Open Source: What It Is and How to Contribute

Subsection 2.4.1 Website

Subsection 2.4.2 Software Engineering Collaboration Platforms (SECP)

Subsection 2.4.3 Other Asynchronous Communication Tools

• Collaborative Instant Messaging Platforms.
  In recent times, collaborative instant messaging platforms like Discord¹³, Matrix¹⁴, Mattermost¹⁵, Slack¹⁶, and others have become very heavily leveraged in OSS communities. Each of these platforms has their own flavor, and the choice of which of these to use is largely driven by the OSS community. Discord was originally favored by gamers. Matrix is decentralized, open source, offers end-to-end encryption, and is the primary choice for some larger projects like Firefox¹⁷. Mattermost is also open source and is most proud of being dedicated to security, so the Mattermost website highlights users like the US Department of Defense. Slack was developed for professional and organizational communications, and is also very heavily utilized by many OSS projects. Some commonalities across all of these collaborative instant messaging platforms is that communication is carried out in channels which individual users are placed in or choose to join. In addition to human users, various services and bots (programs providing automation) are present in many channels. Nicknames or handles are used, although in some OSS communities, the handles must adhere to the rules of the project (e.g. being identical to your handle on the project’s SECP).
• Wiki.

  Definition 2.4.6.

  Simply stated, a wiki is a hypertext publication where the pages are a user-editable, easy-to-use, asynchronous way of putting semi-permanent content on the web.
  Although wikis can be created within many of the SECPs, the concept of a wiki is widely used and understood outside of SECPs as well, largely due to the wide popularity of Wikipedia¹⁸ and WikiMedia¹⁹. Wikis are useful for documentation, timelines, status reports, meeting minutes, and conversation logs. A wiki provides easy version control, a database backend, simplified markup, and a fast edit-and-post cycle. Having said this, the use of wikis for OSS projects have fallen largely out of favor in place of having markdown files in the code repository since markdown allows using the same tools such as merge requests, which has the additional benefit that changes to the documentation can be part of the merge request that introduces the relevant change.
• IRC.

  Definition 2.4.7.

  Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is old-style text-based chat system for instant messaging and synchronous communication between people working on a OSS project.
  IRC is one of the older means of synchronous communication between people working on a OSS project, and although in the past it was one of the primary OSS communication tools, many projects have abandoned IRC for collaborative instant messaging platforms and other newer communication tools. It’s a text-based federated chat system where clients connect to the servers of one or more networks, and the servers relay messages between themselves within each network (hence the name). Communication is done in channels which individual users join, and users are identified by nicks (nicknames). In addition to human users, like collaborative instant messaging platforms, various services and bots are present in many channels. However, IRC is very lightweight because its focus is solely on the textual content, which means it can work right from your command line. However, there is no formatting, not even new lines, no emojis, no voice or video chat, and unlike most more modern chat technologies where recordings can be automated, messages aren’t easily stored, so it is designed to work only for synchronous communication.
• Blog.

  Definition 2.4.8.

  A blog, which is a truncation of weblog, is an informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of individual, often informal entries called posts.
  A website provides semi-permanent places for content which is updated and replaced as needed. While in a blog, new articles that are published add to the content rather than replacing it (although existing posts can be updated as well if things change). Blogs provide a flow of transient, in-the-moment news, commentary, and technical articles which are posted by date, with past posts still available. Because many open source participants write blogs, it is sometimes difficult to keep up with them on a larger project. The volume of blog postings created within a community can be overwhelming. To help deal with this, RSS feeds enable the receipt of content in a machine-readable format so that it can be used in a variety of different ways through a service called a RSS feed aggregator. A few open-source communities also maintain a Planet site which aggregates the feeds from that community into a single page (and the Planet, in turn, provides an aggregated feed). Here are some examples: The Mozilla Planet²⁰, The Fedora Planet²¹, and The Document Foundation Planet²².
  As you get into OSS, you may want to share your news and opinions with others via a blog. Remember to represent your thoughts professionally, bearing in mind that the Internet is semi-permanent. If you don’t want a potential future employer to see what you write, don’t post it because the Internet Archive²³ and/or other crawlers may capture it forever.
• Mailing List.
  You likely know that an electronic mailing list is a collection of names and email addresses used to send material to multiple recipients, typically given a single email address for the list. Open source communities that use email lists tend to use discussion lists (which allow for replies) rather than announcement lists (which are one way) to engage their communities. An example of an open source project that leverages email lists heavily for discussions is Debian²⁴. Note that all emails sent to the Debian lists are distributed both to the list subscribers as well as copied to the public archive, so people to browse or search without the need to be subscribed.
  People on an email list typically use their real name. Surprisingly, there is a significant variation from community to community in terms of list etiquette and even the amount of participation on lists.
  An open-source participant subscribed to several lists in multiple communities can easily receive thousands of messages a day. For this reason, many people choose to use a separate mailbox or use filtering rules to keep their mail under control or sign up to receive only a regular "digest" of the messages.
  Mailing lists are sometimes managed through online list service providers such as Google Groups, but are often managed through private installations of list management software such as the open source GNU Mailman²⁵, which provide subscriber management, bounce control, and web-accessible archiving.
• Forum.
  A web-based forum has some similarities to an email list because users can subscribe to receive updates via email. However, conversations in forums are typically grouped by discussion topic and are often better-organized than email archives, which makes them easier to browse and search. People on a forum typically have handles or nicknames, rarely using their full real name, unlike in email. Many OSS communities have one or more forums specific to various aspects of the project. There are also forums that span multiple OSS communities. For example, It’s FOSS Community²⁶ is an example of an active forum on FOSS.
  Other OSS communities use related communication technologies such as newsgroups and listservs which serve some of the same purposes as mailing lists and forums and often offer e-mail notifications as well.

Subsection 2.4.4 Synchronous Communications