Blogs from WikiToLearn

I am wrapping up the ideas after the Google mentor summit 2017. In spite of having mentored my first GSoC student in 2008, this is the first time I ever attended this summit. There were ~300 mentors representative of many different open source communities. A triple-concentrate of all the main open projects in a not-too-noisy environment (unlike e.g. FOSDEM) – all in all, it has been a very pleasant experience!

I also took a few more days to visit the Mozilla offices (shout out to Micheal, Havi, and of course Potch for being so welcoming), visit the Internet Archive and in general have follow-ups about the discussions generated at the summit.

Highlights from the conference

The conference was an “unconference”, so sessions were not precisely defined. I have attended many, but here are my true highlights:

• Running hackathons
  Extremely interesting session – where I gave some advice on how we run events in KDE, and we discussed how to attract open source contributors and create a productive environment around it, where even newcomers are enabled to have an impact. Great ideas for the future!
• Collaborative education
  In this session, run by Alessandro and me, we discussed tools for implementing collaborative education resources, compared to simply producing open educational resources. The difference is simple, and can be understood with an example: you have a similar difference between simply adding an open license to your code or following an open and transparent development process, where other can participate.
  The latter brings many more exciting possibilities to build, as a community, something great, and it is what I believe to be the future of education. WikiToLearn was of course a main topic in this session.
• Git(hub)(lab)(…) and new collaboration tools for opensource
  This last discussion started as simply “tools for automating git workflows”, including ML-powered bots to triage and categorize issues, and turned into a general discussion around tools, infrastructure and workflows around git. This question is very much felt in many open projects: where and how do you store your code? We carried it on to a new session run by Alessandro and Boudayan (where I was unfortunately not present), and kept discussing it throughout the whole summit. I interviewed many developers from very different communities to understand their take on the matter.

My peronal take on git in open communities (preview)

This is in no way meant to be a concrete proposal, but not even a rant – simply a primitive thought on a very complex issue. I think that “how we work together” is currently the most challenging problem affecting the KDE commmunity, and it should be handled as such.

I think that Paul Adams came up with a great blog post this summer, a TLDR of the post could be (sorry Paul for the extreme synthesis!): if you adopt Git, you cannot continue to work like you did on SVN – the price you pay is the isolation and fragmentation of the development community. I fear that KDE, just like other “traditional” open source communities, didn’t see this transition happening before their eyes (after all, it was just a tool switch for them), and continued with the traditional workflow of the centralized repository. This is understandable, as we’ve been simply continuing to work like we used to, but we didn’t see how “Open Source” was becoming a standard for the new generations, and with it there came an associated, standard, way to “work in the open”. Personally, it took me a lot of time and a lot of talking to young developers to understand how other communities use tools for open source such as Gitlab, and why this is so radically different than what we can provide with our git.kde.org installation.

This is reflected in the final composition of the community – the big core formed during the golden age of SVN, and, as time progresses, is undoubtedly aging. We have to accept that nowadays most open source communities don’t work like we used to ten years ago, and it is imperative we figure out a way to evolve our workflow without betraying our values of shared and open governance. What are the young kids doing? Why are they doing that? What lessons can we learn from all these git natives?

The side-track

As always, the most interesting part of the conference happened in the corridors. In particular, I have been working with the developers of Rocket.Chat to show them the work we’ve been doing on Ruqola. They were very happy to see the development in this direction, and they showed me RocketChat+, a great newly released React Native mobile application for Rocket.Chat, so that we can chat reasonably even in mobility. It seems like we’re getting closer to a point where Rocket.Chat can be an OSS replacement for Slack! Another feature request I have managed to ask (it is a real blocker for us!) is a way to do proper SSO authentication (e.g. OAuth) outside the browser, so that we can have all of our userbase logging in the chat system with a unified identity, and the possibility of properly linking different identities. They are tracking this second issue here, and my hopes are up! 🙂

The work was not over when the Summit finshed. We’ve been brainstorming with a representative of GFOSS (a Greek FOSS-related organization) to improve their open education systems with the help of WikiToLearn. During the last days Alessandro and I managed to squeeze in a visit Mark Graham at the Internet Archive, to figure out how to best develop and preserve educational material.

