The document discusses Beaversource, an open source project at Oregon State University that combines social networking features and project management tools to help college students learn open source software development skills. It provides a sandbox environment where students can collaborate on projects and learn skills like code reviewing through projects hosted on the platform. The platform uses the Elgg social networking framework and Trac project management tools to allow students to find collaborators, browse code, and manage bugs and wikis for projects. It aims to lower barriers for students to contribute to open source projects through mentoring and a supportive community environment.

1. BUILDING OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION Jose Cedeno Justin Gallardo

3. How to build and maintain an open source community in higher education

4. What challenges college students face when trying to join OSS projects

5. How we are trying to address some of these problems through Beaversource

7. A magic solution that will work for all communities

8. Only a bunch of statistics or technical paper talk

9. College students get a degree, but most do not possess the skills to successfully join an open source project The problem:

11. Code review knowledge

12. Open Source style documentation

13. Dealing and working with large repository

14. Filing good bug reports

15. Collaborating online with other OSS peers

16. RTFM

18. Departments around OSU wanted an easy way to share code and make it publicly available for other developers at OSU

20. Make it easy for people to find each other and projects they might be interested

21. Create a safe haven where students do not feel intimidated by feedback.

22. Our Solution

24. Wiki

25. Finding people and other projects

26. Forums

27. Mailing lists

28. Bug Tracker

30. As a CS freshman advances in his or her degree, they start building a portfolio. The various projects that they have worked on are easily available online

32. A collaboration project between College of Engineering, Central Web Services, University Housing and Dining and Network Engineering at Oregon State University

33. Funding for the project was also provided by an NSF grant

36. Wiki

37. SCM

38. Browsing code online

39. Statistics

40. Bug Tracker

41. Browsing Code

42. Wiki

43. Project Statistics

45. Postgres backend

46. Multi-project support

47. Automated project creation and management

48. Subversion

49. Using 0.10.x right now, looking to upgrade to 0.11.x

51. Changesets

53. We are running an old version of Trac

55. People not aware of CS can use the social site and find out more about CS

56. Projects can communicate with users, have discussions and a more user friendly frontend

57. The profile page of a student becomes their portfolio after a few years

58. We can boost student support using things like Karma

61. Project Profiles

62. Forums

63. Promoting Projects

64. User Profile

65. Browsing Friends

66. Project Profile

67. Forums

68. Marketplace

69. Tag Cloud

71. Supports MySQL database (we’re using postgres)

72. It provides basic level file caching

73. We are in the process of upgrading from 0.9.x to 1.5

75. Limited functionality for project profiles

76. Communities cannot have page

77. Not very polished code or API

79. 50+ projects

80. Lower level classes are using Beaversource

81. Students are giving us plenty of feedback in the form of bug tickets :)

83. As we find bugs, we file them in Elgg’s bug tracker

84. We are providing a patch to Elgg1.5 to support postgres databases

85. We idle and participate in #elgg

87. We are upgrading to Elgg1.5 which will give us better support for user profiles and communities

88. We will be doing a homepage redesign and fixing more UI problems

89. Improve documentation

90. Track website traffic better

93. http://osel.oregonstate.edu

96. http://osuosl.org

97. Conclusion

100. http://beaversource.oregonstate.edu/social/gallardj

103. Documentation and instructions are a must

104. We are not trying to replace the existing tools that the teachers have

106. Launchpad and Ubuntu are also trying to combine the social and coding aspect

107. We are not trying to compete with facebook

109. We want to be just a starting point for them

110. As their project grows and they require a more robust infrastructure they may choose to move on to SourceForge or GoogleCode

112. Git does not have as robust or user friendly GUI programs for Windows

113. People can use git-svn