User:BPenzenstadler

Revision as of 06:07, 24 October 2016

Birgit Penzenstadler is an Assistant Professor at CSULB in California, USA. Find out more on her Homepage.

Notes from activities

The following are my notes from our preparation exercises before the F2F workshop in NC in Nov. They are hard to read right now, just saving progress notes that I need to turn into legible form ;)

Part A

For Part 1, their observations/answers to the following questions: - How do people interact? Informal and friendly, many colloquialisms - What is the pattern of communication? Short and abbreviated - Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning? Yes, abbreviations for expressions as well as loads of technical terms. - What advantages might IRC have over other real-time communication methods (like Google Chat or Facebook Messenger?) Are there potential disadvantages? Less UI for IRC means more efficient for slow internet connections, and maybe also less storage space for logs, but it's less appealing to the eye. - Can you make any other observations? Without netiquette this could be a disaster ;) Different interactions depending on how well people know each other (e.g. task assignment) - Bonus question: Why didn't Heidi and Darci's actions get picked up by the meetbot? Because the names were capitalized in the #action command

For Part 2: nothing to deliver, should have successfully installed IRC client Done, but doesn't work at CSULB ;)

For Part 3: observations of the chosen IRC channel (either from chosen HFOSS channel or from project channel) Mifos Moved to gitter, a different IM Lots of stuff going on, quite active channel Open MRS Logs pull requests Also quite active

For Part 4 (optional): a list of at least 5 commands that will work in the channel they have chosen, and what they mean. #twinkleflip with password but no special commands set yet - gotta figure out the meetbot Commands: #startmeeting - Start a meeting. You are designated the owner (and have permanent chair powers). #endmeeting - End the meeting. Must be called by a chair. #topic - Set a new topic. #agreed - Document an agreement in the minutes. Commands for Everyone: #info - Add an info item to the minutes. People should liberally use this for important things they say, so that they can be logged in the minutes. #action - Document an action item in the minutes. Include any nicknames in the line, and the item will be assigned to them. (nicknames are case-sensitive) #idea - Add an idea to the minutes. #help - Add a "Call for Help" to the minutes. Use this command when you need to recruit someone to do a task. #link - Add a link to the meeting minutes

For Part 5 - Sugar Labs: want to improve how computers are used in education Sahana Eden - humanitarian platform for disaster control

Part B

Part 1 - SourceForge

One of the best known of these FOSS project hosting sites is Source Forge. In this activity you will explore projects in SourceForge to gain an understanding of the key characteristics of a FOSS project. Do the following: Go to: http://sourceforge.net/ Use the Search feature in the center of the screen to view applications in an area of interest to you (e.g., gaming, sports, music, computing, etc.). "Mountains" How many projects are there in this category? "19" How many different programming languages are used to write software in this category? "5" List the top four programming languages used to write programs in this category. "C++ and Lua" Identify the meaning of each of the statuses below: Inactive - "no longer actively maintained" Mature - "well established" Production/Stable - "ready to promote for wide use" Beta - "ready for rigorous wide user testing" Alpha - "test phase by general users, unstable, preliminary release" Pre-Alpha - "not ready for public, under development" Planning - "under planning" Compare two projects in this category that have two different statuses. Describe the differences between the statuses. "both inactive" Which projects are the most used? "Fracplanet" How do you know? "number of downloads" Pick a project in your category. Answer the questions below: What does it do? " Fracplanet. Interactive application to generate and view random fractal planets and terrain with oceans, mountains, icecaps and rivers, then export them to POV-Ray format or Blender." What programming language is the project written in? "C++ with Qt and OpenGL" Who is likely to use the project? How do you know this? "3D modelers, from the categories and reviews" When was the most recent change made to the project? "April 2016" How active is the project? How can you tell? "code repository updates" How many committers does the project have? "1" Would you use the project? Why or why not? "no, not active enough with one contributor, even though recently updated"

Part 2 - OpenHub

In this activity, you will use OpenHub to gather information about a Humanitarian Free and Open Source project named OpenMRS. Explore OpenMRS: Go to: https://www.openhub.net/ In the upper-most search space, enter: OpenMRS For the OpenMRS Core project, identify when the data in OpenHub was last analyzed and the last commit date. How much difference is there? "25 days from 3 months ago code, 2 months ago last pull" What is the main programming language used in OpenMRS Core? "Java" How many lines of code does OpenMRS Core have? "3,739,232 lines of code" Click on the OpenMRS Core logo or link in upper left. (Be careful not to click on the OpenMRS link associated with the "claimed by" as this brings you to the larger OpenMRS project page.) Click on "User & Contributor Locations" (lower right side of screen). List some of the locations of the developers. "seems not to work" Go back to the main OpenMRS page. Click on the "Languages" link. How many languages is OpenMRS written in? "15" What language has the second highest number of lines of code? "JavaScript" Of the programming languages used in OpenMRS , which language the has the highest comment ratio? "Java" Click on the “Contributors” link under "SCM Data" menu. What is the average number of contributors in the last 12 months? "about 15" Scroll down to the Top Contributors section. How long have the top three contributors been involved in the project? "3-5 years" Use the information on the project summary page to compute the 12-month average of commits. What is the average number of commits over the past 12 months?."40 per month"