How to add a creative commons license to your blog

I always wanted to understand the creative commons licenses and it is now that I decided that all my blog posts should have it by default making life easier for other people to reshare whatever I blog about.

I visited this link to generate the code snippet by just answering few questions:

http://creativecommons.org/license/

and I also read a little bit this document which explains briefly some concepts:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/images/6/61/Creativecommons-licensing-and-marking-your-content_eng.pdf

This is the license I chose Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License and here is the break down:

• BY - created BY
  
• NC - No Commercial use
• SA - Share Alike

I have decided to add the snippet of code in every single post by adding it to Blogger's "Post Template" under "Settings->Formatting"

Make other people's life easier and keep just the rights you want!

<br /><a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work by <a cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="http://armenzg.blogspot.com/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen</a> is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License</a>.<br />

NOTE: I tried to use the following code to show you what the code snippet looks like but I ended up using a "textarea". Is there a better way to share HTML code? http://bguide.blogspot.com/2008/02/howto-add-custom-css-class-to-blogger.html

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

White Paper in open source and education -> rescoping

After the insightful moments at HFOSS and many discussions followed in the mailing list of teachingopensource.org, I have to narrow down the scope of my white paper in open source and education.

This decision was made after talking with my professor today and it is not the first time I did this since I came back from the symposium. The first time I narrowed it down to the polytechnic schools in Ontario since I don't understand properly the post-secondary system in United States and my experience is with an applied college rather than a theory and research oriented university.

Trying to narrow it down to the polytechnic schools inside of Ontario does not work either since it would require me to get in touch with several schools and maybe for nothing since teaching open source is not yet normal. Even the term polytechnic cannot be extrapolated to an equivalent type of school in the United States and it is not an accepted term in here either!

What I am going to do

I have three more weeks before the due date and I am going to narrow it down to the advantages a Seneca student gains when taking the open-source courses compared to other Seneca students and show how the skills gained were immediately put into practice when I was doing my internship with the Release Engineering team of Mozilla. I hope Lukas Blakk, Anthony Hughes, Cesar Oliveira and Ben Hearsum could help me by telling me what their own experience is from working at Mozilla and having taken the open-source course or the crash course at Seneca.

Funny enough, this advantage that I gained is going to be lessened since the majority of my class mates are either currently taking the open-source course with Jordan Anastasiade or they took it with Dave Humphrey last Fall.

This is going to require to write again a new outline, identify my ideal reader and all the work I had already done but it will be totally worthy and more personal.

Stayed tuned!

HFOSS - paper presenters

The following paper presentations are happening with slide presentation and I believe that they take less than 15 minutes.

Position statements are next after these presentations.

NOTE: Slides are not available or linked from the website
NOTE 2: Excuse me if some notes are not easily understood

Presenters:

• Timothy Budd (Oregon State University)
• Gary Thompson (San Francisco State University, Sun Microsystems)
• Yunrim Park (Oregon State University)
• Cay Horstmann (San Jose State University)
• Linda Seiter (John Carroll University)

Comments:

Some of the comments during the presentations worth highlighting were:

• Best teams have been the ones that CS students have been mixed with students from other disciplines
• Some people highlighted that what Linda has been doing makes it easier to help NPOs with open source tools since they are most graphical rather than command line oriented
• Students do not learn to read code before writing it
• Lack of tool knowledge by students

Notes from the presentations:

Timothy A. Budd (Oregon State University)

"A Course in Open Source Development"

• Paterson's editorial - Open Source course would be the course I would love to take
• We teach writing before reading code - wrong way
• Important about Open Source:
• Code
• Community
• Tools and self-development
  
• Process is not well articulated - No text books in this
• Professor teach what they have been taught. Who has experience in FOSS
  
• Open source merit badges
• First assignment - what is your passion? do some introspection
• Next assignment - contribute something of wikipedia
• Make the students present
  
• Outside speakers
• A paper or patch every two weeks
• it doesn't have to be accepted
• peer reviewed by students
• It is all about the process, not the product

Gary Thompson (San Francisco State University, Sun Microsystems)

"Teaching Distributed Collaborative Development Techniques in a Software Engineering Class Setting"

• this is a course in distributed development
• Global Software Engineering
• a student's project example - http://csc640-03.dev.java.net
• every day he sees the need of developers that have the open source methodologies
• dstributed collaborative class among few universities
  
• this is a process oriented class, not a technology oriented class
• globalization
• outsourcing
• and others
• students learn by doing things
• break students into teams and assign project
• they have to go through the whole software development cycle
• we treat the team as start ups
• we provide all the teams the needed tools
• software development tools
• netbeans, java EE, linux, open Solaris
• collaborative tools
• archive mailing lists, version control, skype, IM
• require the completion of 6 milestones
• description of milestone 0
• first 2 weeks of class
• they have to setup the environments
• students normally don't estimate properly how much work it takes to setup the tools
• this milestone helps them deal with that immediately
• CCLI Grant Proposal to National Science Foundation
• he presents some publications on their last slide
  

Yunrim Park (Oregon State University)

