Exploring the HFOSS world for fun and profit (OK, for pedagogical purposes)

One of my post-tenure teaching explorations has been in the general area of integrating academic civic engagement projects and experiences into my courses. In the past, I’ve had students work with campus and/or community members on term-long projects in our dyad, my Argument and Inquiry (first-year) seminar, in our Human-Computer Interaction elective, and in a Comps (senior comprehensive exercise) project last year. These have been amazing experiences for my students (and for me!), and hopefully for our partners, and I’ve had the privilege of working with Carleton staff and our Center for Community and Civic Engagement who make setting up and executing these projects easy and fun.

I’ve always been a bit curious about ways to extend these civic engagement experiences outside the Carleton and Northfield communities. In addition, I’ve always been interested in helping our students have encounters and experience with real-world code and real-world development processes. So it was sheer dumb luck, or maybe fate, at Tapia when I found myself sitting in between Gena Likins and Janet Davis. Gena works for university outreach at Red Hat and talked about a workshop that Red Hat sponsors (and NSF partially funds) called the Professors’ Open Source Software Experience (POSSE), where faculty learn about how to incorporate humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) project experiences into their courses. Janet, whom it feels like I’ve known for forever at this point, had attended the most recent POSSE and highly recommended it. I came home from Tapia and immediately applied (and was accepted) to attend the next POSSE in November.

As part of my homework for the workshop, I need to do a couple of blog posts on open source software based on some pre-workshop activities. The first such blogged activity is the “FOSS Field Trip”. This field trip was a great experience for me, since I’m pretty much a newbie in the HFOSS world and am still trying to get the lay of the land. The activity asked us to do some structured poking around in SourceForge and OpenHub to get a sense of the activity levels, contribution histories, etc. of various projects, as well as to get used to those two particular sites.

My first stop was SourceForge. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been on SourceForge, or at least not gone directly to a specific project page on SourceForge. The prompt asked me to type in a search term of interest. Since I’ve supervised a few Comps projects on health care and health related apps, I typed in “health care” as my search term.

This is a screenshot of the results:

Screen shot of SourceForge search for “health care”.

I show the results here because I was struck by how crowded and cluttered the UI was. Large ads competing with the results for screen real estate. Lots of real estate devoted to “sponsored links”, which as far as I can tell are not or may not be projects? It’s very disorienting and makes it hard to figure out where to start or where to focus. I can see why many people find it so overwhelming to contribute to open source projects, if something similar to this is their first encounter with the projects.

So. There are 87 projects (does this include “sponsored links”? Unclear.) A brief perusal of the first page of results when I sorted by “Last updated” showed a few projects which seemed to be vitamin scams and a number of health records/administrative related projects, along with some projects that didn’t seem to relate to health care at all. Sorting by “most popular” yielded some more promising looking projects. And I figured out that I could mouse over a project and see a brief description. But the descriptions still didn’t tell me a lot about the projects, and I was still overwhelmed by the number of things to click. (Fun fact: Filtering by “recently updated” limited the search results to 6 projects, many of which were different from the top ones that appeared when I sorted by “last updated”! There were 6 recently updated projects, most of them dealing with health care records, such as OpenMRS.)

The projects were written in 15 different languages; the most popular being Java (by a long shot), PHP, Javascript, and JSP. I was actually surprised by how popular Java is as a language — I think I expected more Javascript.

I decided to drill down more into OpenMRS, which is a framework for medical records systems —specifically, a framework that can be used to set up a medical records system in a resource-constrained environment by people with little to no programming experience. This appears to be a very stable project (in fact, its status is both mature and stable/production). As an educator, I am more interested in stable, established projects — I can’t take the risk of having my students contribute to something which may go away or may lay dormant for the duration of the class/term. It’s been recently updated (commits within several hours of me viewing the page), which is a good sign. I couldn’t glean much info from the SourceForge site, so I went to the project web site instead. The web site is super helpful! It looks like the project is mostly written in Java. There are clear ways to get involved in the project, and good documentation (from my quick skim). This site makes me feel good about potentially contributing to this project and puts my fears at ease. There are currently 51 people listed on the “people” page of the Github repository, so I presume these are the active committers.

The second part of the exercise asked me to explore the OpenMRS project on Open Hub. Well, at least it will be interesting to see how this project is differently represented on the two platforms. Anyway, I went on OpenHub and searched for OpenMRS. Here’s the screenshot of the result:

Open Hub screen shot, search for OpenMRS.

