Birds of a Feather: Growing Open Source Communities with Student Participation
Channel: Open Source Program Office, UC Santa Cruz
Date: 2022-10-08

Birds of a Feather: Growing Open Source Communities with Student Participation

Emily Lovell, OSPO Incubator Fellow, UC Santa Cruz (Moderator)
Steven Huss-Lederman, Project Maintainer, Open Energy Dashboard (Featured Speaker)

Growing open source projects with student involvement offers many rewards, but also presents unique challenges. For example: How can we attract and support new contributors? How can we get students up and running quickly with a development environment? How can we maintain continuity across academic terms or internship periods?

We’ll start with a talk from Steven Huss-Lederman of Open Energy Dashboard as he shares his experience in this arena, followed by open community discussion on this topic. Whether you’re simply curious to learn more, or have your own best practices (or quandaries) to share… join us!

Talk: Bringing the Joy of Open Source Software Projects to Students (slides)

Computer science students can enhance their college learning by engaging in an open source software project. The key to maximizing the gains is having a project that offers a high-quality experience for the student. Projects have many considerations in working with students: knowing what attracts students and professors, knowing what students want/need, mentoring, easy setup, providing necessary documentation, effort/time in working with students, etc. The Open Energy Dashboard (OED) has been engaging students in a variety of ways for six years. The experience, best practices and lessons learned by the OED project maintainer will be discussed along with insights from a couple of similar projects. The hope is to spawn an open and interesting discussion about students engaging in open source software projects: the good, the bad and the rewarding!

About the Speaker:
Steven Huss-Lederman is the project maintainer of the Open Energy Dashboard (OED) project that provides a web-based application to acquire, archive, analyze and visual resource usage at an organization. In this role, Steve provides direction for the project, interfaces with the user community, works with colleges/universities to engage with OED and mentors student developers. Previously, Steve was a professor of computer science for nineteen years and chair of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Beloit College. Steve received a BA from the University of Maryland and a PhD from Caltech.

About the Moderator: 
Emily Lovell is an OSPO Incubator Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching use novel domains to invite broader participation in computing, with her postdoctoral work focusing on sharing open source with high schoolers. Emily previously served on faculty at Berea College, where she developed and taught courses on open source contribution and computational craft. She has also co-taught physical computing workshops at a variety of venues domestically and abroad, including outreach programs, design schools, museums, and festivals. Motivated by a desire to make e-textiles more accessible, Emily designed a low-cost, pre-programmed sewable microcontroller known as the LilyTiny – which is open source and has been commercially available as part of the LilyPad Arduino product line for ten years now. She has a S.M. in Media Arts & Sciences from the MIT Media Lab and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Santa Cruz. Emily lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains with her rescue pup, Lyra.