Hi everyone! I am a junior majoring in CS and minoring in math and game design :)
Our Oppia-3 team (Justin, Shay, and I) delivered our presentation on Wednesday this week. As the first group presenting that day, I felt nervous since English is my second language. We met at the Data Science Department an hour before to practice, which helped our presentation go smoothly.
This week, our Oppia-3 team made significant progress on several fronts:
Last Monday, our group, Team Oppia-3, had a productive group work session. We started the class with stand-up reports from each group. Since there are three groups in our class contributing to Oppia, we had a clear understanding of everyone’s progress. Our team finalized the first community exploration lesson focusing on Manhattan geography, structured into five chapters, and decided to incorporate voiceover functionality. Over the weekend, we held a Zoom meeting to brainstorm our next community exploration lesson, which will introduce basic Git commands. Given our target audience is relatively young, we aim to present the content in a more accessible and engaging narrative format rather than straightforward explanations.
Eric Raymond’s essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” provides valuable insights into different software development models. As I’ve worked with the Oppia project with our team (Oppia-3), I’ve experienced several of these principles firsthand:
Our Oppia-3 team has been making consistent progress over the past weeks. Each member has actively contributed, with myself posting two UI front-end issues and one broken link issue - all of which have been resolved. This quick resolution demonstrates how supportive and active the Oppia community is, confirming it was an excellent open-source project choice for us, especially for a starter like me.
This week, we had Nick Vidal from the Open Source Initiative (OSI) present about the Open Source AI Definition. The presentation deepened my understanding of what truly constitutes “open source” in the AI space.
We first reviewed all project ideas from 2 helpful resources provided by a student peer and tutor: Awesome First PR Opportunities and past GSoC list of orgs. Then, we filtered them based on our familiar languages (for me, Python, Java, and JavaScript). After that, we picked around 5 ideas and discussed the pros, cons, and potential applicability for each one. We finally decided to delve into Oppia, which is also the project that the Professor mentioned in the Humanitarian and Social Good Projects slides. We also completed the project evaluation for Oppia together.
I’ve been on a gradual journey with my open source contributions. I recognize that I’ve struggled somewhat with procrastination and need to work on improving my self-motivation. My approach has been to start with more accessible contributions like Wikipedia edits and OpenStreetMap improvements to build confidence and understand contribution workflows.
After reviewing several open-source projects, including Godot, VSCode, and Ghostty, I’ve noticed interesting patterns in how these communities operate.
git log --graph --decorate --oneline --all).Our team of 3 (team#7) is developing a Firefox browser extension for infinite scrolling through auto-reloading content. We quickly aligned on this idea and maximizing our development time.
From my perspective, having a code of conduct document for a project has many benefits. For instance, it creates a clear guideline for people, as it usually lists out the standards for acceptable behaviors. It also handles any possible conflict or violation based on explicit management instructions, since communication challenges are very common in open projects. As the presentation about how to drive consensus and transparency within open source communities, having such a document maintains the community to be inclusive and collaborative in the long term.
The term “open source” makes me think about words like transparency, community, and collaboration. It’s the representation of shared and innovative knowledge. Regarding the advantages of open versus closed source, open source code transparency firstly allows better bug fixes and provides a public place for developers to learn collectively. This community-driven feature thus further strengthens the system, making it more robust or innovative. However, potential problems with open source might be the lack of full-time support development; projects are largely dependent on stable and centralized support from the community, which is not easy to maintain.