Over the course of a year learning about and working on an open-source project, the Kick Butlers group , comprised of Ben Cross, Will Freeman, and Gregory Edwards, has traversed the ideas of interacting with an open-source community, applying pair-programming and finding purpose in contributing to a project outside the walls of Dickinson. Each of these exercises provided us with a different perspective and process by which we developed civic disposition and civic skills.

Listen effectively

When you interact with an open-source community, there can be an array of challenges from finding the proper location for questions to learning community standards for those questions. When working within Jenkins, specifically on JENKINS-59865, I found the space to develop listening techniques and the ability to target questions. By this, I mean I had to come to understand where community members congregated and how to seek help when needed. This often resulted in senior community members replying with often abbreviated terminology and direction. I learned to adopt civic skills of active and effective listening through reading the responses and then doing leg work with that before further asking questions.

Pair Programming

During the fore-courses of the Dickinson Computer Science curriculum, students are tasked with working on labs and assignments in groups - being paired up with a new class member each week for a lab. This encourages the collaborative process of both understanding the material for oneself and then teaching to a partner. However, after those courses, the major seems to not require it. This project caused the rediscovery of many of these skills. During the early stages of the developer install, Greg had issues running the Maven build on his system. Having worked the summer with Maven, I was familiar with the issue as it failed to contact Maven Central. Thorugh working together, we found a solution in running the command with sudo mvn clean install. While we arrived at an eventual solution, my account does not capture the principles of teaching without being patronizing and working to understand your partner’s approach.

Civic Interaction

Finally, the value of this project, I find, is helping each Dickinson CS major discover that they have the ability to contribute to something outside the walls of Dickinson. We can often feel separate or independent of the greater CS space but not with this. In this, we have to apply the intellectual curiosity of formal class to a project - a project without a teacher there. This builds a student’s sense of discover and intellectual curiosity.