Thanks a lot to KDE e.V. and Google for sponsoring my flights and allowing me to participate!

 

 

Back from #OSCAL2017

It’s been a while since the last “What’s going on?” episode, but now we’re back!

A lot has been done in this period, as our social pages and blog can confirm. We’ve announced the release of the German portal and we’ve launched the new series “Meet the authors“, with the first episode dedicated to our italian contributor Atakanz. The community is growing and contents on the platform are increasing day after day, as you could read from our reports. WikiToLearn never stops: knowledge only grows if shared, then let’s share!

But now let’s move to more recent activities: we’re just headed back from Tirana, where we attended Open Source Conference Albania 2017 (OSCAL). I’ll try to keep it short because words are often not enough. First of all a special mention goes to the organizers and all the volunteers, kudos to you all! WikiToLearn also gave special thanks to the conference, make sure not to miss them 😉

Matteo and Riccardo had two talks: “Social Engagement for the Open Source” and “Web backends for native frontends” respectively. We also attended several presentations: every talk was very inspiring and gave us the opportunity to improve ourself and to share ideas with other speakers.

On Saturday we had a WikiToLearn meet up, main issues? Community building, outreach and some cool plans for the future. The support of external people, such as OSCAL volunteers, was fundamental: thank you very much! Having an external point of view helped us to understand where and what we need to improve, what we are doing well and what people expect from us.

Back from the conference, it’s time to work. We have planned our activities for the next weeks, but no spoiler here 😉

Acttually you don’t deserve it, so here it is a short list of what you should expect:

• WikiToLearn has to be a powerful tool for your studying activity, that’s why we are planning to lunch WikiToLearn study groups;
• Community building is a great issue for us and we’d like to start working on this more and more;
• We’ve several books to import, TexLa will have to work hard: knowledge only grows if imported!

As you can see these taks demand strong efforts from the whole community. Are you corious about them? Want to help? You can find us at chat.wikitolearn.org and on join.wikitolearn.org, do not hesitate!We’ve learnt a lot from this country, which has suffered a lot in its history and now is trying to rise from its hashes. We hope all the best for the Open Labs community, you guys rock!

See you at #OSCAL2018

This article is the first of a series of stories to meet more people behind WikiToLearn! Today we speak with Daniele Pannozzo, one of the most active editors, from Southern Italy. This is Daniele’s User page (Italian).

Hello Daniele! Could you start by telling us a little about yourself?

Hi, I am an undergraduate physics student. I am 21 and I study in Sapienza, Rome. I live in a little town in the south Lazio (central Italy). My hobbies are reading, playing videogames and my main interests are physics, science in general, literature and philosophy.

What do you do for a living?

Actually, I am a full-time student and even if I don’t have many relations, I’m facing several problems with the studies. (do you know complex analysis? Me neither, but you don’t have an exam in a week). So, perhaps it’s not a good idea to find a job at this moment. Anyway, when I am not busy with studies (as in summer), I usually work to survive, away from the sun and the people.

What do you do for WikiToLearn?

In WikiToLearn I am an editor. I wrote some courses in the Physics department (just for the Italian portal, I don’t feel so confident with English to be able to translate them). Actually I am working on a course, which is Elettromagnetismo (Electrodynamics), trying to give our site a well structured, planned and written book with examples, exercise and images. Now we have several notes collections, but there is no book which could be used as a textbook in the university. I’m trying to write it.

Also, I’ve been quite lucky, in that, everytime I log into the site I find at least a bug. So over the months I have become an unofficial bug-finder for the developers of WikiToLearn. I also try to help where I can help. I don’t know coding so well, so the tech side of the project is out from my reach, for now.

How did you get started contributing to WikiToLearn?

I joined the project in December 6, 2015, thanks to a post published by Davide Maggiorelli on the faculty Facebook group (Fisica Sapienza). At that time, my idea was to write good math books for high school (when I was at high school I found those books horrifying and awful, so I had to study math and analysis on university textbooks) because the ones we had was awful and not so clear. The project is mainly focused on universities, so the first course I wrote was analysis, but for university. To date I have still not written that book for high schools, but who knows, in the future..

