life at the end of the universe

KDE is once again taking part in Google Code-in this year, a contest to bring 13 to 17 year-olds closer to Free Software. I asked some of our students to write about their experience with KDE. Here’s the third one by ctaka.

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“What have I gotten myself into with the Google Code-In?! I’m smart. I get good grades. I’m good at learning stuff. Yet I kept running into little problems on every task. What makes it so frustrating is that it’s basic stuff. I feel like I’m learning to walk again. And look, now I’m talking to myself …”

Ohhhh, the stories my mentors could tell you! Fortunately, the three of them are sworn to secrecy. 😉 [Note: This includes you too, Lydia … although I have yet to do something eye-roll-worthy. But the task isn’t over yet. Just give me time!!! hahaha] What I am at liberty to say, is that working on the tasks and getting things done is very satisfying, but the best thing about the Google Code-In has been getting to know the mentors. KDE has some really amazing people.

My first mentor, who shall remain nameless (hint: his name rhymes with Mascha Sanns!), welcomed questions and suggestions. He laughed at my misconceptions and good-naturedly pointed out reality. He was very patient and appreciative, and it felt great to have my work acknowledged. (THANK YOU, Mascha!) Even after the task was over, he encouraged me to learn DocBook, as it is widely used in industry. So I’m working on that. Lafar, whose name I have so cleverly encrypted (I’m a walking Enigma machine), works for CERN. He may as well have said, “I work on Mount Olympus.” It’s the same thing. Still, he found the time to explain APIs, answer my questions about CERN, and offered very constructive feedback. And then there’s Anne-Marie, who is very efficient at diagnosing problems. It took her all of three questions to figure out what I was doing wrong. Of course, that was after patiently waiting while I muddled through learning to use IRC. Note to others: If you want to chat with someone, don’t bother looking for a nice, big “Click here to reply” box or button. It’s about 5mm tall and is disguised as part of the bottom border. 😛

I’m impressed with how well my mentors communicate in English, and am inspired to continue studying Spanish until I become as fluent. I am aware that they are helping us with Code-In tasks in addition to their regular jobs, and this encourages me to become more selfless. I love the idea of free and open source projects; I had no idea this type of collaboration was going on. Welcoming students to work on their projects makes me feel like the world is not so big and far away, and that we can work as one to advance society. As a result of the Google Code-In, I am developing more than code; I am developing into a better person.*

@ Anne-Marie: Don’t forget our virtual pinkie swear.
@ Lafar: One basket of cookies delivered to your altar every third waxing gibbous moon when the sum of the digits of that day is evenly divisible by 3. Got it.
@ Mascha: Just remember that I have your email address … and I’m not afraid to use it!
@ Lydia: Please disable the mentors’ “reject” button. If they don’t currently have that option (for when students request tasks), you might be getting some requests! LOL =D

*Disclaimer: I have not done any actual coding yet, as I am waiting for winter break and a task I think I can do without causing too much pain to my mentor—HAHAHA. But linguistically, it seemed like the perfect phrase.

KDE is once again taking part in Google Code-in this year, a contest to bring 13 to 17 year-olds closer to Free Software. I asked some of our students to write about their experience with KDE. Here’s the second one by Sumit.

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“I come from India, where one in every five of the world’s children lives. I come from India, where 400 million children and young people below the age of 18 live; this is larger than the population of America, Argentina and Australia put together. “ – Derek O’Brien

I’m a 16 year old kid from Kolkata. I started learning how to code when I was in grade 7, while stumbling across a few YouTube tutorials on Java. 3 years later, Google Code-In was the first time I was exposed to the world of open-source, and I must say, it has been truly marveling.

