Author Archive for stevelee

GNOME and Project:Possibility: collaboration in open source accessibility

Published by stevelee on March 14, 2010 in Development, Software and Community. 1 Comment

In my last post I mentioned how satisfying it is to watch the results of making introductions between people or groups. Recently I was involved in a link up between students and GNOME accessibility and though I’d explain how events panned out, as well my hopes.

Project:Possibility organise team coding competitions for computer science students. The the goal of these SS12 events is to create accessibility software that will be of benefit to real users. These weekend ‘code-a-thons’ bring the students together with a mentor from industry and provide an exciting chance to learn something about accessibility, while creating open source software. Thus students get exposure to topics and skills that are still sadly absent from many computer science courses. Plus they get to have fun and win prizes.

Project:Possibility was set up by Chris Leung while he was at USC so it is fitting that the latest SS12 was a face off between USC and rivals UCLA. This added an extra element of competition, and the winning team from each campus have been invited to present their work at the 25th CSUN conference (#csun10) next week. They also get the opportunity to explore the conference, getting a flavour of the many accessibility offerings. CSUN have been very supportive of Project:Possibility and are keen to see students learn about accessibility and take the knowledge along with them as they start their careers.

The Project:Possibility board decided to concentrate our energy on the weekend competitions, at least for the short term. While accessibility is clearly a key feature of the events, I felt the experience of open source is less compelling. The code is given a open source licence and placed on Google Code but there is not much opportunity to provide an in depth experience of open development or to support subsequent maturing of the new software. OSS Watch are very aware that employers are seeking open source development experience, and yet there is a shortage of skills as they are not often being taught in computer science course. This further influenced my thinking.

I have previously worked with the friendly and hard working GNOME accessibility community, so I therefore proposed that we offer students the opportunity to work with them. The idea was to support students in adding features to existing GNOME accessibility projects, working with community members. This would introduce students to the project, hopefully exposing them to best practices. My hope was also that this introduction will lead to longer term engagement with GNOME accessibility or other projects and continuing contributions. Some concern was voiced that students would not want to climb the extra learning curve while competing in a weekend event. The GNOME team, however, were supportive of the idea and we all hoped the right students might be ‘up for’ the greater challenge and potentially greater rewards. We came up with a few coding ideas and I’m pleased to say a team from each of USC and UCLA chose to work on GNOME Caribou, the new GNOME on screen keyboard that provides operation for non keyboard users (via pointer, switch or other devices).

Ben Konrath, the Caribou lead, was available on IRC during the competition and answered questions from the students, helping them to get up to speed. With his help, both sets of students got through to the finals and came 2nd and 3rd place overall. Ben will now help the students go through the submit and review process and hopefully commit their code into Caribou. From there it will be part of GNOME and so will appear in many Linux distributions. Something the students can rightly be proud of.

If you are interested in seeing what the USC students have done with Caribou then you can meet the teams at CSUN next week on 26th and 27th. There is already considerable interest in the students work, including from Microsoft. CSUN have promoted their attendance in conference announcements, and this has also raised GNOME accessibility profile, not bad seeing it is their fist year at the conference. If you would like to find out more about GNOME open accessibility the team are there all week at the booth.

I’m really looking forward to the conference, catching up again with GNOME (and Mozilla), meeting the students and, hopefully, hacking a little on Caribou. I hope to see you there.

Dev8D - where collaboration happens and skills are learnt

Published by stevelee on March 3, 2010 in Event, Development and Community. 0 Comments

One of the most satisfying aspects of working for OSS Watch has been observing the outcomes from introducing people and then encouraging them to collaborate on new ideas. Outcomes such as personal development and new or improved projects. The recent Dev8D event was a real highpoint in several strands of OSS Watch activity and I was inspired to have been able to observe what happened and be part of the action. Dev8D is about developers getting together and seeding new project ideas, something that is an important aspect of open development, and so is important to OSS Watch. The Dev8D team, led by Mahendra Mahey, along with everyone who participated over the 4 days made Dev8D a fantastic event. Much developer happiness was expressed both during and after the activities, not to mention the many new project ideas that were hatched.

Several coding challenges where made and our very own Sander won 2 of them with MuCoMaCo an interesting Google map mash-up of MLA library data. OSS Watch have provided continuing support services to the Apache Wookie (Incubating) project from the University of Bolton. Recently Sander recently organised a Wookie Training day at OSS Watch. This was led by Scott Wilson, Wookie project lead, and Ross, OSS Watch manager. Scott was with us at Dev8D, so it was no surprise that Sander’s winning entry was a Wookie served W3C widget. This enables it to be readily deployed in a range of contexts with little effort.

