Open Source Comes to Campus/Resources

If you're looking for help with the logistics of running an OSCTC-type event, see here.

It's not particularly clear from how this page is laid out, but everything listed as a "demo" is intended to be done interactively at a shell or something, with all of the modifications coming from the students in the audience.

Computer Setup
See the computer setup page.

Command line basics
(This is based on what the command line tutorial in the Boston Python Workshop.)

Many of the tools of open source development are primarily used via the command line. Let's get some practice with navigating the computer from the command line.


 * Windows
 * OS X
 * Linux

Open Source Communication Tools
You can see the current and past versions of this presentation here.

Learning Git
You can see the current and past versions of this presentation here.

Career Panel
See also: OSCTC career panel.

We aim for four panelists representing a diversity of open-source jobs. For example, past panelists have included people who work for Red Hat BoCoup Loft the Sunlight Foundation and the Personal Genome Project, as well as freelancers.

We start off by asking each person to introduce themselves, their current occupation, and their current employer and to talk very briefly about how that work relates to open source.

Then - questions! Potential questions include:
 * How did you get started in open source?
 * What opportunities are out there for college students? And do you have any other advice specific to college students?
 * Do you have advice on what to do when approaching a project for the first time?
 * What obstacles have you faced in open source? How have you addressed them?
 * What business models are there for open source?
 * What are some non-programming contributions you've made?
 * What's your favorite open source project?
 * Who's the coolest person you've met doing open source stuff?

We typically do the career panel just before lunch so that attendees can socialize with panelists immediately afterwards.

Make sure Google Summer of Code, GNOME Outreach Project for Women, and any local opportunities are mentioned!

Ethics and History of Free Software
The tried-and-mostly-true version of this section is a lecture: Ethics history talk.

The more interactive, more un-tested version of this section is an activity: history and ethics activities

Contributions Workshop
Here is the link for the Princeton event.

Wrap Up
These can vary, based on your event. We often:


 * Ask attendees to share their successes. Find a few people (perhaps 5) to stand up and speak for a minute or two about what they accomplished during the day.


 * Get attendees to fill out your exit survey. Typically, you should plan your exit survey in advance of the event. At the wrap-up, you can use a projector and project a URL of the exit survey (preferably shortened with a meaningful name, using a service like http://bit.ly/ or http://smarturl.it/ ).


 * Thank people. Sponsors!  Staff!  And don't forget the attendees - they are there! You are glad they are there.


 * Hand out tokens of appreciation, if you can. Attendees often love to receive T-shirts, books, stickers.


 * Follow up:
 * Tell attendees to expect a follow up email and an invitation to join the alumni list (if you have an alumni list) and/or the general OpenHatch mailing list.
 * Let them know about follow up events. If this is obvious -- like inviting people to a "project night" after an introductory workshop -- great! Make sure to share that recommendation, and do so with high clarity. Perhaps put the URL on a projector, and give people 90 seconds to check their calendars and sign up for it. If the follow-up methods are less obvious, think harder: for an open source outreach event, are there conferences nearby that are coming up? Is there a programming user group that welcomes newcomers that might be a good fit? Mention them, because attendees new to the community are likely to have never heard about them.
 * Encourage attendees to keep hanging out on IRC, keep doing training missions and to keep working on the bugs from our bug tracker.
 * Remind them about programs like GSoC and GNOME outreach.

Edits Needed

 * Prepare a solid plan for a nice looking version of this page (aka a "frame" to help people navigate the materials)
 * Improve the Github demo by adding screenshots and stating more clearly what to say out loud
 * Revisit the intro to FLOSS
 * Make Intro to Version Control less wall-of-text-y
 * Improve Contributions Workshop section once we've got the new issue tracker/compiler

Practice reading a bug, in pairs -- exercise
We have begun asking students to work in pairs to understand, with each others' help, bugs in real open source software packages.

The handout for that is available here: https://github.com/openhatch/oh-communication-handout

There is currently no instructor guide for it.

To print it out:


 * git clone that repository
 * make to build a PDF
 * If on Debian/Ubuntu, you likely need to apt-get install texlive-latex-extra for it to build happily.

Website editing via git -- exercise
This is taking the place of the previous "Github demo".


 * Notes for the event organizer: Open Source Comes to Campus/Website editing via git/Preparing repositories
 * Instructor handout: Open Source Comes to Campus/Website editing via git
 * Student + instructor handout: Open Source Comes to Campus/Github pull steps