Archive for the 'Development' Category

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.

Opportunities for scientific research in open source projects

Published by Sander van der Waal on March 3, 2010 in e-Research, Development and Community. 1 Comment

There are many interesting open source projects that can be beneficial to academic research. As OSS Watch’s recent article on e-Research by Gabriel Hanganu shows there are social and organisational problems in adopting open source for e-Research, but there are many open source software projects there to be joined. Some projects are suited very well to be used in scientific research and I feel that this is especially true in the realm of big data databases.

Google showed the way, really, with the MapReduce paper in 2004. They published their programming model for processing large amounts of data in parallel and although publishing it, they did not neglect to apply for a patent as well, which was recently granted. Hadoop, which originates from a project at Yahoo!, also implements the MapReduce pattern, but is completely open source being a project of the Apache Software Foundation. And now recently Apache Cassandra has joined the mix. Cassandra originates from Facebook, but has become open source in July 2008. It recently promoted from the Apache Incubator and is now an official top-level Apache project.
Work has been initiated to facilitate integration between Cassandra and Hadoop, which simplified means the Hadoop database HBase is replaced with Cassandra. There has been discussion of this on the list and a feature has recently been implemented. So there’s Yahoo! working on Hadoop and Facebook working on Cassandra, and recently also Twitter has announced that it is working towards using Cassandra for their backend. Also worth mentioning is the open source implementation of Amazon’s Dynamo database which is named Voldemort. This project is used and actively developed by LinkedIn and is therefore another example of how you can benefit from the work this large company is investing by engaging with this project.

To me, this all shows that there will be large investments in NoSQL databases from major companies in the coming years, and it will all be in open source software. This means that there is a lot of opportunity for anybody who has to deal with big data to profit from this investment. All you have to is try out the software and engage with these projects. Researchers also have to cope with more and more data, so I think they have good reason to follow these developments closely and step in to benefit.

Can open source reduce costs?

Published by Ross Gardler on March 1, 2010 in Procurement, Development and Strategy and Policy. 0 Comments

It is often said that open source software will reduce costs.

Those with little or no experience of implementing computer systems assume these savings come from the fact the free and open source software does not carry a license fee. However, this is not usually the case.

Anyone who has rolled out an software solution, even in a small organisation, will tell you that there are hidden costs. These include training, support,  customisation and maintenance.

In 2005 BECTA published “A study of the spectrum of use and related ICT infrastructure costs” which concluded that training and support costs accounted for 60% of total cost for any software solution. The report also found that open source software reduced these costs by 40-50%.

Further to reducing training and support costs, open source can reduce the cost of customisation for specific environments.

It is extremely rare for a back-office software solution to be a perfect fit for any specific organisation straight out of the box. Consequently, the software needs to be customised to suit specific needs. In a closed source environment there is a single provider, or a limited set of approved providers, who can make these modifications. However, in an open source environment anyone with the appropriate skills can make these modifications, including internal staff.

As a result of this competition, market forces can often result in a lower cost for a tailored product. Just how much can be saved here depends on the customisations you need to make.

Finally, the open source culture of code sharing results in lower development costs for the software in the first instance. That is, once one user has commissioned a specific feature or configuration option the results of that work is available to all. As a result, the more a product is used and developed within any given domain, the more widely the development costs are shared. In addition to a reduction of costs open development can significantly increase the rate of innovation as it brings together great minds to collaborate on shared solutions.

Where there is no pre-existing solution to match ones needs the open developent model can be an extremely cost effective way of reducing cost. This process is examined in more detail in our document “Meritocrats, cluebats and the open development method: an interview with Justin Erenkrantz.”

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.