-experiment-teaching-open-tos-wojcieszak/
For the second year, Red Hat is honoring the work of higher education instructors who are committed to teaching the open source development process to their students. The majority of honorees are past participants in Professor’s Open Source Software Experience (POSSE). Launched by Red Hat in 2009, POSSE is a cultural immersion in the tools and practices of open source communities, designed for instructors looking for ways to bring their students into active participation in those communities. These workshops are made possible through National Science Foundation grants awarded to Drexel University, Nassau Community College and Western New England University, and by Teaching Open Source, a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Corporations such as Red Hat and Google provide support through Teaching Open Source and their participation in POSSE workshops, which are co-taught by members of the academic and open source communities. (Read the full news release on redhat.com)
Congratulations to:
Aria Chernik, lecturing fellow, Social Science Research Institute, and director, Open Source Pedagogy, Research and Innovation (OSPRI), Duke University
Joshua Dehlinger, assistant/associate professor, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Towson University
Robert Duvall, lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Duke University
Joshua Pearce, professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering; professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and advisor, Open Source Hardware Enterprise, Michigan Technological University
Alan Rea, professor, business information systems, Haworth College of Business, Western Michigan University
Wes Turner, senior lecturer, computer science, School of Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stewart Weiss, associate professor, Department of Computer Science, Hunter College of the City University of New York
The next POSSE workshop will be held June 18-20 at Drexel, in Philadelphia PA. For more info and application instructions: http://foss2serve.org/index.php/POSSE_2018-06. Applications are due April 6.
If you’ll be at SIGSE, make sure to attend these Teaching Open Source-related sessions (use this quicklink while you’re there for easy reference: bit.ly/TOS-SIGCSE)
Time: Thursday 10am Activity: Demo Session #1 Title: Teaching “Blinky Flashy”: Best Practices and Helpful Tips for Teaching eTextiles to a Wide Range of Students Location: Exhibit Hall Speaker(s): Gina Likins (Red Hat, United States) Abstract Electronic Textiles, or eTextiles, are textiles that directly incorporate conductive fibers or elements. eTextile projects are engaging and hands-on, and can serve as an introduction to computing, electrical engineering, and the Internet of Things. In addition, evidence suggests eTextile projects are especially well-suited for girls and young women, and may help improve their overall attitudes and confidence about computing.
This demo will prepare instructors to lead a successful eTextiles workshop. Attendees will learn by doing – up to 20 participants will experience the fun of eTextiles by adding an LED sequin to an article of clothing they bring. In addition, the demo will cover: what information should be included in an eTextiles workshop — and what can be skipped; variants to accommodate experience and knowledge levels; and how instructors can ensure that workshops go off without a hitch.
Time: Thursday 2:35 – 3:00 PM Activity: Paper Title: A Survey of Instructors’ Experiences Supporting Student Learning using Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Projects Location: Room 319 Speaker(s): Heidi Ellis (Western New England University, United States), Lori Postner (Nassau Community College, United States), Gregory Hislop (Drexel University, United States) Abstract: Studies have shown that Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects provide a rich learning environment for students, allowing them to gain a range of both technical and professional skills. Although there have been a number of studies on student attitudes toward learning within HFOSS projects, little has been documented about instructors’ experiences supporting their students in the classroom. This paper examines survey results from 26 faculty members who participated in an NSF-funded Professors’ Open Source Software Experience workshop with the goal of incorporating HFOSS into their curriculum. The survey was designed to identify barriers to using HFOSS in the classroom, to understand the type of classes where instructors incorporated HFOSS, the successes attained and challenges faced by instructors, and to understand instructors’ future plans. The data gathered was used to enhance semi-structured interviews that are currently being analyzed. This paper focuses on the hurdles reported by faculty members, the cross-section of uses of HFOSS in the classroom as well as factors that may influence one’s ability to integrate HFOSS into the curriculum. The results of the survey demonstrate that faculty have successfully incorporated HFOSS into a wide range of courses across all four years of the curriculum with both large and small classes. The major hurdles are time to prepare materials for one’s course as well as finding time within an existing course to integrate HFOSS material. This paper discusses possible ways to address the hurdles as well as future directions for the work.