My first task with KDE was relating to ownCloud. I learnt how to use IRC and immediately after, got in touch with Michael Gapczyski(MTGap) , my mentor. I encountered many helpful souls in the IRC chat, who were a great resource when the task seemed daunting at first. They helped me understand what the task wanted, and how I was supposed to go about all my work. This was one of the most counter-intuitive things I had learnt in my life. That people will go out of their way to help you out just because you ask. I discovered how truly wonderful the open source community was. But coming back to the task, my job was to write a short overview of describing the different types of apps available on ownCloud. After spending several hours using the ownCloud demo online, experimenting with internal and 3rd party apps, reading source gode on git, I finally began writing my summary. After several proofreads, I felt ready to upload my file online. MTGap thought that my summary needed a little more work, and helped by adding the text to TitanPad, where both of us could edit it simultaneously. After a little more research and some edits, my work was finally approved. I felt proud. It was my first task on Google Code-In, and I was glad it went well. Immediately after, I searched for another task. Maybe it was coincidence, but my 2nd task also ended up with KDE. Once I switched, over to Ubuntu, I downloaded Kamoso, which was the crux of my 2nd task. Kamoso is a program to use your webcam to take pictures or make videos. I fired up Kamoso on Ubuntu and started fiddling with all the features. Once I felt I had explored it fully, I started my task of writing documentation for how to use it. Some problems arose as I never got a chance to speak to my mentor, Alex Fiestas, and even long after I had completed the task, nobody reviewed my work. But it was a very minor issue, for when I inquired with GCI, they immediately spoke to KDE, and my work was approved. KDE was extremely swift at getting my work approved and I was equally contented by the fact that I had now completed 2 tasks. I was enthralled by the experience of open source software.

KDE has given me my debut to open source development, and, hopefully, I have a long way to go from here. I felt a little lost coming into Google Code-In, but I can safely say, I know what to do a lot better, and can take on tasks without feeling ill at ease, and it’s all thanks to KDE.

Links to my work :
ownCloud : http://www.google-melange.com/gci/task/view/google/gci2012/7989204
Kamoso : http://www.google-melange.com/gci/task/view/google/gci2012/7980218

Thank you.

KDE is once again taking part in Google Code-in this year, a contest to bring 13 to 17 year-olds closer to Free Software. I asked some of our students to write about their experience with KDE. Here’s the first one by Adam. More will follow in the next days.

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I don’t know C++. I don’t know anything about Qt. And yet with the support of Google Code-In mentors, I managed to contribute to a project in a language I don’t know, in a toolkit I am clueless about, in an unfamiliar codebase. And I managed to dive into KDE, even though diving into development can be difficult with so many different tasks to be solved. Google Code-In helps a ton in reducing the initial workload to getting involved with the KDE community. Instead of the titanic mass of the bug tracker there are a few simple, easy tasks that are not too hard for someone like me to get involved and to start solving problems.

One of these problems was in the anagram app, Kanagram. Kanagram simply gives the user an anagram to solve and a button to show the answer. The bug was a simple one in which the reveal anagram button still appeared after the user had either figured out the anagram or solved it. It was a minor detail and yet an important one, as it was confusing to have a button to reveal an anagram when there is no anagram to reveal. This was a minor inconsistency, and becuase of the simplicity of the problem, a good place to start for me. I apt-getted kubuntu-desktop and I was ready to start my first bug. I, being unfamilliar with Qt, turned to Google to try to solve the problem and came up with an idea. I posted it, and the mentor for that task, Laszlo Papp, looked over the code, and told me what I was doing wrong. A few more changes and I had got in working. I reposted it, and again I had a variety of code-style problems. One more iteration and it was accepted. The mentor turned this from what would’ve been a rather frustrating experience to a much simpler and easier one. In addition, once he marked the bug as fixed he continued to talk to me about what I did wrong with integration, further educating me about KDE and C++.

