Weekly Overview

This week in class we focused on learning how to rebase with an in-class activity. We were able to work in small groups over Zoom to complete an activity and help each other if we needed to. The first time we started this activity, I found it a little tricky because I was unfamiliar with using Git through the command line. Also, I thought we needed the activity logs formed by the terminal to be exactly like the one we were given in the activity. Getting the activity log’s to be an exact match was a little difficult and time consuming. By the end of the activity, I was able to understand Git a lot better and had a clearer understanding of what rebasing was.

Our Open Source Project

Throughout this week, Selam, Karishma, and I have been putting a lot of work into our Open Source Project. We have been in contact with various members of the Oppia team to make sure that the site we are building will meet the community’s needs. This week we created a user journey and wrote a product requirement document. When we first began writing the user journey, we struggled with understanding the exact purpose of the site we were asked to build. Many of the ideas seemed to be too simplistic and trivial. We were able to get in contact with a researcher and teacher for Oppia, Yamama. Yamama was able to offer us a great deal of insight on how Oppia is actually using in developing nations. She also was able to tell us some of the things she struggled with when she started using Oppia. Her insights were extremely useful and helped us write our product requirement document. On Friday, we were able to speak with Sean, a director of Oppia, about the document we had written up. Sean and Diana (another director at Oppia) were very pleased with our document and thought we covered various of their concerns.

In the next week, we are hoping to make wireframes and designs for the site we want to build. We are also hoping to write all the content for the site, and maybe even start working on some of the visuals we want to incorporate on the site.

So far, working with Oppia has been really exciting. We have been able to be in touch with Sean and Dianna, who are always offering us useful advice and encouragement. We hope that the site we build will be impactful and help the larger community of Oppia.

Cathedral and the Bazaar

I really enjoyed reading Raymond’s essay, Cathedral and the Bazaar. What I enjoyed most about this essay is the analogy used to describe the organization of various open source communities. The idea of building software like a cathedral is very familiar to me. One would expect that by building software slowly and meticulously would lead to the best product. However, surprisingly, the bazaar method of having many people working all at once doing various things seems to be the best approach. I think that by having various people constantly collaborating and debating you are able to encourage creativity. In the cathedral style approach, people are very focused on their own art and are not forced to look at the work of others. In the bazaar approach, it seems like people are forced to collaborate and come up with novel ideas together. It is this collaborative nature of open source that allows open source to suceed and excel.