UNICEF Reading List

[whenbellstoll]

Summary

Compile a list of reading materials on Open Source for educational purposes.

Background

We have determined that the teams are looking for educational materials on Open Source as some of their colleagues have never worked on an open source project before.

Details

• Gather a list of reading materials that covers a comprehensive overlook of FOSS methods and practices.

Outcome

We should have reading material to hand the teams that educates a beginner on FOSS.

** The materials will be added to the home page on our LibreCorps Wiki **

[jwflory]

Some of my favorites:

• What success really looks like in open source - Nadia Eghbal @nayafia
• Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project - Karl Fogel @kfogel
• Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software - Richard Stallman
  • Actually not sure about this one since I think RMS's work pushes certain types of people away from FOSS, most notably beginners.
• (video) Have It Your Way: Maximizing Drive-Thru Contributions - VM Brasseur @vmbrasseur
• The Open Organization Maturity Model - The Open Organization Ambassadors at Opensource.com
• Your step-by-step guide to more effective documentation - Lauri Apple @LappleApple
• A template for creating open source contributor guidelines - Safia Abdalla @captainsafia
• CONTRIBUTING-template.md - Nadia Eghbal @nayafia
• How we organize GitHub issues: A simple styleguide for tagging - Zach Dunn @zachdunn
• Why (some) agile teams fail - Jen Krieger @mrry550

[ct-martin]

@whenbellstoll @jwflory where on the practical-philosophical spectrum are you looking at?

[whenbellstoll]

@ct-martin Practical end

[Nolski]

There's a lot of good stuff here. I think instead of the Stallman article you link to, that perhaps the GNU article on the 4 Freedoms might be a bit more useful for the context. Happy to leave it in though!

A lot of these resources focus on community management. It might be worthwhile to look for some resources geared through a lense of product development strategy. Here's a few that I've found.

Setting an Open Source Strategy - Linux Foundation
A Free Guide for Setting Your Open Source Strategy - Linux Foundation (a bit more succinct)
6 steps to perfecting an open source product strategy - Michael DeHann @ opensource.com

[vmbrasseur]

Forge Your Future with Open Source - by me. It's the only book about how to contribute to FOSS projects, and is inclusive of all roles necessary for a successful FOSS project (read: not just programmers).

[Nolski]

Oh! @jwflory @whenbellstoll https://standard.publiccode.net/ is a great resource to be included. It's geared towards public organizations which works very well with the work we're doing with UNICEF. We should have a discussion about potentially using this to inform our rubric

[ghost]

One aspect of my attempts to gather these sorts of resources is at: https://github.com/ritjoe/hfoss-library I go into this in the README and CONTRIBUTING files in that repository, but my aim is to make the repo redistributable and repurposable as a free work itself in the vein of https://freedomdefined.org/Definition (h/t @ct-martin for that link, which is itself also a good entry for this kind of effort). Combined circumstances do not allow us to include, for example, "Forge your future with open source" but it is crucial in several respects to include reference to that and other works even if we cannot incorporate and redistribute them verbatim. Also, there will always be more things we should reference than we might be able to include in their entirety. Those considerations of referential inclusion have led to some off-and-on discussion about assembling and managing some form of bibliography or bibliographies for use in and by FOSS@RIT-associated efforts, but I think the scope of that, even if it might prove useful for this issue, might exceed this issue's scope.

[Nolski]

List can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A6UbSrJ-uhhGA5XYfKEEyYvI-PByf4am7u9XwfDsbh0/edit?usp=sharing