The other winning entry that OSS Watch had close connections with was Wookie BaLTI. BaLTI is a sample Moodle course by Mark Johnson and Dan Hagon and features the newly developed Twirlymol and CollabMCE widgets. These 2 widgets use the widget loading and collaboration facilities of Wookie to provide a shared 3D interactive view of a molecule model and shared WYSIWYG editing. Several threads came together to make this happen. Those familiar with OSS Watch and open development will not be surprised at how open collaboration has made this possible.

Since we spotted Mark’s announcement of his first small contribution to Moodle and subsequently invited him to present it at an OSS Watch workshop, he has gone from strength to strength. At the Dev8D awards dinner Mark deservedly one ‘Best newcomer’. An award that provided him with a small Lego car kit, which we ‘knocked up’ during the meal, and a rather handmade certificate. The point is that Mark’s enthusiasm for learning about and contributing to open development has been noticed and is sending ripples through the HE and FE communities. Mark attended the previously mentioned OSS Watch Wookie training day, which stood him in good stead for working on the challenge with Dan. Since the Dev8D fun, Mark has pledged on the Wookie lists to reimplement his editing widget without the current LGPL licensed code dependency and to contribute it to the project. Further evidence of Mark’s personal development and it’s far reaching affects comes from his recent blog post. He also supplied us with this comment.

My manager appreciates the opportunities that open development provide to us as a department and an institution, both internally and externally. By letting me go to events like Dev8D even though the things I did there don’t relate directly to my current job, she gave me the opportunity to develop new skills which will allow me to provide new facilities to the staff and students in our institution. We’ve just started an ILT working group with our teaching staff, so hopefully I’ll be able to apply some of my new skills and knowledge to the ideas that come from that.

Mark’s collaborator, Dan, was the first person I met at Dev8D, and as with Mark you can’t help but be affected by his friendly enthusiasm. When I discovered that he had created an interesting Google Wave widget I steered him towards Scott and Mark and watched the magic happen. Scott explain how trivial it was to port the widget to Wookie, and once they’d decided on the LTI challenge Scott added BasicLTI interfaces to Wookie in order to support the challenge work. These are now part of the Wookie project code. More great collaboration followed and someone gave them an Amazon cloud server to install Moodle on. I observed them working together, discussing ideas, fixing bugs and working on their ‘judgement’ presentation. I tried to muscle in on the action with another widget idea but got rather distracted and bogged down in practicalities. Still I do have some new ideas to add to Wookie at some point.

I also attended their pitch to the judges as moral support and I’m glad I did. Chuck Severance of IMS and Sakia and Steve Vickers where in the judging team. A soon as the pitch was over, Chuck and Steve rushed off to add the widget to Sakai, Blackboard and WebCT. Chuck made the point that by using Wookie and LTI it is now possible to have something running in all these platforms, and in a matter of minutes. He then distributed screen shots around various lists.

Dev8D saw many other collaborative ventures seeded or strengthened. New skills were learnt by motivated developers and new contacts made. For example I enjoyed watching Chuck and Tobias Schiebeck work on a tricky Sakai bug. Finally I’d like to mention GNOME who were running an overlapping event in London. After a bit of prodding for collaboration, Willie Walker and Brian Cameron came over and presented on accessibility and GNOME work. Both were very interested in the accessibility possibilities of “Mr gadget” Ben O’Sheen’s demonstration of software to talk to wiimotes. A representative from Dev8D also went over the to GNOME usability hackfest and I expect we will see fruitful cross pollination developing from this mutual interest. Not least is the opportunity for HE/FE developers to learn from a large, established and successful open source project.

Governance Models - everything you wanted to know but where afraid to ask

Published by stevelee on February 18, 2010 in Development, Software, Strategy and Policy and Community. 0 Comments

After an extensive gestation period, OSS Watch are pleased to have jointly published 3 documents on the important subject of Governance Models for open source projects. That is excellent value for your money.

The documents on our web site undergo a rigorous quality assurance process that ensure they are technically correct and well scribed. The result in this case is an comprehensive introduction to a topic that can be over looked by projects, or may cause confusion and uncertainty.

I have on several occasions heard lead developers say that if they make their code open source they fear they will loose control and anyone can update their source, leading to chaos. As you read these documents you will see that this clearly should not be the case. The project leaders remain in control, in fact they make the decisions on who the leaders are and how the project is controlled. The governance model describes how this happens.

