Hi Folks, Other areas for addition to the text are aimed at the next level of contribution, once the developer gets up to speed on FOSS. These are along the lines of software engineering topics such as:
Requirements - How do you determine the exact requirements of a feature or enhancement? How do you do this in an open environment where users may be developers and there may be conflict in desired functionality? How do you document these? Design - How do you determine the overall design of a project? How do you determine how your piece fits into the overall design? How do you document this? What are good design practices that result in good code? Test - How do you ensure that your patch/enhancement/bug fix is correct? Organized approaches to testing. These are topics that I'd like to talk about in my Software Engineering course that are not directly covered in the text. Just a thought. Heidi -----Original Message----- From: tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Karsten Wade Sent: Monday, August 23, 2010 7:51 PM To: tos@teachingopensource.org Subject: [TOS] new chapters for Practical OSS Exploration textbook When we were at OSU talking about the 'Practical OSS Exploration' textbook, Tim Budd made a comment that I paraphrase as: "This material is good but there isn't enough to teach more than two weeks." What's missing, as we discussed, is all the material that gives a more full picture of participation in a FOSS community. What we have right now is very task oriented learning, so you could sit down and read through/conduct the exercises within that few weeks. What I imagine we need are topics that provide broader information and invite discussion, contemplation, and thought change. Such as: * History - what are things like now and how did things get to be this way? * Community cultures - different types of communities and how they interact. Explanation of communities of practice. * Open communities and diversity - there are significant disparities and non-trivial problems, some of what and why. * Licensing the Code - concepts about copyright, copyleft, different types of licenses, and effects of those choices on the code and community. * Threats and risks to and from FOSS - review of what can go wrong and consequences; what FUD is and how it's handled. What people forget and do wrong all the time. * Open for Business - Free software, open source software, and business. Different business models around FOSS to the present. * Who else practices the open source way - how open source has influenced other disciplines in terms of core principles (NOT using software but contribution cultures). Sources for this content: Wikipedia and other CC licensed sources; theopensourceway.org; original content production. Other ideas? Expansions? - Karsten -- name: Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener team: Red Hat Community Architecture uri: http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki gpg: AD0E0C41 _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