How much time do you spend working on WikiToLearn?

Actually the 80% of my free time is dedicated to WikiToLearn. The writing of Elettromagnetismo fills all my free time, so, when I have a free moment, I turn on my pc and write some pages. Also, creating images requires more time than I’d planned, with the result that I write the pages and, later, I create the images I need to use.

What keeps you motivated?

First of all, I love what I study. I think that, if I didn’t love physics so much, I would never write about it. Also, as Physics student, I have to admit that we don’t have so many good books in italian: the most of them are written for engineering, so they don’t explain what they have to or, sometimes, they also provide wrong information about the topics. Therefore, we are forced to use english textbooks, which are better for many reasons. To have a good Italian book, someone has to write it. I don’t think I’m writing a good book, but it can be a good base to use, in the future, for someone finally write one.

The other courses I wrote in these months, were collections of notes, and I wrote them mainly to help my classmates, who appreciated my work. That is to me, the best motivation to keep writing – someone who appreciates your work.

What are some of your future goals for your involvement with WikiToLearn?

To date I am the only developer who studies in Sapienza. In think in the future people will know WikiToLearn, so I hope people in my university will start contributing to the project Therefore I chould help them in taking their first steps into WikiToLearn. For now, since I live away from other members of the project, and also as I am busy with studies, I continue being what I am: an editor.

What are the most interesting aspects of WikiToLearn?

I think there are many on these; for example, WikiToLearn helps me studying: I reorder my notes twice, once on my notebooks and then on WikiToLearn, giving them a cleaner and more complete meaning. When I write the notes on the site I ask myself: “How can I explain this topic to someone who has no idea of the course?” So I can improve them, clarifying the discussions and this really helps me understanding what I study. It so happened that, at the end of the semester, I downloaded my notes and printed them, cause they were better than the ones I hand-wrote in my notebooks.

Another interesting aspect is the possibility to work together with someone else: actually I write alone (for several reasons, which are that no one of my mates wants to help me and, of course, other people have different classes from mine; also I give my notes a style and a continuity which gives the book a general organisation) but, if two or more people want to write a collection of notes together, the site gives them the best way to do it.

And, if there are already are notes about the topic you want to write, you can reorder these, without starting from zero, using the work of someone else as a base for yours.

What are some of your hobbies and interests outside of WikiToLearn?

As mentioned earlier, I like playing videogames. I like reading (I have a great library, which I consider to be my treasure). I’m actually reading some books about physics and continuing my reading of One Piece (if you are thinking about reading it, DON’T DO IT, you will be another victim of the author and, like me, you will die before it ends). My preferred authors are Tolkien and Dostoevskij. My three preferred books are Silmarillion, The Karamazov Brothers and Faust (by J.W. Goethe).

I like art and science in general. I dislike Chemistry and Engineering, but of course I acknowledge there are other nice sciences except Physics (such as Particle Physics, Matter Physics, Cosmology… I’m joking, don’t worry). I also like sleeping, eating, drinking and loving cats, even if i don’t have one yet. In my future, I can see a life full of cats and sadness.

Do you have any advice for people who want to start contributing to an Open Source project?

“Go on” could be okay? I don’t know, what advice I have to give except “Go on and enjoy it”? Actually Open Source is an open space in which everyone  who wants to contribute can do it as he can, so there are no problems about that. I have an idea about all this. There is no reason to run behind money or fame. Many of my friends, when I said them my work on WikiToLearn is completely free, said “Are you crazy? Why don’t you sell your note? You can make good money this way”. What reason do I have to do this? Even if I could do 1000€ selling my notes (which is an astronomic number for such a “job”), this money would not change my life. But my notes can change the life of someone else. Many people have thanked me for the notes, saying that they passed their exams studying from them. There is no reason other than this to contribute to WikiToLearn (or a general open source project): you have no direct earnings, but you will help people, and your work would not be erased, so it will help you in the future to find a job you like.

There is no reason to follow money, it won’t change your life and people won’t be thankful to you.

Thank you so much Daniele for your time and your hard work on WikiToLearn!