Having a governance model in place is one of the clear marks of an open source project that practices open development. That is, it marks a project that positively encourages community engagement.

Governance models provides an introduction to the what, why and wherefore of managing an open source project.

A governance model describes the roles that project participants can take on and the process for decision making within the project. In addition, it describes the ground rules for participation in the project and the processes for communicating and sharing within the project team and community. It is the governance model that prevents an open source project from descending into chaos. This document explains why a governance model is necessary, considers some of the challenges associated with adopting a governance model in open source projects, and looks at the key areas such a model needs to cover. It also describes how to encapsulate your governance model in a governance document.

Meritocratic governance model provides a detailed insight into this common model that is lead by an elected leadership team or ‘board’. A template is provided for use by projects interested in applying this model.

The meritocratic governance model is a commonly found model in which participants gain influence over a project through the recognition of their contributions. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is perhaps the most famous example of a large-scale meritocratic community. The foundation operates with an almost completely ‘flat’ structure, which means that anyone willing to contribute can engage with their projects at any level.

Benevolent dictator governance model describes another popular model where one person leads the project and has a final say in decisions. Again a template is provided for projects wanting to use this model.

A benevolent dictatorship is a project controlled by a single leader. Perhaps the most commonly cited example of the benevolent dictator model is the Linux Kernel project, which is run under the direct decision making leadership of Linus Torvalds. Being a benevolent dictator is not an easy job. It requires diplomacy and community building skills, in-depth technical knowledge of all aspects of the project, and exceptional levels of commitment and dedication. However, as the Linux Kernel project illustrates, it can be very effective.

With any project, good leadership or management are vital, and these documents will help you install the basics with little overhead. If your project already has a governance model in place then these documents could help you refine it, perhaps by making it explicit. If you don’t yet have one, then these document will help you decide what model best suits your style, and quickly get it into operation.

And you can do it all without any sign of pointy hair.

GNOME accessibility - the future

Published by stevelee on February 11, 2010 in Development, Software and Community. 1 Comment

The layoff of Willie Walker by Oracle is causing consternation in the the open source accessibility world, and for good reasons. As lead of GNOME accessibility and head developer of the Orca screen reader for the blind, Willie is a key member of GNOME accessibility. GNOME itself is a key player in the open accessibility field. The recent OSS Watch briefing note on open accessibility identified the importance of GNOME’s position and it’s contribution under the leadership of Willie.

Until this fallout from the recent takeover of Sun by Oracle, Willie was employed by Sun to work full-time on GNOME accessibility. The removal of Willie’s salary has removed a critical source of funding for open accessibility and the community is reeling as a result.

However despite the understandable concerns for the future of both Willie personally and GNOME accessibility, this is also a opportunity for both. People like Willie are highly sought after by employers who value leadership skills coupled with excellent technical experience. A couple of people described Willie as the Linus of open accessibility, a simile that has some merit. We can hope his next employer (or funder) will allow him to further develop his passion for accessibility, building on his impressive legacy to date.

For the GNOME and open accessibility communities, the impact of this seemingly crass business decision also causes us to focus hard. It can be a catalyst for improving the sustainability of this small but effective community as Willie himself indicates. I’d like to explore the subject a little in this post.

In general people get involved in open source for selfish reasons. These may be personal needs, corporate motivations or academic interests. The power of open development comes from working together to develop and maintain a common resource that benefits all players. The famous phrase is ’scratching an itch’. When it comes to open accessibility, however, there is an extra dimension. While many members of the community are users of accessibility, others are not and are involved for more complex reasons like social concern, if not quite altruism. This leads to members being in a position of “scratching another person’s itch”. There are elements of accessibility being a basic human right and these colour the community relationships and explain some of the strong outraged reactions to Willie’s layoff. As an aside it’s worth recalling Sun’s significant contribution to accessibility, something that was obviously not core business for them.

The fact that community members are in it for largely selfish reasons means they are likely to leave for equally selfish reasons. There should be no surprise at that. The key is to develop a broadly diverse community that can sustain any individual member’s exit. This is the opportunity I see we now have. I hope that Willie will continue to work full-time but I also hope we will work hard to attract more members who will also bring resource with them. Many of the reactions have vocalised the need to find funding but I feel we should focus on building the community first and the funding will follow. We also need to build community as, to be frank, there is a huge amount of work to be done, as can be seen on the GNOME 3.0 accessibility roadmap.

