The third book of the semester, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, examines the history, motivations, sociology, philosophy, and economics behind the open source movement. In his writings, ESR spends a significant amount of time discussing different projects such as Linux, Mozilla, and Fetchmail.
The goal of the third project is for you to explore an existing open source project and provide a case study of it. The artifact that you will create is a presentation that you will need to present to the class.
Working in groups of 2 - 4, students must create a case study that meets the following requirements:
The project your group studies must be a well established open source project with a reasonable amount of history such as:
Ideally, it would be a project that you use regularly and have an interest in.
Members of your group must attempt to make a contribution to the open source project such as a pull request, bug report, documentation, etc.
The presentation must include the following topics:
A brief summary of what the project is, what its goals are, who is the target audience, and what are its key features (ie. why is it interesting).
A discussion on whether or not the project follows any of ESR's 19 principles that he enumerated in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
A discussion of what sort of homesteading in the noosphere the project participates in (ie. how does the community communicate and organize itself, what sort of web properties does it run, etc.).
A discussion on the license the project uses and who contributes to the project's magic cauldron.
A discussion of the process of contributing to the project, including evidence of your group's attempt to contribute.
Each group will have approximately 8 to 10 minutes to present.
Here are some interesting resources:
Here is the project timeline:
| Date | Milestone | Description |
|---|---|---|
| March 31 | Proposal | Description of proposed project. |
| April 7 | Progress | Status report of current progress. |
| April 9 | Presentation | In-class presentations and demonstrations. |
| April 11 | Presentation | In-class presentations and demonstrations. |
More details about each of these milestones is described below.
Your group must submit a proposal document by noon on Saturday, March 31, which provides the following information:
Lists the group members and each of their proposed roles.
Identify the open source project your group wishes to study and explain why it was chosen.
Describe the possible contributions you will attempt to make to the project (and which group members will be working on the contributions).
Your group must submit a proposal slide deck (3 - 6 slides) by noon on Saturday, April 7, which provides the following information:
Addresses the questions and expections in feedback email provided regarding the project proposal.
Summarizes the work done thus far, in particular the status of your contributions to the open source project and what sort of community interaction your group has experienced.
Enumerates the remaining tasks, with specifics on what you plan on accomplishing before the presentation.
Itemize contributions to the project thus far and what how each member will aid in completing the tasks above.
Provide video or image evidence of your project and your progress.
To allow for more presentation time, we will be foregoing the hackathaon and simply have two days of presentations. This means each group will have approximately 8 to 10 minutes to present the case study of their chosen open source project.
To help you organize your pitch, your group must submit a project slide deck (6-10 slides) by 9:00 AM on Tuesday, April 9, which provides the information described in the requirements.
The project will be graded with the following rubric:
| Metric | Points | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Proposal | 5 | Does the proposed project meet the requirements? |
| Progress | 5 | How much work did the group do before the presentations? |
| Presentation | 10 | How well did the group present and demonstrate their case study? |
| Requirements | 5 | How well did the project meet the requirements? |
| Technical Challenge | 10 | How difficult was the group's contribution? |
| Execution | 10 | How complete was the group's contribution? |
The first two metrics will be graded by the instructor, but the final four metrics will be evaluated based on feedback from your fellow classmates.
Once you have organized your group, please fill out the following form
Note, while you can always update your submission whenever you have your proposal, code repository, and presentation slides, I would recommend creating place-holder links that you fill-in later (ie. create empty slides for the proposal and presentation and then update those documents later).