This is the last blog post that I will write for this class. This is a chance to reflect on what I did. Go back to my first two blog posts.

Humanitarian

Half of the world’s languages are dying. Should we save them?

Project Update

Wikipedia

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

This week we really dived into finding projects we want to contribute to and evaluated the project for readiness to contribute. This week our professor provides us with a list of open source projects that were either popular and or personal to them. We looked through a number of projects that were written in Python, JavaScript and mostly C++. We then chose a project that interested us and formed groups based on the common interest. I was lucky enough to be grouped with Roy based on our mutual interest in the Sahana EDEN project. Sahana EDEN is the world’s most popular open-source information management system for disaster and humanitarian aid management. It can support all phases of the emergency cycle “out of the box” or be customized to meet the specific needs of agencies and organizations. I was interested in this project because of the tremendous help it can provide people with. I found the evaluation of the project easy with the help of the guidelines. The questions were very pointed and helpful with assessing whether the project was open and with contributions. The guidelines allowed us to go through files, look for indicators as to whether the project was active. I learned that the welcomeness of a project is very important to me. Open source contributions have made me extremely cautious of “ruining” anything. So I noticed that the maintainer was responsive in the issues section so that seemed encouraging. I also saw that only two issues had been closed in the past six months so it seems as though the activity is slow. The maintainer was thankful for the contributions no matter the size. Interactions like those are helpful because you know the kinds of interaction you can expect. I’m interested in this project because of the humanitarian aspect of it but I would like the communications to be more frequently than it currently is. Although there is communication, it doesn’t seem as though the feedback is not frequent, so perhaps a more active project could satisfy that. The hardest task was trying to find out how long issues stay open. Figuring out the average number of commits took some time as well.

It is time to start searching for projects. The above readings will help guide you in what to look for in a project. I will provide suggestions for where and how to look. In this week’s blog, write about which projects you looked at, why you rejected them, which are still possible, and which look good to you. Treat your blog like a diary this week. Also comment on the talk by Karen Sandler.

We continued to build on our git knowledge this week by implementing a contribution workflow. The simulation was very helpful in understanding the process of how to contribute to a project from the beginning to the conflicts we would encounter to the very end. We also read an article about finding a project to contribute to, very resourceful.

In this week’s we’ll explore my experience implementing Github commands and workflows that we read about in Pro Git. I’ll also discuss an inspiring article that I read about a beginners journey through open source and lastly I’ll discuss my blog editing activity to sum up this week in open source .

“10 things you should know about open source before you use it”

What types of contributions do you think are suitable choices for you to make as your first contributions to an open source project?

There are many ways to contribute to open source projects. Some contributions involve coding while others do not. Contributing is something very new to me, so I am hesistant to mess with someone else’s code.I think the best way to ease my hesistaton is to think of messing with the code as my contribution. Nonetheless I think a slow start would work best for me. As far as my contributiions are concerned, my goal is to aid in writing good documentation overall. This will include reading through the documentation that already exist, perhaps following examples and making corrections. Additionally, with all kinds of interesting projects in the works, I could add a glossary of technical terms to the projects.

What types of projects interest you and how do you see your relationship to them? Projects that interest me include those I currently utilize everyday. I’m interested in exploring some of the mozilla projects more specially the add-ons project.The add-ons project seems like the project that allows for creativity in the contributions/suggestions you can make to the code.I really like how organized the project is and the map provided to show you where the project has been and what direction its heading toward. I can optimize code for a web browser add on or contribute an add-on feature for others to contribute/edit/optimize. Having an everyday connection to the opensource projects I contribute to will allow me to make more useful suggestion in improve the use of the project.

I decided to enroll in this class because of the community aspect that Open source software development fosters. I recently finished a summer bootcamp and I was excited to build on the tools and lessons I gained during my time there.I am fairly new to open source software development.