Open Source Comes to Campus/Curriculum/Merge Stories

Merge Stories is an OpenHatch project collecting stories about all kinds of contributions that people have made to free and open source projects. They give details about the process: how people pick issues to work on, the common obstacles they run into, the resources they use to solve problems, and more. We hope that by sharing these stories, we can give newcomers a better sense of what contributing is like.

Feel free to just click around the site. If you want to use the site in an educational setting, we suggest the following activity, which can be done alone, in pairs, or in groups.

Hark, an Activity
Read through some of the stories on the site, and answer some or all of these questions:


 * Which of the Merge Stories seems like a contribution you can make, either right now or with the help of a good mentor?
 * What are the different ways in which people got help when they got stuck? Which methods of getting help seem most comfortable to you?
 * How often do people seem to get stuck? What do you think sounds like the most frustrating problem someone had?
 * What projects mentioned in the Merge Stories seem like good communities to join?
 * What skills and approaches seem most helpful to have/use? How can you work on building those skills?