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Getting started with FOSS techniques (student friendly)

by Sarup Banskota (speaking)

Section
Workshops
Technical level
Beginner

Objective

Identify open source projects that interest you, jump the initial hurdles, and work towards becoming a FOSS contributor! If you're lucky, find yourself a mentor ;-)

Description

If my observations from last year are any indication, there will be a lot of students at PyCon, especially ones who are starting out with stuff. The talks at PyCon are great and interest a lot of students, but many face hurdles when they start out (and they aren't exactly technical - I'm a student myself, I must know).

I propose to introduce interested students to the idea of contributing to FOSS, and help them get started with the basics - finding projects, IRC, mailing lists, version control (anything else I'm missing?). Since it's a student crowd, introduce some opportunities they can involve with. I'll lay emphasis on how non-programmers can contribute to free and open source communities.

PyCon is a wonderful converging point for contributors from various open source communities, so it would be great if some of them come forward with areas that are looking for new contributors and mentor some of the attendees. I'm with Fedora myself, so I can help onboard some into our projects.

Requirements

A laptop, preferably with a GNU/Linux variant on it.
If you want to please me, come with Fedora installed ;-)

Speaker bio

20 year old student, Fedora design team. I help run the tech{know}logy club in college, where we help new students aboard interesting projects. I've also co-authored GlitterGallery, a discussion space for open source designers. Currently on my second GSoC spicing it up! :)

Comments


  • 2

    [-] Abhijeet Nikam 277 days ago

    That really sounds interesting! The slides are cool and its a great proposal to get people started with FOSS and its basics tools. Being a KDEian, would love to help in getting people introduced to the KDE community.


    • 1

      [-] Sarup Banskota 273 days ago

      Sure, why don't you leave a small brief pitch about which KDE project you'd like to help out with? (hint: bonus points for a project based on Python)


  • 2

    [-] Nishaanth Gunasekeran 277 days ago

    Great proposal! I would like to help you out :)


  • 2

    [-] Nishaanth Gunasekeran 271 days ago

    • 1

      [-] Sarup Banskota 271 days ago

      cool. If this session makes it, I'd suggest you maintain a list of good first bugs for getting started with OWTF and preserve links to documentation that helps one work towards fixing it. Will come handy :) thanks again!


  • 1

    [-] Nishaanth Gunasekeran 270 days ago

    Yeah the pleasure is mine.
    I will do the same.

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