"Supporting the Learning Process of Open Source Novices: An Evaluation of Visualization Tools"

• this presentation talks about that visualization tools helps the learning process of the source code. It also explains the experiment
  
• overwhelming
• feeling that you have to know the whole project before you can submit patches
• dealing with a large code base
• learning about the community
• interaction with existing members of the community (intimidation)
• finding entry points (hard)
• lowering barriers: visualization
• lower the "cost" of joining OSS projects?
• they did an experiment to see if visualization tools help them
• group A
• access to open source sourceforge website, wiki, tracking system
• group B
• two eclipse plug-ins
• group C
• two standalone tools
• Change history (Augur)
• you can see in different colors the authors of the modifications
  
• Code Structure (Creole)
• you can see a diagram on how the source code is connected
• completeness vs correctness
• in SUMMARY:
• information visualization helps
• Creole and Version tree both provided insights into overall code organization and structure
• Source Forge was really intimidating
• Females showed low self-efficacy in activities that involve close interaction with other members
  

Cay Horstmann (San Jose State University)

"Challenges and Opportunities in an Open Source Software Development Course"

• The OSS Class at SJSU
• the focus on gaining an understanding of the open source methodologies, business aspects
• students are not very tools savy
• version control
• build automation
• patching
• test automation
• cross-platform development
• we have to spend a lot of time in teaching tools
• tools are not the only problem
• they lack the human skills
  
• reading before asking
• asking good question
• putting yourself into their shoes
• effective participation in discussions
  
• submitting good patches
• business and legal background
• licenses
• paid vs voluntary contributions
• motivation
• organizational structure
• open standards
• patents and copyrights
• challenges
• vast difference in student skills
• many students lacking tool knowledge, cross-platform skills
• limited experience with OSS products (often only Firefox, Eclipse)
• social skills: asking questions, understands other perspectives
• surprise: the facebook generation is shy about being out in the open
• surprise: bad coders also most lacking in business skills
• benefits
• successfully working with large code base greatly increases confidence
• students were motivated to do better when seeing marginal coding practices
• tools become second nature
• students gain respect for platform and configuration issues
• first exposure to legal, business, professional issues for many students
• conclusions
• course stresses skills that are valued by employers
• have realistic expectations
• push for curricular improvements
• tools taught earlier
• learn how to read code, not just write it
  

Linda Seiter (John Carroll University)

"Computer Science and service learning: Empowering nonprofit organizations through open source content management systems"

• capstone course
• traditional issue - sustainability of that project
• NPOs are the least capable to maintain projects
• John Caroll University - Center for Service and Social Action
• 2007 - 1300+ volunteers (~3000 undergrads)
• 70+ nonprofit community partners
  
• no computer students unfortunately got involved
• business school case studies
• have web presence
• charity events
• lack of technical staff
• NOSI - Nonprofit Open Source initiative
• class taught at their university
• most popular FOSS software
• CMS
• CRMS
• CS444 - Adaptive and open software systems
• computer info systems learning objectives
• free and open artifacts
• explore business and societal impact of FOSS
• readings, peer review
• CS444 - Service Learning
• build web site
• train end users of the CMS system
• service activities with community partner
  
• contribute to open source CMS
• She shows a web site as an example:
• "Interfaith Hospitality Network of Greater Cleveland"
• "Thea Bowman Center"
• Good together: FOSS + NPOs
  

HFOSS - dicussion panel

Here are some things that I was able to catch during the discussion panel.
Some of these have a question/answer style but some are just notes from an answer or from an independent comment.

Audience:
Laptops unfortunately come with Vista (proprietary software)
At their local stores they will only buy a windows laptop

Answer:
Most vendors will help you have laptops with customized installations of Linux
Netbooks are great to run Linux and are inexpensive
USB Linux boot flash drive

Audience:
There ethical issues using proprietary software, it makes institutions unable to provide the tools needed to students for free
Would you give a book to a student and not allow them to take it home?
They can't take the resources they need home
Teachers can't download software and install it in school stations
Students can't do their homework unless they buy Office, XP and other tools

Answer:
CDs with needed tools would be great

Answer:
I don't know that the question was
Foster mentality that projects are things that you work on
A project is something that you are inspired to work on and don't wait for a professors to tell you what to add or how to continue

Audience:
K-12 creating games and sharing them online follows an ideology of sharing philosophy
Games help self platforms to be sold or be attractive

Audience:
Open source for women might not be as appealing idea; who likes the idea to go home after work and getting involved in writing code?

Answer:
open-source has a lot misconceptions which scare women away
Women don't work with computers when they get back at home
A lot of things in big open-source projects are not just coding

Audience:
I am an o.s. maintainer and I don't know how to get an educator to ask how I can help them

Answer:
We have been like this for many year, if there is a place to fix that is in here. We have educators in here that we say we are here and open-source projects maintainers that we are in here. We are finally in the same room

Audience:
How can we prepare educators to teach open source? One week courses?

