DPS909 and OSD600 Fall 2009 Weekly Schedule

Introduction

The fall is broken into two parts. First, general open source and and community (i.e., Mozilla) specific skills and ideas are taught. Students learn how to deal with the tools, techniques, and practices of their chosen project and its community. Second, students are taught about extensibility models, and how to write Add-ons and Extensions.

Part I – Essential Open Source Development Skills and Concepts

Week 1 (Sept 7) Course introduction

• Course introduction
• Intro to open source
• Intro to Mozilla project
  • Mozilla Project Overview
  • Community, Foundation, Corporation
  • The Mozilla Manifesto
  • Mozilla platform and technologies

• Readings/Resources
  • "Cathedral and Bazaar" by Eric Raymond
  • "Revolution OS" [film] (see also http://www.revolution-os.com/ or QA 76.9.A25 R68 2003)
  • Mike Shaver (Mozilla Corporation VP of Engineering) discusses the Mozilla Manifesto [MP3]
  • Article about Mozilla and Firefox in the New York Times

• TODO
  • Complete readings and watching/listening to this weeks resources.
  • Create an account on this wiki for yourself
  • Create a personal wiki page on this wiki, and add a link for yourself to the People page and the
  • Create a blog (wordpress or blogspot or whatever) and create a feed category or tag called "open source"
  • Read the Blog Guidelines for instructions on how to use your blog in the course
  • Add your blog feed and info to the Open Source@Seneca Planet List so that it appears in the OpenSource@Seneca Planet
  • Blog on your reactions to the readings for this week, and also introduce yourself.
  • Begin learning how to use IRC for communication. We'll cover this in detail next week, but it's better to get started early.

Week 2 (Sept 14) - Collaborative and Community Development Practices

• Open, collaborative, geographically dispersed development and the web
  • Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Communication
  • Timezones
• The function and value of community
  • Mozilla Foundation (MoFo)
  • Mozilla Corporation (MoCo), map of offices/individuals
  • Mozilla Community
    • Other companies or institutions working on Mozilla technology
    • Individual Contributors

• Where can the Mozilla community be found? Overview of Mozilla Communication
  • IRC - Intro to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
  • Blogs and Planets
    • How to blog?
    • How do people use blogs?
    • Planet Mozilla
    • OpenSource@Seneca Planet
    • Mozilla Education Planet
  • Twitter
    • Use of Twitter in conjunction with blogging
  • Wikis
    • Seneca Course Wiki
    • Mozilla Developer Center (MDC)
    • Mozilla Wiki (wikimo)
    • Intro to course wiki
      • "Yes, you can edit it!"
      • Common Editing tasks, History, Reverting changes
      • Watches, Recent Changes
      • Comparing selected versions (cf. diff)
      • Editing help
  • Public, project-wide status calls
  • Mailing Lists
  • Bugzilla - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org
  • The "Tree"
    • Mercurial (hg)
    • Tinderbox

• Project discussion

• Readings/Resources
• Mozilla Community (on-line lecture) by Mozilla's Mike Beltzner
• Getting started in Open Source projects, or "Learning to be at the festival" (on-line lecture) by David Humphrey (given at Mozilla24 in Stanford): Formats - mpg, ogg, mp4
• Ars Technica article on the value of academic blogging and open source
• Code Swarm Community Commits Visualizations
• Learning Collaborative Development Lab Fall 2009

• TODO
  • Ensure all TODO items from week 1 are completed
  • Begin (or continue) reading the CDOT Blog Planet, as this is where we will share class announcements and discussions.
  • Create Wiki Accounts on MDC and wikimo
  • Consider creating an account on Twitter to use in conjunction with your blog
  • Dial-in to one of the Mozilla Status calls happening this week, and blog about the experience. I'd recommend the Firefox call.
  • Join at least one Mozilla Mailing list
  • Comment in at least one other student's blog with your feedback to what they wrote. Reminder: Comments have to be approved for them to be be shown on your blog. Check your blog settings.
  • Watch online lectures for this week about open source community, blog your reactions.
  • Complete this week's lab by Friday.