OSS Watch team blog

I previously blogged how Mark Johnson provided an excellent example of contributing local changes or bug fixes to an open source project. I was impressed that while the contribution was very small (1 line) it managed to encapsulate the process and so acted as a good example for illustrating how to engage. Accordingly I drew out the process that Mark followed from his post.

Whilst planning our recent OSS Watch workshop - Engaging developers with open source projects Gabriel spotted my post and decide to invite Mark to present. This turned out to be an excellent move as Mark’s presentation  The Line of Code That Could: Contributing to Moodle (pdf) not only complemented the other talks by Scott Wilson (Wookie) and Ian Boston (Sakai), but also made us aware of something important.

Mark’s presentation smoothly told the story of how he found a problem in Moodle when implementing a feature for use in his institution. He went on to explain the process he followed of engaging with the Moodle developer community and ultimately submiting a patch to fix it and that is now in the Moodle codebase. This is explored in depth in my previous post.

At the end of the event Ross did a round robin of ‘what did you get out of it’ and a handful said they would consider submitting their code to the relevant project community. This is a significant ‘win’ and even if only one person actually follows through we have a result to be pleased with. In our debrief we decided that Mark’s talk played an important part in achieving this positive outcome. I’ve identified the following reasons as key

• By being a very small contribution and a ‘first’ contribution it presented an example that others could easily relate to. Especially those who have not yet contributed and who were the target  of this workshop. This contrasts with the other talks from the perspective of very experienced submitters (actually commiters).
• Mark obviously enjoyed the process and the outcomes, including the kudos he gained.
• While Mark made significant extra effort to engage and submit it was clear this had real value to him, his employers and to the Moodle community.

We’ll be looking for other ways use this realisation in our events and resources in order to encourage users and developers to engage more fully with their project communities.