The Open-Source Collaboration Game

The goals of this tutorial are to

• Learn how to use the collaboration features of Git, including forks, pull requests, merges, and issues
• Apply them in a realistic setting of multiple contributors without requiring time to write code
• Familiarize with the key elements of open-source project documentation

In the following, we simulate a small Open-Source community that updates the documentation for an example project.

Students will split into small groups and one maintainer group, which will lead the project and use the beamer to show their work.

Preparation

• Create a GitHub account
• Select two maintainers, form up to 7 teams (1-3 students each)
• Give the maintainers 5 minutes to prepare

Round 1 (Maintainers)

• Create the project and ask for contributions (based on playbook M1)

Round 2 (Contributors)

• Each group works in their issue based on the following playbooks (playbooks with 🎓 are sightly more challenging):

  • Playbook C1 - Goals 🎓
  • Playbook C2 - Getting started
  • Playbook C3 - Example
  • Playbook C4 - Documentation 🎓
  • Playbook C5 - Contributing guidelines
  • Playbook C6 - FAQ
  • Playbook C7 - Using CoLRev for interview data

• The maintainers prepare for the next round

Round 3 (Maintainers)

• Review the contributions assign them to issues (based on playbook M2)

Round 2 (Contributors)

• Each group updates the nav_order values and adds links to the other pages (the links are optional)
• Group 7 has a separate playbook
• The maintainers prepare for the next round

Round 4 (Maintainers)

• Conclude the session and provide a brief outlook (based on playbook M3)

Round 5 (Clean-up)

• Take notes on the changes that were introduced and the key elements of the GitHub/Open-Source workflow that were covered in this session

License

The contents are licensed under the CC-BY 4.0 License.