SPO600 Communication Tools
SPO600 students use a number of communication tools that have been built and heavily adopted by Open Source communities. This page contains set-up instructions for some of these communication tools.
Wiki
The OpenSource@Seneca wiki is located at http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/ (this page is part of it). To create an account, click on the log in / create account link in the upper-right corner and follow the instructions there (mail the Wiki administrator cdot-wiki-admin@senecacollege.ca from your Learn account, and check your mail for a welcome message and instructions - note that it usually takes a day or more for wiki account creation, which is a manual process to guard against spammers). Once you have created an account and logged in, most of the pages within the Wiki will have an Edit link at the top of the page, and you can use this link to add to, edit, or correct any page.
After creating your account, please update your user page with your personal details including your IRC nick (you can get to your personal page by clicking your name, above), and add yourself to Winter 2015 SPO600 Participants page.
Tip: You can have the system "watch" pages that interest you. First, go to your preferences page using the my preferences link (which appears at the top of each page when you're logged in), and check the box marked "E-mail me when a page I'm watching is changed". Next, click on the "watch" link on the top of any pages for which you want to receive change notification. For example, you may want to be informed when a change is made to pages that you have created, and you may also want to be notified when a page containing due dates or assignment details is changed.
...Which means you can edit it. Obviously, don't change things such as assignment due dates (!), but feel free to create new pages, add text to existing pages, fix any typos you find, and add resources and links.
Blog and Planet
A blog (short for weblog) is a (usually personal) website where dated articles are posted over a period of time. In the open source community, blogs are used to announce new projects, project releases, and general information, to comment on current happenings, to record personal reflections, and to comment on other people's blog postings. Many Open Source communities aggregate posts from their community members into a Planet so that it is possible to view posts from the entire community on one web page.
See the Open Source@Seneca Blog Guidelines and Planet List for information about setting up your blog and including your postings in our Planet.
The OpenSource@Seneca planet is at http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/~chris.tyler/planet/
In this course, most coursework is submitted by blogging. Therefore, it is important to write blog posts frequently, with good content, writing, and links.
It's a good idea to read the Planet several times a week. Finding out what your colleagues are doing can give you useful ideas and accelerate your own project work.
IRC
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat and provides immediate, text-based chat facilities. See the IRC article on this wiki for details. Some open source projects use IRC extensively, others are moving away from it.
When communicating with your professor by email, please use your Seneca-provided e-mail address as the "From:" address (yourname@myseneca.ca). Because your professor receives a huge amount of email, it's helpful if you include your course code in the subject line of each of your messages.
Community Communication Resources
Each open source community uses some combination of email, IRC, blogs, wiki, and bug-tracking systems to facilitate communication. Learn the tools used by the communities you are interacting with, and communicate with their preferred tools.
