Overview

In this course, you'll learn about how open source communities work and start contributing to an open source project!

We welcome people who don't write software and programmers. Open source projects need lots of different kinds of help: artwork, documentation, planning, web design, and software code. By taking this course, you'll learn the community skills you need, and get started working on a bug in a real project of your choosing.

Course format

Once per week, we will publish a half-hour video that explains some topic in open source. We'll also publish exercises for students to do on their own.

We really want to encourage students to discuss the exercises, what they learned, and what confused them! You all can help each other, and the instructors will also answer questions.

Curriculum

Here's what we're planning:

• Week of November 14: Introductions (why people are here, what they expect to get out of the course)
• Week of November 21: Linux and the command line (tar, cd, ls)
• Week of November 28: Communication tools (IRC, mailing lists)
• Week of December 5: The ethics and history of the movement; and the economics and licensing that support it.
• Week of December 12: Getting, modifying, and verifying open source software (getting code; local patching)
• Week of December 19: Project organization (bug trackers; git format-patch; github; people's roles in a project)
• Week of December 26: Start contributing to a project
• Week of January 2: Discussion of progress so far, and wrap-up

Even after the course finishes, we will be here to support you as you start contributing to an open source project!

Prerequisites

None! An interest in contributing to open source software and enthusiasm are all that we require. You don't need prior programming experience.

Coursework can be completed on a computer running any modern operating system, including Linux, OS X, or Windows.

Time commitment

Once per week, we will publish a new video. Each video will last up to 30 minutes. The exercises will take up to one hour, depend on your experience with computing.

We also hope you will spend 30 minutes a week discussing your progress through the course with the other students!

About the instructor

My name is Asheesh Laroia, project lead of OpenHatch. I have been participating in open source for the past ten years; I have worked at Creative Commons and the Participatory Culture Foundation and volunteered technical skills to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I believe there are enthusiastic prospective contributors to free, open source software waiting to be invited, and this is your invitation!

The event is organized by OpenHatch, soon to be a non-profit. OpenHatch is an open source community itself, aimed at bringing new contributors into open source and code communities. We maintain a website of tools helpful to new contributors and organize outreach events such as this.

This P2PU course is based on feedback from two past OpenHatch events: a weekend workshop at the University of Pennsylvania in September 2010 and a one-evening MIT Open Source Workshop. The feedback we gather from this course will help us fine-tune the next round of on-campus weekend events.

Policy on being nice to people

We're committed to making this a safe space for women and men of all backgrounds. The primary language of this course is English; you are welcome to participate even if your English isn't perfect. We'll be friendly, and we expect all the students to be friendly to each other!