Open Source Club continues to focus on Rawr for April

saraford — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:25:00 GMT

Since I announced Rawr as the project of the month after nearly a week went by in March, we decided to make Rawr (http://rawr.codeplex.com) the project for April. And I have to be honest that I haven’t carved out the time that I’ve wanted to work on the project. But this week will be different! I’ve just made a public commitment =D

Additionally, I’m still brainstorming ways of tracking interest and participation. Maybe people could comment to this blog post whether they are interested in the project or how they’ve contributed?

Also, thanks to those who have submitted a project nomination. You can nominate any OSI-licensed project by contacting me at saraf at microsoft dot com.

Introducing the Open Source Club on CodePlex – Project of the Month: Rawr

saraford — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:28:00 GMT

What is the Open Source Club?

The Open Source Club (OSC) is a group of volunteers who contribute what they can to the specified open source project each month. If you’ve ever wanted to contribute to an open source project, but didn’t know where to start or didn’t have much time, this is your chance.

Even if you just spend 20 minutes just writing up a bug report, a “how-to” user guide, or a blog entry about the tool, it counts! It’s about making the most of the time you have right now to contribute.

Project for March: Rawr

Rawr is a program for comparing and exploring gear for characters in the MMORPG, World of Warcraft. It has been designed from the start to be fun to use, and helpful in finding better combinations of gear, and what gear to obtain. (.NET, WinForm, C# 3.0, XML)"

The Rawr project is looking for

Issue Tracker management - going through the issue tracker, sorting out bugs from what should be on the discussion boards, figuring out which bugs are still reproducible, and so forth
Writing documentation for the end user
Software Testing – for those familiar with World of Warcraft
C# and .NET WinForms developers to fix bugs and help with features
Blogging about Rawr and getting the word out

If you have time to help, go to the Rawr project and jump in. Contact Astrylian for any help getting started.

Special thanks to Rawr for volunteering to be our first project!

We’re looking for projects!

If you’re a project owner that could use an extra set of eyeballs on your project, or if you know of a cool project that could benefit from this, please let us know.

Projects must meet the following criteria:

Uses an OSI-approved License
Is active on CodePlex
The project owner wants to participate =)

If interested or want to nominate a project, contact Sara Ford.

Why did we started the OSC?

We started the Open Source Club because we want to help Open Source projects become as successful as possible.

Why a “club?”

It’s been our experience that many consumers of open source software would like to contribute back some way. It’s just a matter of finding the right project with the right needs at the right time, which can at often times be challenging. There’s also a matter of time commitments. Even if a potential contributor finds the perfect project, he or she may not have enough time to commit to finishing the task. Thus, projects are left without contributions, and potential contributors are left wishing they could have helped.

One solution is to harness the potential of as many contributors as possible and focus their combine efforts into just one project at any given time. For example, imagine if 20 people wanted to contribute just an hour once a month to a project. That would be the equivalent of nearly 3 full-time days of contributions to a project.

Similar to a book club model, the Open Source Club will announce a project for the month. Then people in the community can choose how to assist that one project in whatever way makes sense for him or her.

How is a project chosen?

Since we’re just getting started, the OSC Leadership Team (Jim Holmes, Leon Gersing, James Avery, and Sara Ford) will select the project of the month.

Thanks to Jim Holmes, Leon Gersing, and James Avery for sharing these ideas with me, knowing good and well I would be “called to action” to make these great ideas happen!

CodePlex Weblog : Open Source Club

Open Source Club continues to focus on Rawr for April

Introducing the Open Source Club on CodePlex – Project of the Month: Rawr