Another great plus to working with KDE is the reality of the problems I’m solving; in short, I know that what I do makes a difference. It may be a tiny bit of QA or it might be the removal of a button; either way, that change I made directly helps people around the world. And it has taken me just a few days to get started with the KDE community with virtually no hassle, beyond some minor kinks with setting up a build environment, though once set up KDevelop + Git really worked well. Even though KDE does a lot of things well there are some problems for a newbie KDE developer. Many of these are tiny details like the lack of a unified account for the wiki and the bug tracker, but in total they pose an obstacle.  Overall the combination of mentors and the list of tasks materially reduces the difficulty of getting started with KDE development.

This is a guest post from Kevin Carillo, a researcher I’ve been working with to help us improve KDE’s newcomer experience. If you fit the criteria please do take the survey. It’ll help improve the experience of new contributors and thereby help improve KDE. Thanks!

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My name is Kevin Carillo. I am a PhD student currently living in Wellington (New Zealand) and I am doing some research on Free/Open Source Software communities.

If you have joined the KDE community after January 2010 (within approximately the last 3 years), I would like to kindly request your help. I am interested in hearing from people who are either technical or non-technical contributors, and who have had either positive or negative newcomer experiences.

The purpose of the research is to work out how newcomers to a FOSS community become valued sustainable contributors.

The survey can be found at:

https://limesurvey.sim.vuw.ac.nz/index.php?sid=65151&lang=en

A quest for community citizens

KDE is a successful community that keeps attracting new contributors and that has a reputation of being extremely newcomer-friendly. But is this enough to make sure that KDE remains a healthy and growing project?

Suppose a community manages to attract 20 new members every month and suppose a large number of them do not comply to the code of conduct, commit changes without considering the people or modules/components being affected by the commits, do not attend or contribute to any of the community events, do not assist any other members when they seek for help, do not treat other members with respect … It will not take a lot of time until the health of the community will be affected and the future of the project seriously jeopardized.

The main assumption that motivated this project is that attracting new members has become crucial for a large majority of FOSS communities but this is not a sufficient condition to ensure the success and prosperity of a project.

So, yes … it is important to attract newcomers but a community needs to make sure that a certain proportion of these newcomers become ‘good’ contributors from the community perspective. ‘Good’ in the sense that they shall contribute to the well-being and growth of the community. ‘Good’ as good community citizens.

What do newcomers have to say about their experience?

Keeping all that in mind, FOSS projects have thus to do a good job at ‘socializing’ their newcomers and turning them into contributors. Doing a good job here means that FOSS projects shall ensure that they help generate those citizenship behaviors from newcomers by designing appropriate newcomer programmes and procedures.

KDE has a lot of initiatives to facilitate the integration of newcomers with its active involvement in GSoC or SoK, the availablity of a wide array of resources dedicated to helping newcomers, or the use of junior jobs to help involve new contributors.

However, it seems that the other side of the coin is less understood by communities: the actual experience of newcomers.

How are the contributions and the behavior of a new member affected if he or she has received formal mentoring by one or several experienced members? Are junior jobs really helping integrate newcomers? How important is the support of a community towards its newcomers? This is what I am trying to find out.

How is this study going to help KDE?

The data will help gain insights about the experience of newcomers within the KDE community. In addition, it will allow to understand how to design effective newcomer initiatives to ensure that KDE will remain a successful and healthy community.

The dataset will be released under a share-alike ODbL license so that KDE contributors can extract as much value as possible from the data.

Since this survey involves other large FOSS projects such as Mozilla, Debian, Gnome, Ubuntu, or Gentoo to name but a few, it will also be possible to compare practices across projects in order to identify what works from what does not work when facilitating the integration of newcomers.

About the survey

This survey is anonymous, and no information that would identify you is being collected. I expect the survey to take around 20 minutes of your time.

The survey is available at:

https://limesurvey.sim.vuw.ac.nz/index.php?sid=65151&lang=en

It will be available until Tuesday, 22 November, 2012.

If you know members of the KDE community who you think would be interested in completing it, please do not hesitate to let them know about this research.

I will post news about my progress with this research, and the results on my blog: http://kevincarillo.org. Don’t hesitate to contact me at kevin.carillo@vuw.ac.nz.