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.

Weekly Summary

1. Worked on a team based project evaluation activity
2. I picked another project, one that no one evaluated it, and completed the evaluation of that project.