This interface was much, much clearer to navigate. I like the analysis it attempts to provide about the activity level of the project, although I was struck by the discrepancies between the data reported here and the data on Github in terms of project participation and updates. (Looks like this is because the data is based on project activity from a few months ago.) I also like the stats view, which I think would make it easy to compare the activity level of different projects before deciding to integrate one of them into a class. Here is part of the stats page for OpenMRS Core:

Open Hub stats about OpenMRS Core

 

OK, at this point I have to admit that I started geeking out on the stats. Here’s the OpenMRS Core stats page about the languages in which the project is written:

Language stats for OpenMRS Core

Something like this would be super useful to use in my Software Design class, when we talk about code structure. Lots of potential teachable moments in this data. Also, I don’t think you can see this in the screen shot, but the OpenMRS Core has 187 lines of Pascal code (27% of which are comments). Not sure if that’s scary or impressive or a bit of both.

OpenHub reaffirms that this is an active, healthy project. There seems to be a core group of contributors and a number of new contributors, which would make me feel good about assigning students to work on this project in a class.

In completing this FOSS field trip, I’ve started to reflect on how to incorporate HFOSS more broadly into my courses. I went into this experience thinking that HFOSS would be a good fit for a Comps project, and I’m still planning on primarily exploring that angle. I also thought that it might fit the HCI course, but as I go through these activities I’m less sold on that idea. I think there is real value in having students meet face-to-face with their clients, and less of a chance of having them fall back on the “I understand my users so I don’t have to talk to them” path. I am, however, starting to think about smaller ways in which I can incorporate HFOSS activities into Software Design: the code stats are one thing, but I could also see some smaller assignments or maybe an in-class lab around writing test cases or debugging a small piece of code or even commenting existing code. I’m excited to explore these little activities further.

 

Advertisement

Trip report: GHC 2016

I’m writing this post on the plane ride home from Grace Hopper on Friday afternoon. Unlike previous years, I escaped the conference early: a compromise with my kids since I was at a conference last month and will be at a workshop next month. Still, it feels like I managed to squeeze about 10 days into 3, so while on one level I’m sad to be missing the last keynote and tonight’s party (and dinner with Carleton folks present and past!), on another level I’m just done with conferencing.

It’s been several years since I’ve done a proper conference trip report — I used to do them semi-regularly (see here, for example), but in the past few years life’s gotten in the way. But I wanted to honor my time at the conference this year, so I’m resurrecting the trip report tradition.

I should come clean first, though: After last year’s conference, I swore up and down that I wasn’t going to attend this year. I’m not a fan of Houston (sorry, Houston!), and logistically last year was kind of a pain. Plus I knew I wanted to attend Tapia and wasn’t thrilled about going to 2 conferences so close together. But then I was tapped to be Posters Co-Chair, and it sounded like too good of an opportunity to pass up. And then since I was going anyway, I agreed to speak in the CRA-W early faculty career track and volunteer in the Student Opportunity Lab. On top of that, I had my LACAFI booth organizing/setup/wrangling duties.

Apparently my conference motto is: If you’re going to attend, be busy!

The days and weeks leading up to the conference were busy: working with my co-chair to select and assign ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) poster and finals judges; working with my co-presenter on our slides and role-play scenarios for our CRA-W session; stressing over whether we had enough people to cover the booth during the Expo hours. (This year a lot of our usual booth-staffing suspects took GHC off, either because they were at Tapia and/or they’re going to SIGCSE. We missed you, intrepid volunteers!) Then there were receptions and breakfasts and meetups to keep track of. I actually had to put everything on my calendar and set multiple alarms so that I knew exactly where I had to be and when. It was looking very likely that I was not going to make it to any sessions that I was not leading or speaking at, so I didn’t even bother to look at the program.

To add more excitement to the mix, I realized a few days before the conference that my constant desire to sleep and my low-level ever-present funk was not due to recovering from the marathon I had just run, but was in fact my depression flaring up. Good times. I was worried, because I knew I’d have to be “on” a lot of the time I was at GHC, and was starting to dread going. I decided to give myself permission to skip out on anything that was not absolutely necessary if need be, to be a hermit when I needed to, and to escape the conference when possible, to recharge and try and keep the depression at bay. I’m happy to say that my strategy worked, and I was able to cope and function at a decent level. The knowledge that I was leaving the conference early also helped. This meant that I didn’t seek out people I knew to the extent that I normally do, but it was worth it for self-preservation.

