Hi list, I'm a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information<http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/>and have been getting encouragement here to teach a course on open source development targeted at students in our Masters program.
Our Masters students come from a variety of backgrounds and are required to pick up some coding skills during the program (though some come in with more engineering background). It's a professional degree that culminates in a technical project. Often the emphasis of these projects is on design, but many of the students have expressed frustration at not having more of an opportunity to hack with constructive supervision. I'm coming from a background of FOSS development, project management, and business, but have never taught a course on this before. I wanted to send out my rough ideas for a course proposal and invite any feedback of any kind on it. I'd be really interested to see any currently existing course syllabi or material, but am not sure where to look. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Summary:* This course is a hands-on exploration of the theory and practice of free and open source software (FOSS) development. Students will collaborate on the design, development, and marketing of a new open source software project. Practical work will be organized around themes of project management infrastructure, community self-governance, and engineering education through open source participation. Supplemental readings will explore business models for open source software organizations, the open source "ecosystem", and hacker culture. The (admitted ambitious) goal of the class is to launch a broadly usable open source project that can be used as part of iSchool Masters projects, faculty-directed research, and beyond. [There's going to be a lot of prep work on my end figuring out what a plausible project for this might be. I'm thinking something along the lines of a lightweight pluggable mailing list solution, but I'm open to other ideas...] *Format*: The class will meet twice a week: Once in a classroom to discuss readings, and once in an IRC channel to discuss progress on development. *Grading*: Grading will be based on X% class participation, Y% on open digital participation (blog posts, issues, mailing list participation, commits) and Z% on student's assessment of their peers [according to some algorithm I've haven't put enough thought into yet]. *Readings and Topics: * for everything practical and then some: Fogel, K. *Producing Open Source Software* what else? governance: Freeman, J. The "Tyrrany of Structurelessness" Ostrom, E. *Governing the Commons *(*?? haven't read yet, looks good. I'm thinking excerpts) *business models: Pentaho's Beekeeper stuff: http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/BEEKEEPER/The+Beekeeper Asay, M. something by him like http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10244853-16.html -- stuff about Red Hat? -- stuff about Twitter, GitHub? -- stuff about Mozilla? classical (?) texts: RMS. Something. Or maybe just stuff from here; http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ ESR. *The Cathedral and the Bazaar* culture: Coleman, G. something? Kelty, C. *Two Bits*. (excerpts) international participation: Tahkteyev, Y. *Coding places*. (excepts) something on gender in open source?
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