Greetings amazing humans doing wonderful things in the world,
I’m a teacher at Orange Coast College in California, and an alum of UC-Irvine’s informatics dept. There are advanced cs project classes at UCI that partner student teams with realworld clients to solve an existing software challenge. I’m a former student who participated and then as a grad student, I was a teaching assistant and supported teams through their process. Student teams have uni support, not only with tech but with processes (communication, etc).
One of the project classes is open to new clients (Spring 25, Mar26-Jun6) and if there’s interest from farmOS, I would be honored to help support/do leg work/chat/etc… please let me know.
I’m planning to join the next dev call 11/21 and maybe regularly? (if helpful, as its an ideal time slot for me to participate freely)
Mostly to see what I can do to help with making past student projects visible however is ideal. Though also to see if I can help make these interactions easier and more useful for farmOS.
Thanks for sharing this! I made it an agenda item for yesterday’s monthly community call. We talked about it right after you signed off. It would be great to chat more on the next dev call if you can make it!
On the community call it sparked some good discussion around how to best support student contributions like this generally. One idea was for farmOS.org to provide some more targeted training materials that could be designed for teachers/mentors. We also talked about how it would be nice to showcase success stories for projects like this, which could be shared with other prospective schools/programs/groups. So it was mostly general talk, not specifically about this project.
Let’s chat more about this one next week and see what’s possible!
Sounds wonderful. Is there anything that you all thought you want more info on, something I could prep to bring? Not just for the UCI offer, but for the things you were talking through.
My students LOVED getting to listen. Their most voiced take away is that software devs are regular humans, and that was great to see.
Thank you all for being clear, kind communicators.
Auto-typos by Outlook for iOS the unsung predictive algorithm deciding our future. : )
could a short tutorial-ish game be a thing? i am biased so there’s that.
games are generally low-risk ways to explore and learn about how a model works. maybe a first project could be a mini game for setting up a few (currently common config) variations of farmOS?
then the prototypes can be posted around and folks would need to play with them and be ranty/have opinions you like to share, about what you like/don’t like?
Hey Marie - following up from the monthly call. I had a few more ideas.
Jennifer Lawrence (from UNL) and I talked before break about common problems and opportunities from the perspective of Universities in terms of engaging, supporting, and/or generating Open Ag Tech. I offered that there maybe was an opportunity to create a kind of active subgroup of folks in U’s who can share and collaborate around these U-specific experiences.
I think your program is kind of low-hanging fruit for this kind of collaboration and sharing. Clearly we (companies, non-profits, individuals, end users…) struggle to fund OS, and clearly students and contributors struggle to identify useful areas to collaborate, and clearly we’re failing to ensure we’re teaching people the best ways to both make actually useful stuff but also do so with an eye towards what progresses broader community needs.
So anyway, I think it’d be cool to connect you, and maybe even folks from Purdue (Aaron Ault, probably Ankita at least for context), to broaden this conversation. What do you think? Don’t want to derail, just want to share
I would @ mention them here but the other folks aren’t on this forum. Email or element chat me if you want to give it a go!
the programs at uci are positioned to support small groups do a thing, i’m trying to leverage those resources for civic benefit through persuading potential future OS devs to join the community early. also nudging the university in slightly more prosocial directions.
i’d like to touch base with the program director by beginning of feb so we can have our ducks in a row by mid march.
