Tag Archives: open source

Open source project contributions

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Unless I want to add a news item to the web site of the company I work for, Catalyst IT, I do not visit the site. That was already the same for the universities where I worked because such sites are usually geared towards the general public, but not the people working there. Thus, I sometimes stumble upon hidden gems or am reminded of cool pages.

Recently, I was reminded of the page where all our open source project contributions are listed. Currently, this list has 142 open source projects listed to which current Catalystas have contributed in the past or presently. This can be small 1-5 person projects or big ones like Koha or Moodle, projects that were created for a very specific purpose and are now defunct or projects that are continuously maintained.

That’s an impressive number of projects and may actually not be all because we pull the projects and contributors from Ohloh. If a project is not registered there, our site won’t know about it and also if developers have not added their Ohloh username to our internal wiki, our web site cannot pick it up.

With more people joining the company, this list will hopefully grow more.

 

Squashing bugs

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Bug squashing: This is not the messy kind of hitting annoying mosquitoes or sand flies and seeing their victim’s blood drain from them. No, here I am talking about the bugs that hide in software, are brought to light by keen users and then fixed by awesome developers.

This week is global bug squashing week for Koha, the open source integrated library management system. This is a “concerted effort to get bugs and patches moving along in the right direction” all over the world. Everybody is invited to help test bugs, add comments and if all is well sign off on them.

Eliminate as many bugs as possible; Photo by Benny Lin, CC BY-NC
Photo by Benny Lin, CC BY-NC

One of my colleagues, Chris Cormack, who is the Technical Lead of our Koha Team at Catalyst IT, announced this initiative on Monday at work and invited everyone to support the project.

I am not a developer, but I have already fixed a few bugs in Mahara – pretty much only language string-related – and as I like the Koha team and the software, I thought that maybe I could help as well as signing off on bugs does not necessarily require programming knowledge.

The Koha community makes it easy for people like me who cannot so quickly set up an instance of Koha on their own computer, configure it, import data etc. in that there are sandboxes that can be used for testing. What you need to do is test the faulty behavior on the latest version of Koha, the “master”. Once you have confirmed that there is a fault, you apply the patch and run your test(s) again. Hopefully, all works well and you can sign off on the patch.

Now, normally, applying a patch is something that requires some command line knowledge. However, thanks to the sandboxes, all you need to do is to provide the bug number, your email address and whether you want to start with a fresh database or not. Then all the command line magic is done for you and within a minute or so you have a fully functional Koha instance with the patch applied. Voilà. :-)

On Monday, Chris showed me how to work with the sandbox, we found a bug that looked easy enough for me to test and tested it. As I do know a little bit about the version control system git, he showed me how to sign off “properly” with a patch of my own. At the end of 1 hour we had the patch submitted. A considerable amount of that hour was spent finding a suitable bug. In the evening, I attempted to test two more bugs and could sign off on one of them. The other one needed a bit more work.

Three of the five bugs that I tested are already merged and thus could be completely squashed. That’s pretty cool. I did require some more help from Chris because as I am not so familiar with the vast amount of system preferences you can switch on / off in Koha, I needed some prodding to look in the right direction so that I could actually test the faulty behavior correctly. It was great to get the help from him at all hours also on the community IRC channel. And it was nice to chat to other Koha developers on IRC, get updates of the weather around the world and so on. The community is very friendly and supportive.

Now if you want to participate, there are still 61 bugs that need sign off (maybe fewer when you see the list) and every contribution counts as the users make the open source community and improve the software.

On a related note: Yesterday, the Mahara team released the Mahara 1.5 Release Candidate 1. We invite everyone to test the software and give us feedback if you find a bug that should be fixed before the stable release is produced.

NZOSA ceremony on November 9, 2010

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The New Zealand Open Source Awards Ceremony took place in Wellington on November 9, 2010. It was an evening celebrating open source and the people involved in the community or if you look at each project individually, communities.

The evening was filled with laughter for the introductions to the various awards were often witty, great conversation, food and drink. People who had not known each other before learned about each other’s involvement in open source and expanded their horizon about where open source can be seen in action and who is involved in it.

I particularly liked that the awards were not only about open source software, but also about the people involved in its development, promotion, and use. That shows that open source is more than the software, but that it needs the community involvement and enthusiastic users to bring it along further, to make others aware of it and to help it grow.

As one of the three photographers for the night, I took a whole bunch of photos – 763 to be exact of which I 222 survived as rated 2+. As we had not asked people’s permission to take their photo, I only published the close-ups of the people on stage online which is 50 photos.

If you want to watch the recorded introductions to the categories and the acceptance speeches, head over to YouTube or watch the playlist below.

Recap of ULearn10

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ULearn10 (6-8 October 2010) is “New Zealand’s premier education conference” according to CORE Education, the organizer. It is a huge teacher conference with approximately 1,800 participants from all over New Zealand. Some Aussies could also be spotted.

Everybody congregated in Christchurch and I guess hoped that there wouldn’t be any major aftershocks. We were lucky. Though there were plenty of minor quakes that couldn’t be felt, only 4 bigger ones (above 4.2) happened during the week. Early arrivals felt the 5.0 (10th biggest earthquake since September 4, 2010) Monday night. The other three were Tuesday night and 2 on Friday early morning. I was happy to be in a safe hotel that was fitted with earthquake plates.

