User:Hfrancis
Howard Francis
Howard is currently an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Pikeville in Pikeville, KY, where he has taught for almost two dozen years. He is also the program coordinator for computer science. His primary duties include teaching the schools CS0 Intro to CS, and two semester sequence of CS1. He also leads the senior project class, which is what leads him to FOSS. In addition to the CS classes, he teaches a wide variety of freshman and sophomore math classes.
In his spare time (someone needs to remind me what the term "spare time" means!) he is a somewhat active musician. He plays trumpet in the university's pep and concert bands, and in local summer community band, which he co-founded in 2010. He is also the organist and cantor at his church.
Answers to IRC Questions:
How do people interact?
Conversations take place by typing and reading everyone's messages. You always have an opportunity to scroll back through the conversation to check on parts of the conversation you may have missed.
What is the pattern of communication?
Everyone has equal opportunities to speak. Most messages are directed at everyone else there, but sometimes someone will mention a question to someone specific. No one is interrupted so everyone's voice is heard.
Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning?
The meetbot directions were new to me, those seemed to have some significance.
Can you make any other observations?
I've used IRC before; this seemed typical of a chat meeting.
IRC Channel Observation
I wasn't able to see a structured meeting, but I did notice many small informal conversations about the project. Most of them were asking if new revisions had been seen, and if they had, what feedback was being provided. I did see what seemed to be a new interested developer ask to get involved. It was suggested to join the mailing list first. I didn't understand a lot of the terms being thrown around. I hope it comes easy to me when I join the project.
Sugar Labs Guided Tour
Community
All three teams make use of IRC; two of them also have a mailing list. There seem to be a lot more people in the Activities team.
Bug Tracking
Bugs are sorted by urgency, with those needing the most attention at the top of the page. Each ticket has a unique number, and includes information about what part of the project it affects, a brief description, its current status, who's working on it, and its type and severity.
Repository
Judging by the URL, I suspect this is a local repository.
Release Cycle
The roadmap guides the activities for each release cycle. One a new release is completed, a new roadmap for the next release is planned.
Sahana-Eden Guided Tour
Community
These pages are very different. Each page directs you to how to participate, but because the jobs of developers, designers, and testers are all much different, there is a variety of information on how to participate. The team pages at Sugar Labs seemed much more uniform and consistent than the ones here.
Bug Tracking
The Sahana-Eden bug tracker first presents you with a menu of the type of bug report you'd like. Going to the Active Tickets report, the information there is very similar to that provided at Sugar Labs.
Repository
It looks like Sahana-Eden uses GitHub as its repository.
Roadmap
It looks like Sahana-Eden's road map goes past the next release. I also don't see specific dates in this road map as I did for Sugar Labs. Here there is just a list of goals for the next releases.
FOSS Classroom Activities
My main activity (and reason for participating in this workshop) would be to have my Senior Project class make one non-trivial contribution to the code for a FOSS project. In leading up to that final activity would preliminary work, much like we're doing here. There are many assignments and materials from the SoftHum web site that would be adapted for my class.
Seeing the volume of opportunities out there, I'm considering smaller activities for my CS0 and CS1 class. My CS0 could contribute to user documentation, and my CS1 could improve internal comments in the code. There are other activities I haven't thought of yet, I'm sure.
FOSS Project Evaluation
