User:Gtorta

Gianluca Torta

Gianluca 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 Activity

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