This week in class, we delved further into the prospects of free open-source software, reviewing the structure of open source projects on the fronts of licensing, contributions, and community handling.

Ultimately, we were paired with random people to continue to study how these projects are structured, before setting up our own. Overall, I thought this was a very productive and fun experience. Initially, we begun by writing a Firefox extension following the documentation tutorial so we could get a broad overview of what the development workflow would look like for our prospective project.

From there, we started to look at other open source projects for inspiration, while also familiarizing ourselves with how they were set up in order to maximize community engagement.

Finally, we ended up brainstorming our own idea for an open source extension, and decided to settle on a configurable tab dropdown application that can help with things like using chat apps, or conducting research without constantly jumping between tabs. We are still in the process of setting up the repository, but the prospect of the project excites me, and I am eager to witness how an open-source project functions from the perspective of an administrator.

Surprisingly enough, we didn’t face many challenges on the front of collaboration itself, I think the team member I worked with so far have a style of work and communication that melds together very well which allows great efficiency in our work. The only issue was one of our team members not showing up, but I am confident that once we are all familiarized with one another then there shouldn’t be any glaring conflicts to grapple with (at least immediately.)