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COMP 491/492

Dickinson College Computer Science Senior Seminar

PA02: Project Explorations

Introduction

Selecting the H/FOSS (FOSS or humanitarian FOSS) project on which you will work is a three step process. This assignment, PA02 - Project Explorations is the first step. In this step you will explore a variety of H/FOSS projects to begin to get a feel for what it might be like to work on them. You will learn what they do, the value they provide to their user community, whether they are active and open to contributions, and how approachable they seem to be. The next assignment PA03 - Project Reviews is the second step, and asks you to become more informed about the projects in which you are most interested. In the third step, PA04 - Project Ranking and Selection we will form teams around commonalities in the projects that were reviewed and each team will work together to select the project on which they will work.

Assignment

Before beginning it is recommended that you read What you actually need to know about open source to get started and Open-Source Contribution: The Ultimate Guide to get a feel for the kinds of things you’ll want to be thinking about as you browse projects looking for ones that you might be interested in working on.

Candidate Projects

In this part of the assignment you will build a preliminary list of candidate projects to which you might be interested in contributing.

  1. Browse the resources in the Finding H/FOSS Projects section looking for projects that interest you and that seem to be active.
    • It is recommended that you consider projects from across a range of your different interests. Eventually we will be forming teams around areas of common interest. So having considered projects across a range of interests increases the likelihood that you will find a team with some shared interests.
    • You should plan to spend approximately 1 hour browsing the resources to identify your candidate projects.
  2. From the projects you have looked at, identify 10-12 candidate projects (5 for students doing an individual research or honors project).
  3. Using your clone of the course repository:
    1. Ensure that you are on the main branch.
    2. Set the upstream remote of your clone to point to the Dickinson-COMP-491-491/AY25-26 repository.
      • git remote add upstream <URL>
    3. Pull the upstream main branch to synchronize with the upstream.
    4. Create a new feature branch from main.
    5. Using the README.md file in your directory:
      1. Add a section header for “Candidate Projects”.
      2. For each candidate project add a bullet point that gives:
        • the name of the project as a link to its home page or repository.
        • a 1-2 sentence description of what the project does.
        • a 1-2 sentences summary of your impression of the suitability of the project for this course.
    6. Commit your changes to your feature branch.

Project Explorations

In this part of the assignment you will perform more detailed Project Explorations on a subset of the candidate projects that you have identified.

  1. Select 4 or 5 candidate projects (2 for students doing an individual research or honors project) that seem promising to you.
  2. For each candidate project that you selected you should spend approximately 1 hour exploring it and documenting what you find as follows:
    1. Create a new .md file for the project exploration in your directory in the AY25-26 course repository.
    2. Using the README.md file in your directory:
      1. Add a section header for “Project Explorations”.
      2. Add a bullet point under that heading that gives the name of the project that you are exploring as a link to the .md file that you created for it.
    3. Add the following sections and content to the .md for the project exploration:
      • Project Exploration: A top level section heading with the text “Project Exploration”.
      • Project Title: The title of the project.
      • Project Repository: The URL of the repository (or repositories, or organization) where the latest version of the source code is located. This is where a developer would go to get the code for the project (e.g. GitHub, BitBucket, SourceForge, etc.).
      • Project Homepage: The public-facing homepage for the project. For many projects this will be different from the repository. Some smaller projects may keep everything in the repository.
      • Product: Summarize in a paragraph what the software product does.
      • Target User Community: Summarize in a paragraph: (i) Who is the user community for the software product? (ii) What need(s) of this user community does the software address? Briefly explain how the software addresses those needs.
      • Activity: Give some things that you noticed that indicate that the project is active, has some developer community around it, and is supportive of outside contributions. The more evidence you can find that the project is alive, thriving, and open the better. You should at least consider things like the volume of recent activity on the issue tracker or message forums, the frequency of creation and merging of pull requests.
      • Getting Started: Imagine that you have been assigned to start working on this project as a developer. Explore the project repository and homepage looking for resources that would help you get started (e.g. how to install the developer environment, how to contribute, how to communicate with the community, etc). Give your impression of the things that would make it easy or difficult to get started on the project (e.g. was documentation easy to find? does it seem complete? is it written clearly and at a level you can follow?) Support your impression with details from your research and include links to resources as appropriate.
      • Welcoming to Newcomers: Briefly document what you find (or do not find) that the community is welcoming and supportive of newcomers. You should briefly scan documentation, the issue tracker and any open communication channels for the project. Look for things like “Getting Started” documents, message board threads where newcomers or students introduce themselves, tags on issues such as “Good First Issue” or “First Timers,” and comments/feedback on appropriately tagged issues. You might also consider the “tone” in the communications that you find.
      • Personal Interest: Briefly describe the reasons that led you to chose to explore this project and discuss anything that you learned during the exploration that either increased or decreased your interest in engaging with this project. If there are particular aspects of the project that you are interested in working on (or not working on) indicate those as well.
      • Skills Match: Briefly identify the main languages / frameworks / tools that the project uses and describe how well they match or do not match your current knowledge and skill set.
      • Other: Add any additional thoughts that you would like to record about the project. Include things that you think may be helpful later when deciding which project to engage with.
    4. Commit your changes to your feature branch. Note that each project exploration should be in a separate commit.
  3. Turn in your work by creating a pull request to the upstream course repo for your changes.

