OSS Watch team blog

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.