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.
What you Need to Do
To participate in the SPO600 course, you need to:
- Create a blog (if you don't already have one) or create a tag/category for SPO600 if you're going to use an existing blog. Collect these pieces of information:
- The URL of your main public blog page
- The URL of your blog feed - this is the link that will provide an RSS or ATOM feed of your blog content.
- Create an SSH key pair.
- Copy the public key to a file named userid.pub (where userid is the user name that you wish to have on the SPO600 class servers)
- Create an account on the Seneca Topics in Open Source Slack channel.
- Fill in this form to send this information to your professor.
Instructions on how to do these things is detailed below.
Wiki
The OpenSource@Seneca wiki is located at http://wiki.cdot.senecacollege.ca (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 Current 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
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.
The OpenSource@Seneca planet is Telescope.
See the Open Source@Seneca Blog Guidelines for information about setting up your blog and including your postings in Telescope.
In this course, most coursework is submitted by blogging. Therefore, it is important to write blog posts frequently (at least 2x per week), with good content, writing, and links.
It's a good idea to read Telescope several times a week. Finding out what your colleagues are doing can give you useful ideas and accelerate your own project work.
Slack
Slack is an online discussion system. Sign up to use the Seneca Open Source Slack workspace (sign-up with your @myseneca.ca email; this same Slack workspace is used in the OSD600/DPS909 course, so you may already have an account if you're also taking that course).
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 critical to 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.
