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.
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. 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. 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... Thanks, Greg _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
