RD01 - Organizations and Communities
Preparation
Review the expectations for preparation for the Readings and Class Discussions.
Assigned Readings
- Chapter 2: Organizations in Collaborative Software Development by Amy Ko.
- Four types of open source communities by Matthias Stürmer for opensource.com.
- WTF is Wrong with Open Source Communities? by Jennifer Riggins.
Discussion Questions
- Ko states that “even in software organizations, the point of the company is rarely to make software; it’s to provide value.” She goes on to state that “Software is sometimes the central means to providing that value, but more often than not, it’s the information flowing through that software that’s truly the valuable piece.”
- What does it mean for software to provide value?
- What metrics might be used to measure that value?
- Ko mentions a number of different roles that individuals can take on in software organizations. Which of these roles most appeal to you and why?
- When most people think of Open Source they are thinking of what the article classifies as Development Communities. However, increasingly commercial software companies are open sourcing products in the form of Single Vendor Open Source Projects.
- What are some examples of Single Vendor Open Source projects?
- Why would a company want (or not want) to Open Source their project as a single vendor open source project?
- Why would individuals or other companies/organizations want (or not want) to contribute to a single vendor open source project?
- In her “WTF” article Riggins emphasizes the challenges that are faced by individuals from groups who are underrepresented in many open source communities. Most of the issues she raises exist in the tech sector more broadly as well.
- What can/should/must be done to address these issues and what barriers exist to addressing them?
- Who’s responsibility is it to address these issues?
- Prepare at least one question of your own related to the readings that you would like to raise for class discussion. This may be a question:
- seeking factual clarification of something in the readings.
- that you would like to hear your classmates thoughts and opinions on.
All textual materials used in this course are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
All executable code used in this course is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 or later