FOSS Politics Writing Activity
| Title |
FOSS Politics Writing Activity |
|---|---|
| Overview |
This activity helps student investigate politics within the open-source community. |
| Prerequisites |
Basic knowledge of definition of Open Source |
| Learning Objectives |
After successfully completing this activity, the learner should be able to:
Close reading of articles. Identifying concepts and relationships. Writing communication. |
| Process Skills Practiced |
Background
Every community has politics. Understanding those politics is important work effectively within a community. This activity helps student investigate politics within the open-source community.
This is a general activity that could be appropriate for a variety of classes.
- Openness courses
- Any course where you want students to understand how FOSS communities communicate/work-flow
- Research methods course (information literacy)
- Less programming course, like CS0
- Writing component in a technical course
- Ethics course
Directions
Read articles that discuss the organizational and institutional view of FOSS, focusing on how communications in FOSS projects are organized and structured, and how FOSS projects have inherent politics. The outcomes of this activity is the production of a summary (extended abstract) address the research methods used to study these situations - this could be modified to address more pertinent aspects about the FOSS community.
Articles that have been used in the past, include:
- Ebert, Christof. "Open Source Drives Innovation Software", IEEE Software, Volume 24, Issue 3, 2007.
- Morelli, Ralph. "A global collaboration to deploy help to China", Communications of the ACM (CACM), Volume 53, Issue 12, December 2010.
- Zilouchian Moghaddam, Roshanak and Twidale, Michael and Bongen, Kora. "Open Source Interface Politics: Identity, Acceptance, Trust, and Lobbying", CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing, 2011.
Deliverables
Written abstract or essay
Assessment
How will the activity be graded?
How will learning will be measured?
Include sample assessment questions/rubrics.
| Criteria | Level 1 (fail) | Level 2 (pass) | Level 3 (good) | Level 4 (exceptional) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The purpose of the project | ||||
| Why the project is open source |
Comments
Typical rubrics relating to writing, completeness of argument, and process of understanding structure. You may choose to focus on identifying research methods correctly (e.g., other steps they took to dig into the material).
Depending on your class, there may be some concerns:
- How do you fit it into your curriculum that already has a lot of requirements?
- How long does it take to grade them (peer review?)
- Build up to larger assignment with smaller assignments.
- Matching level of articles to level of students.
Additional Information
| ACM BoK Area & Unit(s) |
|
|---|---|
| ACM BoK Topic(s) |
|
| Difficulty | |
| Estimated Time to Complete |
2 weeks |
| Environment / Materials |
Current events articles or papers |
| Author(s) |
Robert Duvall, Stoney Jackson, Joanna Klukowska, Edward Mirielli |
| Source | |
| License |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
|
Suggestions for Open Source Community
Suggestions for an open source community member who is working in conjunction with the instructor.
