Jon+Polaski

Sun Nov 14, 2:14PM (Edited Mon Nov 22, 9:31PM) - Homework 6
**On Saturday November 6****th,** **I had the pleasure of attending my first Linux GNOME “Hackfest” where I learned alot about the open source community. A select few of my classmates and the professor of our Software Engineering course at Western New England College woke up early Saturday to head across the state to the Tang building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We were certainly all anxious to arrive and had little notions about what to expect when we got there. We knew we would be meeting up with Mel Chua who has been working closely with our class and acting as a sort of liaison between the accessibility project we had been enhancing and the open source community. When we finally arrived, we were greeted with open arms.. We were introduced to a few hackers as well as J5 who we later found out was coordinating the event. Following the commencement, we realized this event would be quite informal. The commencement consisted of a very brief overview and then individuals in the community would stand up and write down on a chalkboard a topic they planned on giving an open session about and briefly talked about the topic. Two other of my classmates and myself proposed to have a session about Caribou and accessibility. This was more of a chance to get questions answered than anything else – almost like an open forum. We had lots of questions about our project and were looking for the right people who could help answer them.**

**I was surprised when I was sitting in the hallway by how easily approachable people were. The term open source community truly seems to infer an “open community” from the environment I observed. Some of the sessions our class attended included changes for GNOME 3.0 as well as the GTK animation framework. Having been a Linux user for a few years, I was truly taken back by the amount of knowledge which was being shared in the room. I realized at that point as a senior Computer Science major that I had only scratched the surface of computing. This was a humbling moment for me. I also realized one major roadblock is ambiguity. Linux developers use a lot of jargon and sometimes cryptic acronyms. The learning curve can be difficult. The best thing i feel like an individual can do to understand the open source is to get as much exposure as possible, be open to learn, take a deep breath when you get frustrated. After implementing a new keyboard layout at Hackfest, i realized that it is easy to deal with ambiguity by maintaining a positive attitude. It truly wasn't as bas as i initially thought it would be.**

**The session our class hosted was focused on the Caribou accessibility project in GNOME. The session was paired with experts in AT-SPI which our project heavily relies on. It seemed like a small world to be sitting in the same room as some of the creators and innovators of Linux accessibility. We started off by giving an overview of our project and then opened questions to the floor. The duration of feedback doubled the span of our presentation for sure. Nonetheless, it was all constructive criticism and I was happy to have experts who could give our project more a direction to follow. My previous concern was that we were spinning our wheels so to speak with the resources we were putting into Caribou. I feel like we got a lot of our questions answered and some more food for thought by hosting this session. Martin Owens approached us after the session and sat down with me and my classmate Bryan to speak about some of the specifics about our project and how he thought we could overcome integrating a certain feature. We were very thankful for the suggestions. Martin addressed the enhancement in a way which I didn't even realize was possible. He backed up his reasoning well and showed us another project which had made use of a similar methodology.** **Any doubts about the effectiveness of open source that I had are now erased. Hackfest has a healthy amount of innovation, learning, teaching and networking. I am glad I got to the opportunity to experience hackfest. It was nice to put irc aliases to faces and create some new points of contact. Overall, this was my first real exposure to the open source community and I look forward to contributing more to Gnome and open source in the future.**

Wed Oct 20, 9:00PM
At this point in our Software Engineering course we have created various lifecycle documents for Caribou (a gnome virtual keyboard). We have also outreached to the OSS community a bit and looked for answers. This mainly lead to more questions. I do realize that the open source community has other priorities and I agree that open source software is a great concept. However, It is very clear that Caribou is not stable enough to have any sort of official release without failure at this point. Some things that I would like to take out of this class even if Caribou is not a viable product is team programming, source control, architecture styles and design patterns. I don't thing these are topics other traditional CS courses leave room for. I am having my doubts about Caribou mainly because of the lack of functionality compared to GOK and "glitchyness". Another skeptical point is who is our end user because Caribou lacks a '/' key! How can any human use the internet without this key?

Tues Sept 14, 1:26AM
Reviewing my IRC log; It appears that the A11Y channel is more professional than some of the other channels I have been familiar with after exploring into other servers including ones on course with Open Source projects. The A11Y channel is friendly and will wave and seems rather happy that WNEC has taken an initiative to be on board in general. Topics start off rather casually and progress into a technical specific from what I have observed. There isnt constant activity but when there is activity on the channel it is relevant. I am excited to give back to the community and accessibility hits close to home as I have an uncle who uses a computer at work who has cerebral palsy and has trouble with fine motor movements. He would be the prime target of someone who could benefit from technology like Caribou and again, I am anxious to dive in.

Open Source Community
"Hello World" Just found a picture of us on professor Ellis's page

...Off to complete the homework assignment for the week.

Here are some listservs I looked at GNOME Release Team discussions and coordination http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team Teaching and research with GNOME http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/academia-list Official GNOME Foundation announcements http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-announce GNOME-DB discussions http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-db-list GNOME development http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-devel-list