But back to the conference. Together with Open Systems Specialists and TechnologyWise, Catalyst IT had the Open Source Schools stand in the exhibitor hall. We were one of the few exhibitors who did not sell smartboards / projectors that turned ordinary whiteboards into smartboards. At least that’s what it looked like in our area of the exhibitor hall.

Our aim was to let participants know about open source software and its use in school. I particularly talked about the e-portfolio software Mahara, but also Moodle and Koha when I had a chance to do so. Mark Osborne from Albany Senior High School spent some time at our stand to show conference participants how his school uses these three online systems for learning and teaching.

It was great to hear the accounts of conference participants who came to our stand and proudly told us they are already using Linux / Ubuntu at their school and also introduced or are introducing other open source software to their school community. Others did not know (much) about open source and wanted to learn more more.

We also had two breakout sessions in which Mahara featured: Mine was on October 6. Louise Bray-Burns (Hampton Hill School) and Helen Moran (Tawa Intermediate School) talked about their experiences with Mahara using the hosted service MyPortfolio on October 7. Being in their session, I got a glimpse of student portfolios as well as Helen’s teacher portfolio. Furthermore, the three of us assisted the participants when they took their first steps in MyPortfolio.

Our booth was well-visited throughout the conference. Being in direct line of view during morning tea, lunch, and afternoon tea didn’t hurt because people had time to look at our banners while in the queue. :-)

Thanks to my fellow stand colleagues, I could go to Steve Wheeler‘s keynote “Transformation and inspiration through social media: Meeting the needs of the 21st Century Learner”. I had not seen or heard him speak live since December 2007 when we first met. His presentation was very lively and I particularly liked the storytelling style that he had adopted to bring across his message. A recording of the keynotes will be posted to the ULearn web site. We also had a brief chat on the last day of the conference. It was not easy to spot him among the hundreds of participants. Eventually a tweet helped us to get together.

ULearn10 was a success in my eyes because we could interest conference participants in open source software and talk about its possibilities. We did not do that only in general terms, but sometimes discussions went very specific and we gave short demonstrations on some of the software that is already used in schools.

The organization during the conference was exceptional. A big thank you to the organizers, the set up, catering and tech teams. And also to the student assistants who made sure that presenters had everything they needed in their rooms. Thus, a special shoutout to Rory from Christ’s College who was on duty during my breakout session in ICT1.

Recap of the TAO Days 2010

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On Wednesday and Thursday, March 10-11, 2010, I witnessed my first software launch. After 8 years of development and already substantial use, TAO, an open source computer-based assessment (CBA) platform was officially launched. The development of this online assessment tool started as a partnership of the Research Unit EMACS of the University of Luxembourg and the CITI department of the Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor in Luxembourg in 2002.

TAO

The two days were filled with presentations about CBA in general, the partnership, the history of the development of TAO, and its use in international assessments such as PISA and PIAAC. Although TAO was not officially released as open source software until now, it has already been in use for some time now testing it thoroughly and improving it constantly.

Besides presentations, there were user and developer sessions dealing with all aspects of getting to know TAO. The workshops ranged from setting up TAO on a server to creating test items and running the tests. Thus, we could gain first-hand experience of the software.

TAO is being developed as a versatile and generic solution for CBA instead of being geared towards a very specific test. The aim was and is to create a system that can accommodate as many CBA tests as possible allowing also for the exchange of tests among the TAO users.

The launch did not only kick off version 1.0 of TAO, but also marked the beginning of the user and developer community for this open source system. The developers know that this official start is not the end of their work but the beginning of a more public development to improve the software.

In the user workshops which I attended we learned how to set up users, test takers, tests, test items, and the delivery of the test. I was very impressed by the possibilities of TAO, but also saw that there is a lot of work to be done in regard to usability. Being used to a great number of easy-to-use social media, some of the steps I had to take in the TAO system seemed not necessary and sometimes even annoying. However, I also learned that the usability guys and gals had not taken up their work until a few months ago and are working hard to make the software more user friendly.

During the final round of presentations, William Thorn, senior analyst with the OECD, brought the metaphor of haute couture vs. prêt-à-porter into the discussion. This metaphor was taken up by Marilyn Binkley and Romain Martin (both University of Luxembourg). Haute Couture was seen as where creativity goes on, where new developments are brought about to further CBA. At the same time it also signifies developments that have not yet been thoroughly tested and that cannot be applied everywhere, e.g. for technical reasons. On the other hand, prêt-à-porter assessment is well-tested, easier to administer, immediately usable. However, that does not necessarily mean paper-and-pencil tests, but can also be CBA. In contrast to haute couture CBA, it would only have little added value to paper-and-pencil tests. Just having multiple choice items on a computer screen instead of on paper is not very innovative. Like with elearning activities, the real added value must be something else, e.g. the use of multimedia, new forms of test items etc.

Altogether between 80 and 100 people attended this two-day event at the Abbaye de Neumünster in Luxembourg City. There were plenty of opportunities for discussions in the workshops and the breaks where developers, users and potential users mingled. The TAO Days were very well organized by the TAO team and also included a Walking Dinner for a selected number of guests (photos).

The coming months will show how quickly the word can spread about TAO and hopefully get the community to a good start.