From Teaching Open Source
Contents |
[edit] Listing Template
- Project Name
- Project Home Page URL
- Tags for Your Project
- Project Description
- Project Issue Tracker URL
- Project IRC Channel Information
- Project Mailing Lists Information
- Individual Mentor Contact Information & Their Areas of Expertise (if desired, likely best)
- Project Ideas List URL
- Mentor Capacity
- Links to Information about Your Community
At the end of the page, add the text:
- [[Category:FOSS Mentor Projects|Project Name]]
[edit] Making the Most Out of Your Outreach to Students and Professors
[edit] Tags for Your Project
Tags for your project should be as descriptive as possible and could include things like languages (e.g., Python, CSS), tools used for development (e.g., Eclipse, Git), technology area (e.g., gaming, embedded systems), etc. Add as many tags as you think will be useful. Don't forget to think outside of the box when tagging - does your project have a humanitarian, civic action, healthcare etc. component to it? Add these as tags, too.
[edit] Project Description
In your project description, market your project. Are you giving students the opportunity to learn more about cutting edge content management system development? Will professors be given the opportunity to teach the latest developments in file systems? Will interested parties not only get to hone their C programming skills but also learn how to use distributed version control systems since you use DVCS? Will the code created for this project help people in the developing world have access to better health care?
If you want people to spend their free time working on or teaching about your free software, you need to tell them why it is important to do so. Share your passion for what you're developing - it is contagious.
[edit] Project Ideas List
Your project ideas list has two purposes: to tell interested parties where you need help and to give them a jumping off point for contribution. The more specific your ideas list is, the more likely you will be to find the right persons to work with.
An effective ideas list will contain at least the following:
- A title for the idea, e.g. add WYSIWYG support to Foo Bar Content Management System
- A description of the idea, in as much detail as you can provide.
- Links to further resources to learn about the problem, e.g. documentation for JQuery or links to videos about ZFS
- Add as many links to good resources as you can in this section. You know what good documentation/videos/papers, etc. exist for your project.
- Skills/knowledge needed to effectively work on an idea.
- Think of these as pre-requisites for taking a course in school, e.g. basic knowledge of Java, expert C programming skills.
- Difficulty Rating of the Idea
- This is somewhat subjective, but give it your best guess. Can a novice easily get the task done with a little reading and coaching in IRC? Will it take a superstar hacker with years of experience in your particular domain to tackle the problem? Rate accordingly and make sure to define your rating scale near the top of your ideas page.
- Communication Styles
- Are you an IRC driven community? Do you live and die only by your mailing list or forums? Is the best way to get things done via private emails with a summary later posted to the appropriate list? Tell people how you like to work so they can approach you most effectively and begin contributing efficiently right from the start.
Remember, the more detailed this page becomes, the more likely you will find the right person to help you improve your code base either by working on it personally or by teaching their classes to do so.
[edit] Mentor Capacity
Indicate whether you are interested in mentoring students, professors or both. Given that one of the primary goals of the Teaching Open Source site is to help foster the growth of FOSS in academia and other learning institutions, it would be most wonderful if you make yourselves available to both educators and students.
It is also worthwhile to indicate whether your developers would be willing to do in person mentoring and, if so, the location of your developers, e.g. San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA. Many novices perform better with some face to face interaction and many professors are looking for hands on help to learn a particular system so they can devote their cycles to curriculum development rather than getting up to speed on a particular code base.
If your developers are willing to visit a local learning institution to give a talk, host a workshop or otherwise make yourself available to those who want to learn about FOSS or your particular code base, indicate that in the mentor capacity section.
[edit] Links to Information about Your Community
So much of useful participation in FOSS comes not from knowing a particular set of technical skills, but from understanding the social workings of a particular community. How will newcomers best be able to understand that project lore? Giving them a window into how your project "works" will help them determine if the project is the right community for them and how to best interact with the community when joining.
You may not have these resources now, but consider adding a bit of history to your website About page. Bonus points if such cultural materials already exist. For an example of this type of information, see Robert Watson's talk "How the FreeBSD Project Works" or the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank.
[edit] Feedback on Your Listings
If you would like someone to review your listings and provide feedback, please contact one of the following individuals:
- Leslie Hawthorn - lh on Freenode in #teachingopensource (fastest) or email mebelh at gmail dot com
- Ralph Morelli - ralph dot morelli at trincoll dot edu
Other folks who would be interested in providing feedback, please list yourselves above.