Hi, I am writing to inform you of a new open source club that is starting at
the University of Maryland. It will be mainly concerned with exposing
students to open source, advertising open source software around the campus,
and encouraging them to join projects or start their own. This club is NOT
requesting that undergraduate student be developers in your open source
project. It is instead offering college student time to contribute in any
way you see fit to the project. Students can contribute in their own way,
adding to documentation, maintaining out of date documentation, testing
software, commenting code, advertising to increase your projects visibility
at their school, reduce project developers work load by handling menial
tasks, researching topics, or provide feedback from other students
concerning ease of use and user interface. Most project members are so
overloaded with work they have little time to supervise and undergraduate
student. This club hopes to facilitate the management of students by
aggregating them into groups and developing peer review systems. Students
can work on isolatable tasks or modular pieces of code. Peer review by other
students will help make sure a task is performed correctly.
Before you dismiss the program as another distraction, think of the long
term benefits your project will have from involvement in universities. Think
of this program as almost free labor from fresh minds with a genuine
interest and at least 12 years of general schooling. Student's involvement
will lead to better documented software, better commented code, more
visibility in college campuses, potential recruits after graduating, better
use of collaboration to handle menial tasks, faster bug fixes, and happier
end users. University students have at there disposable a wide variety or
resources to draw upon such as teachers, libraries, peers, computer labs,
and lot's free time. Students could also help fill help channels for the
project, providing online support for users in their spare time.
The club is going to start out simple at first with a few projects and will
expand as interest develops. If you are interested in further information,
please respond. If this email was not sent to the correct contact in your
project, I apologize. Please forward this email to the appropriate channels.
Thanks,
Vijay Kailas
Received on Mon Aug 29 22:06:55 2005