I arrived in Houston on Tuesday afternoon, along with what felt like half of the 15,000 attendees of the conference. I was hoping to have some time to relax before attending the HP Inc reception as an NCWIT member that evening, but a longish wait for my luggage and a taxi meant I had enough time to quickly unpack and then head to the reception. The reception was at a really cool place, and I spent a lot of time chatting with someone I haven’t caught up with in a while. It was weird to be at an HP reception, given my former life as an HP Labs post-doc, but it was neat to hear about what HP’s up to now and to share stories about my time there. All of the HP women there were so friendly and welcoming, and it was a lot more fun than I expected.

I skipped the keynote on Wednesday morning, sadly, to set up our LACAFI booth. I had to get more creative than I intended with our limited space, but I made do. Once the Expo opened, our swag disappeared quickly, so we’ll definitely have to bring more next year.

I knew that the afternoon/evening would be crazy full, so I escaped the conference for a while to recharge and grab some cheap Tex-Mex food. Once the Expo opened, I came back to check on our booth, then wandered around the Expo. I kept running into alums, which was awesome. I promised some of them I’d find them later, a promise I did not keep. (Sorry, alums! Nice to see you briefly, anyway!) I also randomly ran into my posters co-chair, whom I’d never met in person, so we chatted for a bit. She is awesome, and I hope I get to work with her again someday.

Wednesday afternoon was the poster session and the first part of the SRC. Hilarity ensued (only hilarious now in hindsight) when the first poster judges came back to tell us that they could not find the poster numbers we assigned them — turns out we had posters listed by submission IDs, but they were actually numbered by position in the hall, and there was no easy mapping between them. Whoops! Luckily our judges did not revolt, and were super patient as we figured things out. (We joked that we gave them an encryption problem to solve before they could judge the posters.) Judging took way longer than we expected, but we finally figured out the finalists from the judges’ scores and got that info to our awesome ABI contact. At this point, my co-presenter for the CRA-W talk showed up so we could go over our slides and plan for our talk the next morning, after which we headed to a reception for CRA-W scholars. The reception was a great end to the day, but I was totally wiped afterwards, and collapsed into bed as soon as I got back to my room.

Thursday morning began with our CRA-W talk on balancing teaching, research, and service in academia. The talk was way better attended than I expected given the early hour and intended audience. And the role-plays we planned (my co-presenter’s idea) were a hit! The audience was game to participate, asked great questions, and offered great tips and advice to each other.

Afterwards, I met up with my colleague David, who was wrangling the students this year, and chit-chatted about sabbatical and department stuff. While I’m really enjoying sabbatical, I do miss the day-to-day encounters and conversations with my colleagues, so it was nice to reconnect. I then escaped for a bit to recharge, then headed back to the Expo to snap up some swag for my kiddos and chat up some people at the booths.

Thursday afternoon was as tightly packed as the previous day. We had the undergraduate and graduate SRC finals back-to-back, one of my duties as posters co-chair. The talks were fabulous and our judges were simply amazing and thoughtful. (One of my regrets for missing the Friday keynote is that I was not able to see these six incredible finalists receive their awards.) My co-chair and I then headed to one of my favorite annual events, the NCWIT reception. I met new people and caught up with some colleagues from liberal arts schools, took a picture with the rest of the CRA-W speakers, and got to hear a surprise speech from Megan Smith, the US CTO, who stopped by the reception. I always love what Megan has to say, so that was a fabulous treat. By this point, I was exhausted and my brain was mush, so I again collapsed (after stopping for gelato on the walk back to my hotel — priorities!) as soon as I got back to my room.

Friday started early with the CRA-W scholars breakfast. I sat with my posters co-chair; a colleague I see every year at GHC, SIGCSE, and NCWIT’s Summit; and some very enthusiastic students. If I have to be at something that early, it’s worth it when the conversation is that fabulous. I then went to an actual conference session (on motherhood in academia), then volunteered at the Student Opportunity Lab talking to students about how to get into undergraduate research, in somewhat of a speed-dating format. One last check of the LACAFI booth and the handoff of exhibitor’s credentials and I was on my way to the airport and back towards home.

My relationship with GHC has definitely changed over the years. While I think the conference is now way too big and way too career-fair focused, and while I think these are detrimental changes, I’m still surprised by the ways in which the conference rejuvenates me. What I get out of the conference now is very different from what I used to get out of the conference, and changes every year. This year, I definitely felt like my role was to mentor and give back to the community, but in giving to others in this way I was immensely fulfilled. I networked less, but felt more fulfilled by the interactions I chose to have. This year’s conference reaffirmed that GHC does still hold relevance to my professional life — maybe not on an every year basis anymore, but definitely within a rotation of conferences.