Blog/Ed/Wiki/GitHub/Wikipedia/OpenStreetMap Activity

Introduction

Professional and open source software development makes use of many different communication channels, each with its own strengths and purpose. We will be making use of several such communication channels (blogs, Ed discussion forum, course wiki, GitHub organization) in this class and many of you will find yourselves also using others (IRC/Gitter/Discord/etc.) as they apply to your selected projects.

You will also be contributing to projects hosted on several sites: GtiHub, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and others as they apply to your selected projects.

The start of the semester is a good time to get organized and setup access to some of these platforms. It is also the time to share the information about your usernames and accounts with the rest of the class, since we will be keeping an eye on your activities.

GitHub

The course organization is hosted on GitHub. It is also likely that you will pick a project that hosts its repositories on GitHub. (It is possible that you will work on a project that uses a different hosting site. In such a case, you will need to setup an account there as well, eventually.)

After you complete this task, share your GitHub username with the instructors by completing the survey form shared on the course website.

Tasks

Most of you have an existing GitHub account. But if you do not, or if you do not wish to use it for the class purpose, you should create a new one.

1. Visit GitHub.
2. In the upper right corner click the Sign Up button.
3. In the page that opens, complete the information required by GitHub. If you do not wish the user name to be easily associated with you, pick something that is not related to your name or your netID.

Blog

You will be using a blog to post weekly writings reflecting on the reading and discussion topic for the week.

Tasks:

Setup your blog site (this can only be done AFTER you shared your GitHub username with your instructor and you were added to the course organization):

• locate your repository in the class organization, it should be called YOUR_USERNAME-weekly
• edit the _config.yml file and make changes indicated by the comments
• edit the about.md file to include some information about yourself (make sure that you are using markdown to format this page)

Note: You should clone the repository to your local machine, make changes there and then push the content back to the repository on GitHub. Do not edit it directly on GitHub (if you are inclined to do this, then you do need practice on using git and this is a good place to start!).

You should be making your first blog post by the end of the first week of classes and then weekly throughout the semester.

Ed discussion forum

Some of you might be familiar with Ed from other classes. We will be using Ed for all class communications. Many of the course activities will require you to post updates on Ed. The activities and project live logs will be posted there. And many more.

Everything posted on Ed is indexed and searchable, making it easy to go back and find information and resources or reconstruct ideas and processes.

Tasks:

1. Make sure that you can access this course on Ed.

Wikipedia

We will spend some time editing Wikipedia pages, and while an account is not absolutely necessary for this, I am requiring that you create one so that we can easily track your contributions. These are instructions for creating an account in Wikipedia.

Tasks

1. Visit Wikipedia
2. In the upper right corner, click the Create Account link.
3. Complete the information required on the page that loads. It is very self-explanatory. If you do not wish the user name to be easily associated with you, pick something that is not related to your name or your netID.

Open Street Map

We will also spend some time editing the OpenStreetMap, so you need to create an account on that site as well.

Tasks

1. Visit the page OpenStreetMap.
2. In the upper right corner click the Sign Up button.
3. In the page that opens, complete the information required by OpenStreetMap. If you do not wish the user name to be easily associated with you, pick something that is not related to your name or your netID.

Course Wiki

The course organization on GitHub contains a private repository called wiki. The repository will remain empty throughtout the semester, but we will be using its Wiki pages. We will use this for content that needs to be jointly edited by everybody in the class. All of you should have write access to the existing pages and permission to create new pages.

Tasks

Go to the existing page called OSSD participants and edit it to add your name and some information about you (use my entry as a template). You should list:

• your name,
• link to your blog (the actual blog page, not the repository),
• link to your GitHub profile
• your Wikipedia username with a link to your contributions page
• your OpenStreetMap username with a link to your contributions page

• the name (and a link) of your favorite open source project (challenge: pick a project that nobody else listed; you can list more than one) - this should be a project that you are at least somewhat familiar with, so spend some time figuring out what you want it to be

  Follow the formatting in my entry! (and use it as a guide for markdown if you are not familiar with markdown yet).

NOTE: With our Wiki anyone can edit any page. This is great for collaborative creation of the pages, but it also comes with great responsibility. Please do not edit anyone else's personal entries. Keep in mind that the software logs all changes and the user that makes them (just have a look at the "History" tab).

NOTE 2: Historically, the biggest challenge for this last step was to keep the entries organized alphabetically by last name! Let's see how it goes this term 😀.