Open Source – more than just code

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Open Source – more than just code

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rit-open-source-talk

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Open Source

more than just code

Abigail Cabunoc Mayes / @abbycabs

Thank you Jim & RIT! Thank you for bringing focus and concentration to such an important topic.

abbycabs.hello();

I work for the Mozilla Foundation where I'm the Lead Developer for the Mozilla Science Lab

I want to use the web to move science forward

I work for the science lab *because* I want to use the web & it's power to make things open. I was working in research labs, and we were dealing with so much data & analysis. It was easy to see how the openness and collaboration available on the web could make science better.

Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all.

Science Lab - applying Mozilla's mission to a very interesting community of practice. Where they have some very interesting and specific problems:

Why do you use open source?

Some Benefits of Open Source

  • Quality & Security
    • "More eyes make shallow bugs"
  • Learning / hands-on experience
  • Cost

There is a community behind each benefit

What does 'Open' even mean?

  • open science
  • open access
  • open standards
  • open government
  • open data
  • open source
We've seen this used for... and I think the word 'open' is starting to loose it's meaning When I first heard 'open science' it was vague and I thought it meants something like 'free science'. I want to look back and see how this term came to inspire so many movements and try to bring back some of the meaning & power behind 'open'. And I would argue that a lot of the fundamental ideas behind 'openness' today originates in science!
Welcome to the scientific revolution! Colbert Presenting the Members of the Royal Academy of Sciences to Louis XIV in 1667. At this time, there were a lot of scientific discoveries being made. But people realized they needed a platform to share and collaborate on research.

“Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society”

Established by the Royal Society of London in 1665

“Philosophical” = “natural philosophy” which is equivalent to “science” today Coming out of the scientific revolution, the first academic journal devoted to science...
Henry OldenburgThe Royal Society’s first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, wrote a series of letters giving us insight into the values driving the creation of the journal.

Credit & Documentation

“We must be very careful as well of regist’ring the person and time of any new matter, as the matter itselfe, whereby the honor of the invention will be reliably preserved to all posterity”24 November 1664

Sharing

“…all ingenious men will thereby be incouraged to impact their knowledge and discoverys ”3 December 1664

Participation

“ … being first revised by some of the members.”Royal Society of London, Council Minutes, 1 March 1665 Need to share discoveries in order to build on them. Science is better with more eyes

Science embraced a culture of working together and sharing discoveries to further human knowledge.

This has enabled many scientific breakthroughs. Today, almost all advances in science appear in a journal article.
WormBase - C. elegans

Fast Forward

The Web + Free Software = New Meaning of 'Open'

some ideas around working open start to appear in the 90s
Essay on the state of free software at the time. Linux
“Linus Torvalds’s style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches... out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge…” Inspired Netscape...

Mozilla

In 1998, the Netscape Corporation released the Netscape browser suite as free software.

This became the basis of the Mozilla Project and inspired the term open source.

https://blog.mozilla.org/beyond-the-code/2012/06/19/two-things-weve-proved-along-the-way/

Working Open

Public and participatory. This requires structuring efforts so that "outsiders" can meaningfully participate and become "insiders" as appropriate.

Working Open, Mozilla Wiki So, how does this look like in open scource?

How do we do this?

Open Source Checklist

Public repository LICENSE README Roadmap (issue tracker with tasks broken down in issues) Code of Conduct CONTRIBUTING.md Mentorship

1. Public repository

Make sure your code is available

2. LICENSE

We recommend MIT or BSD

http://choosealicense.com/

3. README

4. Roadmap

Minimum: an issue tracker with tasks broken down in issues. Can be: Comprehensive wiki outlining future of the project.

5. Code of Conduct

6. CONTRIBUTING.md

7. Mentorship

Resources

Working Open Workshophttp://mozillascience.github.io/working-open-workshop/

Acknowledgements

The Mozilla Science Lab team!Kaitlin Thaney, Arliss Collins, Zannah Marsh, Aurelia Moser, Steph Wright

Thank you!

Questions / Comments?

Open Source more than just code Abigail Cabunoc Mayes / @abbycabs Thank you Jim & RIT! Thank you for bringing focus and concentration to such an important topic.