User:JMac

Bio

John MacCormick has degrees in mathematics from the University of Cambridge and the University of Auckland, and a doctorate in computer vision from the University of Oxford. He was a research fellow at Linacre College, Oxford from 1999-2000, a research scientist at HP Labs from 2000-2003, and a computer scientist with Microsoft Research from 2003-2007. Since 2007, Dr. MacCormick has been a professor of computer science at Dickinson College. He is the author of two books (Stochastic Algorithms for Visual Tracking, and Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers), has filed over a dozen US patents on novel computer technologies, and is the author of numerous peer-reviewed academic conference and journal papers. His work spans several sub-fields of computer science, including computer vision, large-scale distributed systems, computer science education, and the public understanding of computer science.

For more details please see John MacCormick's homepage at Dickinson College.

Exercises for POSSE 2016-6 workshop

Answers to IRC exercise from "Part 1 – Walk through of IRC Conversation"

• How do people interact?

It’s a mixture of businesslike interactions, informal suggestions, and occasional humor.

• What is the pattern of communication? Is it linear or branched? Formal or informal? One-to-many, one-to-one or a mix?

It appears to be a mix of all the above.

• Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning?

I don’t see any special terms in the regular text. The meetbot lines seem to have special purposes e.g. #info #action

• Can you make any other observations?

The "actions" that get recorded are interesting, in that they basically seem to list future jobs that need to be done and assign them to specific people. In two of the cases, participants assign a jobs to themselves, but in one case Darci assigns an action to Amber -- it looks reasonably innocuous in this case, but I wonder about the general etiquette of assigning jobs to others within such a project.

• Bonus question: Why didn't Heidi and Darci's actions get picked up by the meetbot?

I don't know the answer to this. Could it have something to do with assigning an action to oneself?

Answers to exercise from "Part 1 – Anatomy of a FOSS Project"

• Summarize the roles that you think would be most applicable for your students on your faculty wiki page. If you think that more than a single role is applicable, indicate why.

Designer, developer. Our students are appropriate for both of these.

• What are the commonalities across roles? What are the differences?

Commonalities include willingness to work with others and an understanding of the open-source approach in general. Differences include specific skills required, such as knowledge of Python and/or JavaScript for the developer role.

• describe the general process for submitting a bug and indicate the types/categories of tickets listed on this page as well as the information available for each ticket

general process requires opening a new ticket in the automated system and submitting a detailed description. Project members will then take a look at the pocket and confirm it, assign it a status etc. The information in each ticket includes a summary, a status (new, unconfirmed, etc.), an owner, a type (defect versus enhancement), a priority (high, normal), and a milestone (usually “unspecified”).

• Can you determine from the information provided here whether the project uses a web-based common repository or a local repo?

It appears to be what one would call a local repository (at git://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-base/mainline.git), since it is hosted by the sugar labs own servers.

• Include an entry on your wiki page that describes how the release cycle and roadmap update are related.

The release cycle uses a pattern that is standard in software development, with odd-numbered releases being unstable and even numbers stable. For each numbered release, there is a roadmap specifying dates for actual events in that release, such as code freezes of various kinds.

• Sahana: re Developers, Testers, Designers. For example, are there any commonalities? Is there something distinct for each type of contributor? How is this structure different than the one you found on the Sugar Labs website?

There are distinct features for each type of contributor, but again the commonalities include knowledge of open source methodologies. There are some different roles here, including SysAdmin and translator, which I didn’t see in the Sugar Labs structure.

• local vs web-based repository?

The command “git clone https://github.com/web2py/web2py.git --recursive” goes to github, which is a web-based repository.

• Info about Sahana release cycle

The first milestone (0.9.0 is recorded as being “four years late”). Other milestones have no date set, although the 1.0 milestone was “planned for” May 2012.