[Events] Is "Open Source Comes to Campus" needed?

Sun Feb 5 20:44:48 UTC 2012

Hi everyone,
My name is Kevin Carillo and I have been in touch with Asheesh who has kindly agreed to help me out in my PhD thesis project which is about understanding what makes a FLOSS community newcomer become a FLOSS community citizen.

I would like to raise a few points about the necessity of the "Open Source Comes to Campus' programme. I am not aware of all the details of the programme as my knowledge about it is limited to my conversations with Asheesh. Apologies if what I am going to answer is not relevant or else if this is something that have already been discussed.

First of all, you guys are doing some amazing job with OpenHatch, 

I guess the important thing according to my understanding, is to clearly define what you guys are trying to achieve with the OSCC programme. is it to raise the awareness about the overall FLOSS movement, get participants to contribute at least one to a project, get participants to become long time FLOSS contributors, etc ...

It is obviously not something easy to measure when you want to know if people will become long-term contributors. However, in social sciences, it is common to measure this kind of aspect through measures of intention so "intention to become long-term contributors", for instance. At the end of the programme, among the other questions such as the ones you have proposed in the previous message you could have something like "I plan to become a long-term contributor in one or several FLOSS projects". I agree that it is not by far an exact measure but if by the end of a OSCC session, you do not manage to generate such intention then the probability that someone is going to become a long-term contributor is then small, and you have failed to achieve your objective. Objectives are more or less easy to measure, however. If you do OSCC to simply raise the awareness about FLOSS, you can still measure things like "I am planning to talk about FLOSS to all my friends ...", "I am going to inquire more about FLOSS projects" ... and other measures like that. 

It is also important to reassess such measures (depending on the objectives you have set for OSCC), some months later (6 months perhaps), keep track of the participants and ask them again the same questions. It would also give you some indication about the strength of intention that you have created with OSCC. In other words, if somebody has not changed his or her mind after 6 months, then it tells you that you have done a good job in generating a long-term behavioural intention.

I stop know with my academic bla bla ... enough for now. I hope no one has fallen asleep reading my post. 

Again guys, well done with OpenHatch! I have told Asheesh that I am already working on trying to get OSCC in Wellington, New Zealand.

Kevin

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Is "Open Source Comes to Campus" needed? (Karen Rustad)

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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2012 14:56:16 -0800
From: Karen Rustad <karen.rustad at gmail.com>
To: events at lists.openhatch.org
Subject: Re: [Events] Is "Open Source Comes to Campus" needed?
Message-ID:
        <CAA2W6bEHEL+rCmSzsorRLC7OQDT6LugyKv6_AooBW+io=k-pYw at mail.gmail.com>
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I made a pad for brainstorming survey topics / questions:
https://etherpad.mozilla.org/floss-readiness-survey

-- Karen

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 2:48 PM, Asheesh Laroia <lists at asheesh.org> wrote:

> Excerpts from Jessica McKellar's message of Fri Feb 03 15:13:36 -0500 2012
> :
> > I would love to see this happen and help craft the survey /
> > investigate prior results in this space.
>
> My thoughts on the survey are that we should:
>
> * Try to ask questions that resemble to existing diversity-in-computing
>  surveys, so that we end up with comparable results.
>
> * Talk to someone who's active in FLOSS and social science, like Mako
>  or Kevin Carillo (who I spoke with recently about a survey he's doing
>  to understand how newcomers experience FLOSS projects).
>
> * Ask some fairly objective questions, like:
>
>  Have you ever taken a "patch" file and used it to modify a set of files,
> e.g.
>  software source code?
>
>  Have you used a version control system, such as git, CVS, Subversion, hg,
> bzr, etc.?
>
>  Have you ever filed an issue/ticket/bug to report a problem or
> feature-request
>  for a FLOSS project?
>
>  Have you ever read through a bug in an open source project's bug tracker
>  in order to understand a problem with a program?
>
> * Ask some fairly subjective, self-rated questions, like:
>
>  Are you interested in learning how to contribute to free, libre open
> source software?
>
>  For how many years have you (to your knowledge) used programs that count
> as FLOSS?
>
>  Do you have personal projects that you have released as open source?
>
> That's the kind of thing I'm thinking of; again, it's the kind of
> research that would show us if http://campus.openhatch.org/ is a good
> idea, and what sort of diversity impact it could have.
>
> -- Asheesh.
> _______________________________________________
> Events mailing list
> Events at lists.openhatch.org
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