Time: Thursday 3:45 – 4:10 PM Activity: Paper Title: A Multi-Institutional Perspective on H/FOSS Projects in the Computing Curriculum Location: Room 323 Speaker(s): Grant Braught (Dickinson College, United States), John Maccormick (Dickinson College, United States), James Bowring (College Of Charleston, United States),
Quinn Burke (College Of Charleston, United States), Barbara Cutler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States), David Goldschmidt (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States), Mukkai Krishnamoorthy (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States), Wesley Turner (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States), Steven Huss-Lederman (Beloit College, United States), Bonnie Mackellar (St. John’s University, United States), Allen Tucker (Bowdoin College, United States)
Time: Thursday 6:30 – 7:20 PM Activity: BoF Title:
Open Source Student Clubs Location: Room 318 Speaker(s): Darci Burdge (Nassau Community College, United States), Gregory Hislop (Drexel University, United States), Joanna Klukowska (New York University, United States) Abstract: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is interesting to many students and provides an excellent opportunity to observe and practice many aspects of software product development and management. There is an active community of faculty fostering student participation in open source within computing curricula (see http://teachingopensource.org). However, the opportunity to add coverage of FOSS varies considerably from institution to institution, and there are always limits to what can be done with existing computing curricula. One approach to solving this limitation is for students to learn about and participate in FOSS projects as an extra-curricular activity. This BoF will provide a forum for faculty members to discuss open source student clubs. The Mozilla Foundation has been developing a program to support open source clubs. The initial clubs were primarily located in Asia, but Mozilla started an effort to expand the clubs to the U.S. during the current academic year. The BoF will include discussion of this effort and the materials developed by Mozilla. (See: https://opensource.mozilla.community/)
Jody Paul (2017-11 POSSE alum) relates his experiences in the first two weeks of teaching 2 sections of Software Engineering Practices. We hope to hear more from Jody as the course progresses!
“I’m the instructor for 2 sections of Software Engineering Practices, a senior experience/project course aimed at graduating seniors in computer science. Software Engineering Practices primarily involves software development project work and generating associated artifacts for a professional portfolio. The prerequisite for this course is Software Engineering Principles, in which students have the opportunity to gain knowledge and skills in software engineering and to experience guided practice in team-based software development.
This will be the first time that the projects are directed toward HFOSS project core contributions. (Some previous efforts have involved developing new plug-ins, but nothing that required close coupling with a FOSS project itself.)
So far (the first two weeks):
In ad hoc teams of size 3 or 4, students engaged in the evaluation of HFOSS projects, based on http://foss2serve.org/index.php/Project_Evaluation_(Activity):
Post-activity reflections indicated that students believed the experience was extremely valuable, providing insight into open source and software project considerations.
In ad hoc teams of size 2 or 3, students experienced a standard workflow for contributing to a GitHub-hosted project, based on https://github.com/StoneyJackson/git-intro-activity
No teams completed all steps of the activity in 90 minutes. Most would have benefited from ~20 minutes of additional time or a precursor activity.
Post-activity reflections indicated that participants all felt activity was useful, including those who already had “significant familiarity” with GitHub.
Students have formed working teams for the rest of the semester.
Each team is comprised of 4 or 5 students.
There are 9 teams across the 2 sections.
Each team has identified its project of interest, taking into consideration the evaluations, group dynamics, and personal preferences.
Projects chosen by working teams include: Mediawiki Accessibility, Moodle, Mozilla Tools, OpenMRS, and SugarLabs. (The first three are specifically accessibility-focused.)
I had been hoping for a smaller set, but decided against imposing that inter-team constraint. Fortunately, several projects were chosen by at least 2 of the teams.
It’s scary for me; but, students are engaged and excited!
I am truly thankful for the POSSE experience and contributed materials!!!”
Dr. Jody Paul
Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Metropolitan State University of Denver
In addition, several other Red Hatters participated in or led portions of the workshop:
Tom Callaway, team lead for University Outreach, joined the group Thursday afternoon and presented an introduction to licensing that, as always, was insightful — and funny! (tl;dr takeaways: All software has a license. Check for the license. Comply with the license of any software you use (in any way). If you’re writing software, choose a license (preferably open source). When choosing an open source license, choose an existing license (don’t make one up). If you’re curious and want to learn more, consider applying for the next POSSE!)
Greg Dekoenigsberg, Community Manager for Red Hat Ansible and one of the earliest promoters of student involvement in open source, joined us on Thursday, providing an excellent historical — and current — point of view on the intersection of open source in education and business.
