HFOSS - Interview with Carlos Jensen (Oregon State University)

One more interview at HFOSS, this time we are interviewing Carlos Jensen who is currently an assistant professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Oregon State University (OSU). He received his BS. degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) Brockport, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2005, where he was a member of the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center (GVU).

You can either watch the interview or read the answers in this blog post.



This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

What's the big picture opportunity in connecting education and open source?

• find out what the challenges are for newcomers and how to make it easier
  
• in education they have short semesters
• students have to be able to do something meaningful in a short period of time

What specific projects or courses are you working on that make the link between open source and education?

• they have a number of various research projects
  
• they are researching if visual code analysis tools can help speed up the structure of the large code base and who contributes in which modules
  
• they are developing open-source hosting environments
• they want to encourage mentoring and other non-technical skills
  
• in sourceforge it is more important the number of commits of a user
  
• in education it is more important who you connect to and how you participate in the process

Do you have any advice on how Mozilla could best engage with educators and students?

• Mozilla could help with the outreach
• Carlos works at a research university which is as well a state university
• students don't think that Google Summer of Code or getting involved with Mozilla is something they can reach
  
• Mozilla could highlight success stories so other students can believe in this
  
• currently there is a believability gap

NOTE: Modified to add license note