User:Jfoster

== Introduction ++ James Foster is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Walla Walla University, a Seventh-day Adventist Higher Education institution founded in 1892. The University has about 1800 students in undergraduate and masters programs.

James started teaching at Walla Walla University at the beginning of 2018 after working in industry for 35 years. In addition to a graduate degree in Computer Science, James has a J.D., an M.B.A., and has worked as a commercial pilot and flight instructor. Most of James' technical experience is with Smalltalk and GemStone and his blog reflects that focus.

Useful Links

• Activity Evaluation
• Travel Information
• Google Groups

FOSS Field Trip (Activity)

1. GitHub
   1. GitHub.com
   2. Search for Education
      1. As of 18-May-2018, GitHub reports 20,199 repositories as a response to a query for 'education'.
      2. The Insights tab on a project shows the number of commits per week for the past year in a bar chart and the number of commits per day for the past week in a line chart.
   3. Search for Humanitarian
      1. A query for humanitarian reports 392 repository.
      2. HTBox/crisischeckin had a commit on 22-April-2017.
   4. Search for Disaster Management
      1. I found 34 projects in 'disaster management applications'.
2. OpenHub
   1. OpenHub.net
   2. Search for Education
      1. A search on OpenHub for 'education' returned 226 pages of 10 projects each, so ~2260 projects.
      2. I was not able to find any KDE Education projects on GitHub.
      3. An analysis of similar projects (from 11 months ago) shows 10 10 related projects.
      4. The KDE Educaton project page shows a project summary, a nutshell, a quick reference, license information, code information, activity information, and contributors per month.
   3. Search for Humanitarian and Disaster Management
      1. Humanitarian has 3 pages of projects (~30) and disaster management has a similar number of pages and projects.
      2. Projects that have had no activity in the past two years will show as inactive.
   4. Organizations
      1. The Organizations page shows a list of organizations and various statistics including the most active, the newest, and the count and commits of organizations by sector
   5. OpenMRS
      1. The most recent commits to OpenMRS Core are about two months old.
   6. OpenMRS Core on GitHub
      1. The most recent commits to OpenMRS are less than a week old.
      2. The sites have different information because they represent different repositories and have different events. According to the OpenMRS Developers page, GitHub is the official code repository.
   7. Having two sites might offer some redundancy, but seems to me to just create confusion. In my experience multiple sites is a consequence of moving from one to another. I've never seen a case where having two master repositories has any advantage.

Project Evaluation Rubric

Evaluation Factor	Level (0-2)	Evaluation Data
Licensing	2	OpenMRS is distributed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. This license been approved by the OSI.
Language	1	OpenMRS is primarily Java (96%). Our students have not taken Java prior to the open source contribution assignment, but they have taken C++ and should be familiar with the OO paradigm.
Level of Activity	2	OpenMRS has extensive activity in the last two quarters. I didn't bother to page back further.
Number of Contributors	2	OpenMRS shows over 300 contributors. This is an active community!
Product Size	1	OpenMRS has over 200 MB of code. This is a bit large for my needs!
Issue Tracker	2	The third-part tracker shows a total of 1256 JIRA tickets ready for work and 12875 that are closed. When sorted by date added, the fifth most recent addition is "PatientService getPatients(name, identifier, types, matchIdentifierExactly) only searches on name or identifier" (TRUNK-5397) and was added on 27-April-2018. Many issues were resolved in the last week and other issues were added, so this is an active project.
New Contributor	2	OpenMRS has instructions for downloading and installing the code and tools needed on the GitHub readme as well as at openmrs.org. There is a community bulletin board with recent activityand 'Telegram' channel (the IRC link is broken).
Community Norms	2	There is an extensive Code of Conduct. In addition to good generalizations (be considerate, respectful, and collaborative), there are good concrete suggestions such as "when you disagree, consult others" and "step down considerately" (let others know when you leave or disengage). There are several avenues for communication, perhaps too many? A brief scan of the IRC log showed some back-and-forth on who should test some failing issues and some claiming they didn't have enough time. Beyond that, the interactions seemed very supportive and there are ample examples of helping users get started.
User Base	2	The Atlas shows a number of Clinical sites. The Download page shows a number of alternatives for production installations. Finally, there are a number of User Guides.
Total Score	16	Overall this looks like a worthwhile project with a good community.

Copyright and Licensing

OpenMRS is distributed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. Apache/fineract is licensed under Apache License Version 2.0. The Regulately backend does not have a license file but the front-end has an MIT license.

The Mozilla 2.0, Apache 2.0, and MIT licenses are similar and fairly permissive. I would feel comfortable contributing to any of these projects. I suppose that we are supposed to be concerned about the project without a license, but I wouldn't have any qualms about using it.

FOSS In Courses 1

I am currently teaching "The Art and Practice of Computer Science" as a first-year introductory course and contributing to an open source project is a requirement. I particularly appreciated the suggestions of how one could contribute without being an experienced programmer since this describes all the students. I have encouraged them to focus on documentation and/or verifying bugs. I will also be working with students next school year (Sept-June) on their capstone projects and I expect that we will look at open source as an opportunity.