I've been working with college professors who want to introduce their students to contributing to open source as part of their education for the past few years. Dr. Mihaela Sabin from the University of New Hampshire has some students working on a php-based donation management system for nonprofits this semester, and asked whether I knew of any open source contributors who might be willing to Skype with her students and talk about what it's like to work on a larger-scale FOSS php/mysql project, with a particular mention of issue trackers and unit testing. Would anyone be interested?
I thought CiviCRM might be a good place to ask -- Mihaela has been part of a faculty workshop I've taught on "getting involved in FOSS" the past 2 summers and is familiar with IRC, trackers, release cycles, etc. -- but isn't an active contributor to a project herself and thus can't give the class a deep glimpse into how a specific FOSS community operates. The hope is that some students might be interested in taking their experience and the skills they've just learned and start contributing to CiviCRM or other FOSS projects down the line as a way to learn, help projects they care about, scratch itches they or the folks they're working for have, and build portfolios.
Her email with more details is below. The class is scheduled Thursdays, 5:30 to 8:30 EST (GMT -5) for the next few months, and they're willing to work around your schedule. You can reply directly to Dr. Sabin -- search for 'mihaela sabin unh' to find her faculty homepage with email - or reply here or to me and I'll pass the message along.
Many thanks!
--Mel Chua
-------- Original Message --------
Hi,
I'm a 2011 POSSE Raleigh participant looking for a TOS speaker for my class this semester. The class is scheduled Thursdays, 5:30 to 8:30 EST. Anything in this interval will work. The class is in the lab. We'll have Skype ready.
The topics on which I'd like get TOS expertise are: issue tracker, unit testing, and mysql-php development. The course is Web Application Development, an upper-level undergraduate course, entirely project-based, with 11 students this semester, 5 of whom are working full-time in industry and are enrolled as continuing ed students.
The project is a client-based open source application to manage donations for non-profits. We use MySQL and PHP. YWCA New Hampshire and Greater Manchester Big Brothers Big Sisters are the "clients". Only YWCA has time this semester to meet with the students.
I appreciate your recommendations. If anybody on this list is interested in giving a talk, I'll be very happy to schedule it.
Thanks,
Mihaela