That might sound rather glib and the question is how can we move forward and encourage? Building community is difficult and not a science but there are many good examples to learn from. I’m fortunate to work for OSS Watch who’s key message is open innovation through community. Ross Gardler our service manager is also Vice President of Community Development at The Apache Software Foundation. The Foundation are also highly experienced in community development. Their informal moto is ‘Community over code’ and most of their activity is community building. For example the Apache Incubator helps projects develop their community and graduation requires at least 3 independent comitters to have joined. So there is a wealth of experience available to tap into and I’d like to see how the open accessibility community can use this to become more sustainable.

On to some practicalities. We are already seeing signs of the community dusting itself down and moving on. Eitan posted yesterday on further plans for the GNOME accessibility ‘hackfest’ at the CSUN accessibility conference. CSUN is THE accessibility conference and this year GNOME joins Mozilla in having a booth. This is the perfect opportunity to introduce GNOME’s work to the #CSUN10 visitors and encourage users and companies to engage. If you are going to CSUN be sure to find the booth and meet the team. The hackfest is the place for other developers to come along and learn what the code looks like and what needs doing. If your are a GNOME, KDE, Linux or Linux Mobile developer you should look us up to find out how to make your program accessible or how to work on accessibility programs.

This year the winners of Projects:Possibility’s SS12 open accessibility coding competition have been invited to attend CSUN. They will look around and present their winning projects. Accordingly computer science students from CSUN, UCLA and UCS will be able to learn about GNOME accessibility and find how they can engage in the action. At a minimum they will take their knowledge of GNOME to their future employers.

In a couple of weeks the GNOME Usability hackfest is in London and overlaps with the Dev8D developers days event. Cross fertilisation is planned and given that accessibility may be viewed to be a part of usability there is another opportunity to explore how to support GNOME accessibility.

OSS Watch have developed a tool that will be useful for exploring the sustainability options for GNOME accessibility. It’s part of our forthcoming Software Sustainability Maturity Model and provides a Q & A on the areas that need to be be covered in order to reach open sustainability. I encourage community members to try it on their project or the community as a whole. It will help focus on the the gaps and provide a common language for discussion of the solution. The form provides detailed explanations and the results are presented as percentages. If you are not sure just leave it as “don’t know”. Results are likely to be cleared at some point, so if you want to keep them drop us a line and we will provide a copy.

So in summary the news of Willie’s layoff is a source of considerable concern for him personally as well as the GNOME accessibility and the wider communities. It is also an opportunity to move on and develop new strengths through open development. The community has previously survived funding loss (IBM) and a key player leaving (Bill Haneman). As Willie says in his email - spread the word far and wide. The time is good as there is not only growing interest in open source in general but also a widening awareness of the benefits of open accessibility. If you are a member of the community then you can start thinking about how to reach out. If you are not yet a member then do introduce yourself at one of the events or on the lists or IRC.

TechDis Accessibility Toolbar features open development

Published by stevelee on January 19, 2010 in Development, Software and Community. 0 Comments

The recent launch of the new JISC TechDis toolbar sees the introduction of an accessibility tool for students and others when accessing the web. This replacement for the previous TechDis toolbar increases the accessibility of almost any web site by running directly in popular web browsers, and provides features like text to speech of page content.

One important feature that may not be obvious from using the toolbar, is that the Accessibility Team at the University of Southampton Learning Societies Labs, developed the toolbar for TechDis while also making it an open source project.

By supporting this TechDis have increased the opportunity for sustainability by allowing the project to continue to evolve while attracting contributions from others, whether they are users submitting bugs and feature requests, or development teams interesting in using it in new applications. OSS Watch’s advise on open development practices has enabled EA Draffan to include these in her management of the project. In addition Seb Skuse, the lead developer, has used established open practices in his daily work on the project.

Seb attended one of the OSS Watch workshops on engaging with open source and found what he discovered useful in ensuring barriers to contribution are been minimised. The Accessibility Team have been heard to say that they enjoy working on an open source project and I am impressed with their eagerness to understand and apply the principles.

Working with them has been a very positive experience. They are undoubtedly a group to watch as they steadily increase their portfolio of open accessibility projects with wide application. Tools that demonstrate open innovation in provision for users of accessibility in education and beyond, by turning new ideas and research into solutions which provide practical benefits.

Download and try the Toolbar and let the team know what you think. You will find the team most welcoming of your ideas or other contributions.