From the manager´s perspective: Classroom contributions to open-source projects

For the past several years, students in computer-science courses have been assigned work on open-source project development. The literature is replete with examples. Yet an instructor desiring to incorporate OSS into a course often has difficulty finding a suitable project and developing a fruitful interaction with its personnel. This paper reports on a survey of managers of OSS projects on how they have interacted with classes and students, and on what faculty can do to work with them effectively. Our findings indicate that instructors need to seek out projects weeks or months in advance, and need to be personally involved in OSS development themselves, and that they need to give their students a good background in design and testing. As a help for instructors looking for a project, we describe several OSS projects that have benefited from student contributions.