Rounding out the Red Hat contributors was Bryan Behrenshousen, Red Hatter, writer and editor of the Open Organization book series, and member of the Opensource.com team, who spoke on his experience supporting student learning from FOSS. Bryan also shared the successes of — and future potential for — contributions to Opensource.com by both students and faculty members.
TeachingOpenSource runs a POSSE workshop roughly twice a year, so if this sounds interesting, join the TeachingOpenSource community to make sure you hear about the next one.
Image credit: “7Things.png” is a derivative of “1959-xx-xx Educational Cards, Ed-U-Cards A – F”, 1959, by Wishbook, via Flickr, and used with permission under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).”
EDUCAUSE’s 7 Things You Should Know About …™ is a series of publications that address a diverse range of professional challenges in higher education IT, from updates on current developments to explorations of important overarching issues. In August of 2017, the organization offered insights in open source in higher education.” Read more: Abstract & download link or HTML version.
Chris Murphy, Nanette Veilleux and Jan Pearce and Judy Weng (a graduate student at UPenn) will be leading a Birds of a Feather on “Addressing Diversity & Inclusion Issues in Computer Science through Contributions to Free and Open Source Software” at this week’s Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. The BOF is Thursday (Sept 21) at 4pm in room Hanover F (more info)
Would you like to support student involvement in humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS)? Full-time faculty at U.S. institutions are invited to join us at the Professors’ Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) workshop. Over 100 faculty members have attended the workshop and we have a growing community of faculty members who are helping students learn within HFOSS projects. To learn more and apply…
This year Google was proud to not only host a workshop at our San Francisco office in April, but also to collaborate with the organizers to bring a POSSE workshop to Europe for the first time.
Software Freedom Conservancy is proud to announce that TeachingOpenSource has joined Conservancy as a member project. TeachingOpenSource (TOS) is a community of educators, developers, and organizations who create resources and document best practices for teaching free and open source software development, principles, and methods in the classroom. Read more on sfconservancy.org.
We’ve heard that it might be useful for students to be able to watch someone live code — well, guess what?! We’ve found someone at Mozilla is doing it — every Wednesday at 1pm Eastern! Find the list of upcoming topics here, and check out the episodes on YouTube:
We’ve been here in the downtown Google offices in beautiful San Francisco for the past few days, exploring how to teach open source and incorporate humanitarian free and open source (HFOSS) project work into computer science and software engineering classes. We even escaped being part of the massive power outage!
Mihaela Sabin, a 2010 Professor’s Open Source Software Experience alumna has been recognized as New Hampshire’s TechEducator of the year. Congratulations Mihaela!!
In the fall 2016 semester, in the Computer Science Department at Hunter College, computer science majors and a few non-majors were exposed to the concept of open source software, open data, and HFOSS. To the best of my knowledge (and I have been teaching there since 1986) this has not been done before. My “CS3” class this semester is programming using open data from the NYC Trees Census of 2015, and soon they will get an assignment sending them to look at an HFOSS project. I hope that some of them are as excited about exploring this new approach to their education as I am.
Another successful Professors’ Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) was held at Red Hat headquarters, in Raleigh, NC from November 16-18, 2016. Participants came from Eastern Michigan University, California State Long Beach, Howard University and more. In fact, the entire CS department from Berea College was in attendance! We created activities for use in our classes, collaborated on classroom approaches, and got a tour of Red Hat..
Research has shown that students, and especially female students, are motivated by the ability to “do good”. Humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) allows students to contribute to society while learning about open source tools and practices. The foss2serve team has received NSF funding to explore how to incorporate HFOSS into undergraduate computing programs.
A group of faculty members and HFOSS community members met at Nassau Community College on Long Island to map learning pathways that result in a contribution to an HFOSS project. The pathways identify the steps that must be taken to make a contribution (e.g., verify a bug). The foss2serve team is in the process of identifying/creating learning activities to support the pathways
Now available: a new, free-to-download, Creative Commons-licensed book about how open can work in education, called “The Open Organization for Educators.” 
Another successful POSSE was held November 16-18, 2017 at Red Hat headquarters in Raleigh. Twelve new faculty members joined three POSSE alums (
Gustavo Pinto, a participant in the recently completed POSSE held in Bologna, Italy, has written up a 
Mihaela Sabin, a 2010 Professor’s Open Source Software Experience alumna has been recognized as New Hampshire’s TechEducator of the year. Congratulations Mihaela!!
