Seneca meets OOo (OpenOffice.org)

It has been more than three years since Seneca joined the Open Source community and doing so a close relationship is formed between Mozilla and Seneca.
Up to now the major focus of the Open Source community in Seneca was based on Mozilla projects but now we are trying to join other communities to widen Seneca’s participation in the movement.

To initiate this David Humphrey introduced me to Louis Suarez-Potts. Louis, is the community manager of OpenOffice.org. He is mostly focused on developing communities based on small business and education, etc. We met and through our meeting he suggested introducing me to the community and let me join the team and use the experience to help our student join the OOo development.

Doing so I started to send emails to the project leaders of OpenOffice.org. I asked them to help us find projects that are within the proper scope for students and those who are new to Open Source community, as I myself am one of those!

I received many replies with helpful guidelines and referrals that are still being followed. Among all I had the pleasure of meeting Eric Bachard. He is the leader of the Education Project in OOo. He also has been doing core development for Mac OS X for more than 4 years. He also did mentoring for Google Summer of Code twice and he is a professor of Applied Physics at UTBM France.

Eric suggested that we meet on IRC to talk about possibilities and steps to be taken for Seneca joining the OOo development community.

We invited Louse Saurez-Potts; OOo Community Manger, David Humphrey; Pioneer of Open Source movement in Seneca and Pastea Pierre, student of EPITECH institute who has just joined the Education Project in OOo.

In the meeting it was pointed out that we (Seneca) need introductory but not too simple projects for the student to take over. The students then ideally will take the project to 0.3 release during the first semester and then continue it to 1.0 release till the end of second semester.

To have an idea of the how Seneca introduces the projects to students take a look at here: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Potential_Projects

OOo Education Project has a similar way, but apparently the difficulty level is only an estimate and the real scope can only be known by doing it.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Education_Project/Effort

It is a fact that size and complexity of the OOo is discouraging for new comers but this also means that there is lot to be done and many simpler, less complicated tasks can be found to be taken over by newcomers.

Having said so, since the semester has already began and the projects are yet to be identified we are looking for projects to begin in January. Ideally this, hopefully, will produce a lot of good things to be done for Eric and us and therefore good things for the whole OOo community.

To identify the projects, it was pointed to ask the project leaders to propose tasks, but they are not only too busy to donate their time but also their managers won’t let them to do so and therefore, "good for community is not always good for productivity".

David added “this have to change or else the community won’t grow”.
The key is to get the leaders think about students as contributors and get them in bugs. Then it will become trivial to work with each other. Like this the developers don’t have to do anything different than normal.
We have done this with Mozilla and now many of #Seneca channel participants on irc.mozilla.org are Mozilla Crop employees. This culture took time to build, but we did it.

To build the same culture between OOo and Seneca Eric suggested to use #education.openoffice.org on freenode.
Meanwhile I will work with Eric on Education Project and learn about it and also work on OOo development to be able to soon help the students to do the same.

Hopefully this will be the beginning of a wonderful relationship….

See the log of the meeting here.