FOSS Field Trip (Activity)

Title	FOSS Field Trip - Browsing a Forge
Overview	Learners will gain an understanding of the breadth of available FOSS projects as well as differences between GitHub and OpenHub.
Prerequisites	None.
Learning Objectives	After successfully completing this activity, the learner should be able to: Search for FOSS projects by category on both GitHub and OpenHub. Look a difference features of GitHub and OpenHub.
Process Skills Practiced	Critical Thinking Information Processing

Background

Open source pre-dates the Web, but the Web and Internet connectivity have been essential for the blossoming of FOSS in recent years. FOSS projects need to be available on the Web to ever gain much attention. There are a growing number of sites (often called “forges”) that provide a home and visibility to FOSS projects (although many of the biggest projects live on their own sites).

Directions

POSSE Attendees: Please post your answers to the following questions on your foss2serve wiki.

Part 1 - GitHub

One of the best known of these FOSS project hosting sites is GitHub. In this activity you will search for projects on GitHub based upon category.

Do the following:

1. Go to: https://github.com/
2. Use the Search feature on the top right next to the Log In button to search for educational applications by placing the word education in the search box and click Search.
   1. How many repositories are there in this category? 13,576 repository results
   2. Click on the first project. Click on Graphs, then Commits. What information does this page provide? It lists all the commits done by date
3. Go back to the main page and use the Search feature to look for humanitarian applications. Type the word humanitarian in the search box and click Search.
   1. How many repositories are there in this category? 303 repository results
   2. Locate the HTBox/crisischeckin project. When was the last update? Latest commit 52774db on Apr 22
4. Use the Search feature to look for disaster management applications. Type the phrase disaster management the search box and click Search.
   1. How many projects are there in this category? 153 repository results

Keep this browser tab open while you move onto Part 2.

Part 2 - OpenHub

In this activity, you will use OpenHub to search for both educational as well as humanitarian projects.

Searching OpenHub:

1. Go to: https://www.openhub.net/
2. In the search space, enter: education
   1. Notice it tells you how many pages of results there are, not number of projects. By default, there should be 10 projects per page. How many projects were returned? 3470 projects
   2. KDE Education should be the second result. Click on it. Look on the right hand side of the page and click on Code Locations. There are a number of projects listed here. Is any of the code located on GitHub? Yes there are two located on git master and the SCM type for all projects is Git
   3. Go back one page. Under the Code Locations, it provides several projects that are Similar. Click on Similar Projects. How many similar projects are listed? There are 10 similar projects listed
   4. Scroll down. What information does OpenHub provide about the project? Name of project and whether it is active, the language it is mostly written in and the license
3. Perform searches for both humanitarian and disaster management.
   1. How many projects were returned for each search? 34 Humanitarian projects and 54 disaster management projects
   2. Click on the Activity icon. Why do so many projects do not have activity information available? Projects that have had no activity in the past two years will show as inactive. Also because Open Hub is weighting recent contributions more heavily, projects that do not have recent analysis because of problems with their code locations or other problems blocking Open Hub from collecting and analyzing code will show the Not Available icon.
4. Click on Organizations.
   1. What information is provided on this page? Information on most active organizations, Newest organizations, Organizations by 30 Day Commit Volume and stats by sector
5. Search for OpenMRS.
   1. When was the last commit for OpenMRS Core? April 17, 2017
6. Go back to GitHub and search for OpenMRS Core.
   1. When was the last commit? February 12, 2014
   2. Why do you think these sites have different information? Maybe because they switched to using OpenHub and therefore it has the most recent
7. What would be the benefits/drawbacks of using both GitHub and OpenHub to search for a project? I guess the contradictions in information found about projects

Deliverables

POSSE: Please post the answers to these questions on your foss2serve user wiki page.

Students: Wiki posting describing your explorations of GitHub and OpenHub.

Notes for Instructors

The remaining sections of this document are intended for the instructor. They are not part of the learning activity that would be given to students.

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

• What should the instructor know before using this activity?
• What are some likely difficulties that an instructor may encounter using this activity?

Variants and Adaptations:

POGIL-style combined FOSS Field Trip and Project Evaluation used by Chris Murphy in his FOSS Course, UPenn, Murphy.

Suggestions for Open Source Community

Suggestions for an open source community member who is working in conjunction with the instructor.