David Lord Mar 31, 2024

Got the latest "student was told to make an open source contribution" PR, so I decided to write up the various types of these that I see, and why they're not helpful. https://davidism.com/school-assignment-open-source/ #OpenSource

If your teacher (or tutorial/video/hackathon/etc) says "go do X in an open source project" and then sends you off unsupervised, they haven't adequately prepared you to be a contributor, or thought through the consequences of their assignment. Don't do it.

So your teacher wants you to do open source

If your teacher (or tutorial/video/hackathon/etc) says "go do X in an open source project" and then sends you off unsupervised, they haven't adequately prepa...

David Lord
Show threadnicksloan

@davidism I think “don’t do it” is bad advice, especially when you give much better advice at the end of the post.

I wonder if GitHub and others could surface some kind of opaque metric that gives you an indication of how engaged with a project the user already is, perhaps looking at their repositories both public and private that depend on a project, and the history of those repositories. This could open the door for moderation features that could help at least contain the mess.

Mar 31, 2024 at 3:24pmWeb
Show threadnicksloanMar 31, 2024
@davidism I’d also say that “Attach this post to your homework submission” might be more effective than telling people to not complete what they may see as an easy assignment.