HFOSS Bruce Perens talks to educators

I don't know what is the best way to pay attention and talk of what is going on but I will try my best. Probably next blog posts won't be as lengthy as this one. Bruce is giving me enough time to write all this and listen at the same time :)

Before I mention what Bruce Perens is talking, I want to mention that I have met again with Greg Dekoenigsberg (Red Hat) and met for the first time with Carlos Jensen (Oregon State University) (who is from Madrid, Spain, yay!!)

Greg mentioned this:

• How can we replicate the Seneca experience? How can we have more students in other places to contribute?
• The professor has to be involved with the open source project. They can't just stand on the side and watch their students hack. They have to know who to connect their students with.
• How can we make cap stone projects to be meaningful. How can they be a module that contributes to projects world wide and really used by others.
• There is so much that can be learned from contributing to an existing base code rather that writing your own from scratch and in a rushed manner
• He also mentioned briefly about the Red Hat Academia initiative and their certification idea
  

Carlos mentioned some reasons of why it is a big barrier for people to get involved

• "How much time is it going to demand from me?" - people don't have a way to measure how much the time impact will be
• Mailing lists - people are afraid of being bombarded with mail and being flamed (ask a *silly* question and get a bad response) - their studies show that this flaming ratio is lower than assumed
• He also asked me about Gregorio in Madrid since he is interested on trying to have programs abroad for students and open-source would be a great course
• These types of program try to teach courses like ethics and usability since students are distanced from their usual "habitat"
• He talked about his colleague Timothy Budd who is more involved with the teaching part and Carlos is more involved with the infrastructure for students and faculty
• He also mentioned about a closed-open-source repository in their school for students before they hit the real communities
  

Carlos is going to present this position statement:
Building a CS Platform for Learning An Open Source Approach - Carlos Jensen
and talk about the OSWALD project.

They create a really cheap Linux box (less than $200) for students not to be scared of breaking it. Most students are afraid of breaking their personal computer by installing Linux or even having a virtual machine. It also includes gaming capabilities to use for other courses.











Bruce Perens talks:
Asks to the educators: What do you want to get out of this conference?

• Find things to tell my students
  
• A good story

He is explaining the story about how open source came to be for all educators to be in the same page of background.

He mentioned these concepts:

• computers used to come with source code included
  
• share code with friends
• pay for code
• business differentiation
• business side of open source
  
• volunteer side of open source
• Microsoft as a business limiter
• proprietary software does not allow you to modify anything
• most open source nowadays is involved with businesses
• freedom
• open source is very community oriented
• computer engineering graduates should have a strong minor since all they know is about computer engineering
• creative artists learn mostly applications and they should learn about programming as well - he mentions LOGO as an example (Armen says: good all times with the turtle and the 5"1/2 floppy disk!!)
  

How can we get students involved open-source?

• open-source enthusiasts work during the day and they spend time out of work hours to contribute to their open-source projects
• we had students who continued in the project they started working on
  
• he talks about students who take an open-source course and don't get the sense of ownership of their project and continued to another semester without continuing involved with that project
• what happens if you don't contribute back? in every new release you will have to port your patch forward
• let's not work just with computer studies students since our world is increasingly being controlled with computers. This is happening in every field

What do we get when we do all this?

• shall we have freedom? shall we have self-control?
• you have the power with your students to lead them in ways that were not available before
• open-source has been mainly written for love
• if you want to write a good software hire a professional, if you want it to be written beautifully get a volunteer
• you also get the look over the shoulder ability - you can check what the code is really doing

The panel discussion is next to come

I made it to Chattanooga! - Humanitarian FOSS symposium

After 7 hours that I have been switching flights, car and shuttle I am finally in here in the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel. There is actually a train in the hotel! (pictures tomorrow)

I have been able to go through HFOSS's agenda of the symposium and the papers that are being presented.

My day will look like this tomorrow:

• 7ish - Meet Frank Hecker for breakfast
  
• 8-9 Reception
• 9-10 Keynote by Bruce Perens - He has been involved in so many things!
• 10:30-12:15 - Round table discussion in which there will be invited round table discussants and position statements - no idea on what this second thing means
  
• 12:15-13:15 - Luncheon
• 13:15-15:00 - Paper session - List of papers
  
• 15:30-17:00 - Panel on "Open Source in the Curriculum"

I will be online and blogging as things happen but will be offline when I will be doing the interviews.

Let's see how it all goes!

Chattanooga here I come!

Study week is around the corner and I will be flying to Chattanooga, TN to attend a one day symposium called "FOSS Sypmposium 2009" in which the sessions will be about integrating FOSS into the Undergraduate Computing Curriculum.

This opportunity arose thanks to Chris Tyler and Dave Humphrey who suggested me to take part of it since I am writing a white paper in open-source and education.
The good thing is that it is happening during my study week and Mozilla Foundation was able to fund this trip (Frank, thanks again!) to meet all these educators that are trying to break the molds and integrate open-source into the CS curriculum with some of them with amazing success stories as well!

I am really excited because there are many interesting people attending and I want to hear first hand what they have to say and what they have done already.

It is going to be great. Stay tuned for more posts!