User:Gtorta

Revision as of 10:23, 3 June 2017

Short Bio

Gianluca Torta is a Researcher and Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Università di Torino, where he obtained a PhD degree in 2005.

His main research interests are in Artificial Intelligence, with particular focus on knowledge representation and reasoning.

He currently teaches Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence.

His interest in Open Source software dates back to the late nineties, when he started using the FreeBSD operating system, the GNU Emacs editor and the Perl language thanks to a friend of him that already knew and appreciated OSS. Since then he has been an OSS enthusiast, both for personal use and for his academic work.

IRC

Part 1

• People interact by writing messages that are shown to all the other people in the channel. If the nicknames of one or more persons appear in a message, such persons will hear a sound and see the message somewhat highlighted.
• The log reports a meeting, which makes use of a meetbot. The pattern of communication is, in general, non-linear, since different dialogues can overlap with each other. For example, more than one person replied to the same question or comment, giving rise to branches in the communication.
• The communication is informal, and many to many.
• I saw many technical terms, some of which I could not understand. There were also some special messages for the meetbot.
• bonus question: the bot hasn't picked up Heidi and Darci's actions because their nickname was typed with the wrong case, and the meetbot is case-sensitive

Part 3

• I tried to observe the #a11y on the irc.gnome.org but, after several hours, there was no activity; so I turned to the #gtk+ channel on the same server.
• Unlike the meeting observed in the log, the communication was made mostly of help requests and answers.
• There was also a bot, but it was called bugbot and reported about creation and status changes of gnome bugs.
• The talk was very technical, I could not understand in detail most of it, since I don't know gtk+

FOSS Project Anatomy

Sugar Labs

• my students are all involved in Computer Science curricula (either BSc or MSc). Therefore I think the best fit for them is the Developer role, although some of them could be interested (and have skills) also for the Designer and Content Writer roles
• all the above roles require the ability to communicate: either through code, words, or images. This makes particular sense in a project developed by a large community for an even larger community of users in education. The difference is in the other skills required: either ability to code, to write clear documents, to design beautiful images and usable interfaces
• in order to enter a new bug for a Sugar Labs project, you should have a github account, go to the Issues section of the project and push the New issue button
• the types of tickets shown by the query on the bugs.sugarlabs.org bug tracker are of three types: defect, enhancement, and task. By the way this bug tracker seems to be independent of the github issues that can be opened by any github user
• last commit on Sugar Labs source repository was made on May 16 2017, 12 days before I wrote these notes
• at the beginning of each release cycle the dev team creates a roadmap for that release (e.g., 0.112). Such a roadmap lists the goals, schedule and freeze dates for the release. The schedule should be observed by all the module maintainers of Glucose (base) and Fructose (base activity) modules

Sahana Eden

• contributing as Testers can either involve manual testing (that can be done also by non-technical contributors), unit-testing the code you write (if you are contributing also as Developer), or working on the Continuous Integration process. Compared to the Sugar Labs project, this project distinguishes the Developer and Tester roles
• the bug tracking page is a list of reports that correspond to useful queries to the bug tracking system. This was not available in the Sugar Labs project. The Active Tickets are categorized into defect/bug, enhancement, task and documentation. The list of Active Tickets reports, for each ticket, component, version, priority, type, owner, status and creation date. By default minor-priority tickets appear after major-priority tickets and in a different color. I was surprised that the last ticket was opened more than 2 years ago
• last commit on Sahana Eden source repository was made on May 25 2017, 2 days before I wrote these notes
• the Sahana Eden roadmap seems quite outdated and unstructured, compared to the Sugar Labs project. It lists three releases (0.9.0, 1.0, and 2.0) that are probably all quite old, since even the last one has still a pending active ticket (see above). For the last release (2.0) there are estimations of the hours needed for the goals

FOSS Field Trip

GitHub

• GitHub found an impressive number of 13,432 repositories with the word "education"
• the first project in the list was nodejs/education. The Graphs/Commits shows graphically the number of commits during the past year (aggregated every 20 days) and the number of commits during the last week (day by day)
• for the repository nodejs/education there was 1 commit during the last week, and about 20 commits during the past year: apparently the project development was not very active during the past year
• GitHub found 301 repositories with the word "humanitarian"
• the last commit on project HTBox/crisischeckin was made on April 22, about 6 weeks before my access to the repository
• GitHub found 121 repositories with the phrase "disaster management"