DPS909 and OSD600 Fall 2008 Weekly Schedule

Introduction

The fall is broken into two parts. First, general open source and and community (i.e., Mozilla, OpenOffice.org) 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 1) 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
• Intro to the OpenOffice.org project
  • OpenOffice.org Overview

• 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 discusses the Mozilla Manifesto [MP3]

• TODO
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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 8) - Collaborative and Community Development Practices

• Collaborative development using on-line tools
• Intro to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
• Blogs and Planets
  • Planet Mozilla
  • Novell's OpenOffice.org Planet
  • Planet OpenOffice.org
  • OpenSource@Seneca Planet
• Using Wikis for Collaborative writing
  • Wikipedia and MediaWiki
  • 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
  • Wikis used by Mozilla and OpenOffice.org
    • http://developer.mozilla.org (a.k.a., devmo, MDC)
    • http://wiki.mozilla.org (a.k.a., wmo or wiki.m.o)
    • http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page
• Project discussion

• Guests
  • On Thursday September 11th during class, we'll be joined by OpenOffice.org's Community Manger, Louis Suarez-Potts. Louis will talk about open source community, the OpenOffice.org project, and answer your questions.
  • Also on Thursday September 11th from 5:00 - 6:00, the Fedora project leader, Paul Frields, will be hosting an IRC discussion on freenode:#seneca for the LUX students. You are encouraged to join and listen to Paul discuss the Fedora project, Linux, and how their community works. You can also see a video of Paul talking about Fedora here.

• 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
• Learning Collaborative Development Lab Fall 2008

• TODO
  • Insure all TODO items from week 1 are completed
  • Comment in at least one other student's blog with your feedback to what they wrote
  • Watch online lectures for this week about open source community
  • Complete this week's lab by Friday.
  • Look at the Potential Projects page and pick 3 projects on which you'd like to work--next week, you'll narrow this to just one. List them here along with your name.
  • Add your wiki page to the class list for your section: Students in DPS909 Fall 2008 or Students in OSD600 Fall 2008