Finding H/FOSS Projects

There are literally millions of open source projects out there. However, not all open source projects are equally good candidates for engagement. You will, of course, want to find projects that you are interested in. But you’ll also want to find projects that are active, technically approachable, have a variety of ways to contribute and have a welcoming developer community that will help you get started and that you can go to when you have questions. Below are resources that may help you find suitable candidate projects.

Humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) Projects

As you know, HFOSS is an acronym for humanitarian free open source software. We encourage you to explore at least a few humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) projects because they reflect the potential for computing to benefit society and thus will align your major well with the broader mission of Dickinson College. In addition, past students and faculty from this course, and other courses similar to ours, report that HFOSS project communities tend to be friendly, supportive and open to helping new contributors come on board. That said, you should explore and select projects according to all relevant factors, including your own personal interest and you are not required to pursue any humanitarian projects.

The following lists are good places to find humanitarian projects that might be of interest:

Projects with Mentor Connections

Having a mentor to guide your work in a project can be very useful in getting started, identifying appropriate tasks and getting help when you are stuck. Regardless of the project that you pick you will want to make an effort to find a mentor in the project. This is easier in some projects and harder in others.

There are several projects where we have potential mentor connections:

Broader H/FOSS Project Lists

The following lists are also good places to find H/FOSS projects that are are open to contributions:

H/FOSS Projects for New Contributors

There are also a few sites that are specifically designed to help new people get involved in FOSS projects. These often have a list of projects with “introductory” issues that make good targets for new contributors. Listing a project here and tagging issues as “introductory” suggests that the projects may be particularly welcoming to new contributors. So you may want to search these sites:

H/FOSS Projects Selected by Past Senior Seminar Teams

Below is the list of all H/FOSS projects selected as capstone projects by previous Dickinson senior seminar students. Note that we do not necessarily recommend every project on this list. Every project has both advantages and disadvantages. Projects where students have had particularly good experiences are marked with an 🏆. Note though that projects change over time so past experience is not necessarily predictive of current success. If you are considering pursuing one of these projects, feel free to discuss it with the instructor to find out about the experience of previous Dickinson students.

In addition there are a number of other projects students and instructors from courses similar to ours have reported having good success with:

H/FOSS Projects You Already Know or Use

Think about the apps, software, frameworks, libraries and websites you use on your phone and computer. Which of them are open source? Are any of them suitable as capstone projects? If so, feel free to explore them.

Other Collections of H/FOSS Projects

If nothing in any of those places catches your attention, or you want to explore further you can leap into the void and search some of the large open source project repositories. Most of the above projects are located in one of the following repositories, but these repositories also contain millions of other projects as well. Some will be great projects to get involved with, but others will be too large, too specialized, dead, or exclusive. So if you do head off into the void searching for projects, spend a few minutes informally assessing how active a project is and how open/welcoming/accessible it is to new contributors before spending the time to explore it in detail. That said, here’s a list of repositories:

Acknowledgements

This assignment builds from and adapts ideas and content from the following activities created by others:

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License All textual materials used in this course are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

GPL V3 or Later All executable code used in this course is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 or later