Line 4: Joining the Project

After forming teams officially last class period, we all jumped into the projects that we chose to pursue. My team, Team Obsidian, had been unofficially meeting for a week or so prior to forming. We used this time to lay the groundwork of our project, and develop a tentative presence online for it. Included in these tasks was setting up an IRC channel, mailing lists, a Google Code page, and the beginnings of our team, and project wikis. We also set a schedule to work by, with milestones being due every 2 or 3 weeks. Hammering out details like this and coming up with a cohesive plan to launch Obsidian into the world of open source software really allowed us to take an active stance on our work.

We accomplished all of the tasks listed above, and are now refining each of them so that by the end of the semester we will have a fully functioning open source community. These accomplishments felt like a major step for our group cohesion, and allowed us to start developing real bonds of trust between each other.

Personally, I was responsible for registering our IRC Channel and Twitter account. Since Twitter was the easier of the two tasks, I attacked it first. We decided in our preliminary meeting that we would be using twitter as a sort of quick news post for our project. @ObsidianTesting will be currently posting updates about what we are working on. Later in the semester it will be more of a tool for communicating with the community we hope to create. The IRC Channel was something that Mike and I worked on together. We looked into a few channels on freenode.net, and registered #obsidiantesting as our own. One channel we looked at before registering ours was #obsidian, however it had a single user idling in it every time we checked. Since the room was created by the freenode staff, we decided that we will ask them for ownership of it in the future, when we have a more comprehensive online presence for the project.

When the group met today, I brought the rest of them up to speed on IRC basics, and got them up and running. They each discussed their parts of the project and we made plans to meet again on Monday.

For now, it looks like my responsibilities will lay mostly with the IRC channel and the twitter account. I plan to talk to Dr. Starr about some twitter accounts he feels would be worthwhile for us to follow. I also am going to begin tweeting updates about our project, so that we can hopefully begin to get some followers. In regards to IRC tasks, my next plan is to add a bot to sit in the channel for us. The bot will be in charge of issuing op commands for the channel when we message him with the commands. This allows us to appear as regular users, which Michael says is important so that we do not scare off new visitors to the channel.

All in all, I think this was a good start for our team.