Apologies if this is not the right place for my (first!) post. I am a lecturer looking to increase our student participation in OSS/linux projects and was wondering if anyone could provide a little direction and guidance as to how I can go about getting my students to participant constructively in actual OSS projects. Any assistance would be most appreciated.
Thank you:-)
p.s. A little about me; I have been a Linux user for a number of years now , having drifted from distro to distro before finally putting down roots with Opensuse Tumbleweed and then Factory. I admit I have been quite selfish in my engagement with the Opensuse/OSS community, sponging of the hard work and knowledge of others!!! I have tried to mitigate this somewhat in my teaching but am now in a position to assert a little more influence over the structure/content of my organisation’s programmes. I would thus like to broaden the knowledge and skill set of our students whilst also providing something back to the OSS community at large
Almost any project will welcome student participation if they have the right skills - often C++ or Python. Apart from the Google Summer of Code which is only open to students on vacation, KDE run a similar program for those who were not accepted on Google’s program. The advantage of these programs is that they expect well-defined problems to be addressed which is probably what you want from your students. Projects which do not have Google Summer of Code experience probably won’t have mentors experienced enough to understand how to develop the well-defined problems your students probably need.
Thank you very much for your advice, its very much appreciate. At the moment I am looking into the links kindly provided by malcolmlewis in order to try and see how we can map them against the learning outcomes of final year projects. I will keep you all posted of any new developments, thanks again everyone
