Mission Statement
PES Open Source serves to facilitate technical skills and knowledge by fostering a community around contributing to, creating, critiquing, and advocating for Open Source Projects.
In other words — we want to create a culture of Open Source collaboration in our college.
Our Activities
Here is how we will go about to successfully create a healthy Open Source community, here, in our college:
Workshops on the Open Source movement, software and technologies
These are hands-on workshops whose goal is to familiarise members with current technologies and frameworks, with the hope that they explore them further and improve their capability in being able to contribute to open source software.
These workshops may be organised by industry experts and guests, which would be a formal, organised affair.
There will be workshops of a more informal nature too, often organised by community members who want to share their knowledge and exciting new discoveries. These will be set as an agenda for general meet-ups.
A major formal workshop from an expert would run at least once per semester and the ones by our community members will be done at least twice in a semester, and will vary based on community interest.
Presentations and Talks from prominent members of the Open Source Community
These are talks where we would invite eminent contributors of Open Source in and around Bangalore from varying backgrounds to give a presentation. These talks would be very insightful and give our members a glimpse into real-world programming.
Open Source student projects supported by the community
Our community will be collaborating together to work on projects hosted on the PES Open Source Github Organisation. These projects will be reviewed and selected based on community interest. In addition to this, we will be supporting open-source projects that already exist in our college, often created by the other clubs, by encouraging our members to contribute to them with issues and pull requests. Almost all the projects lack documentation, so that would be another field where members with less experience can help out in.
A pull request challenge in the style of Hacktoberfest1
We will organise events whose goal is for our members to look for Open Source projects and try to polish out any issues that need help. Projects with tags like help-wanted or low-hanging-fruit would be suitable for these sessions. We will also encourage sending out these pull requests to other projects run in our college.
There will be a dedicated event for this where we set a pull request target and our community should meet that target in a week’s time.
Outside of this event we will also open up issues and pull requests to projects without a specific target during our general meet-ups.
Regular general meet-ups for casual coding, exchange of ideas and planning
This is our most important activity as it is the one that will happen most often and drive long-term interest and engagement. Each meet-up will have an agenda although this agenda need not be strictly followed if something more interesting comes up during the meet. These meetups will happen twice a week without fail, and all our activities will be coordinated from here and our online communication channels.
We will have various activities set on our agenda in rotation. These activities would be:
- Lightning talks by members
- Full talks by one member
- Workshops by members who discovered something cool
- Mini pull request challenges
- Assigning work to projects around the college
- Coordinating PES Open Source projects
- Planning for our events
- Holding elections
- Question time (where members will present a question/problem and other members will assist in fixing the problem)
- Code review - bring some code and walk through it. Explain the code, take comments on style, performance, etc. Rewrite parts of it to make it better.
- Book/Papers study group - review a book/academic paper relating to technologies used in the Open Source world and discuss the same.
All members are expected to attend these meet-ups regularly.