Project Progress...

The decision has been made! My team will be working with Sugar Labs on their Math4 Project. My tema and I are very excited about working on this project and learning more about it along the way. Our first assignment is to 1) find an IRC client and investigate and 2) sign up for the mailing list and check out some threads.
Lucky for our team, Sugar Labs has a page dedicated to the communication channels used when contributing to their project. The first thing we decided to do was actually make a team email address, that way we could use it to sign up for the mailing list and everyone would have access to what everyone was working on. Once we got that done, I went ahead and sent an email to add a thread to the list and see who I heard back from. Within an hour I heard back from someone. I got an almost overwhelming welcome for 4 different contributors to the Math4 Project.  Everyone was friendly, welcoming, and willing to help me help them in any way they could. I even got links from a few people that would help my team in future assignments. I also looked at some of the threads that were already there but it ended up being much more productive to try and talk to some people as well.
We also found links to IRC clients on the communication channels page. I decided to check out the web-based chat called qwebirc where you can pick any username and the channel you want to join and it connects you right to it. The interface isn't much, but it does what it's supposed to. I decided to check out the sugar-newbies channel (being that I am a newbie). It was fairly simple to use and I even got to talk to a couple of people. There wasn't much activity going on, but I got a feel for what to expect when using it later.
On a side note, we also had to read The Cathedral and the Bazaar and blog our reflections. Although it was a lot of reading, the concept of hacking and open-source software being related is something I never thought of before reading this. It was also interesting seeing the comparisons in styles of developing software, particularly that of Linux which I don't know much about. The lessons given were for the most part familiar. There were familiar concepts from readings I did in 362, and they even quoted one of my favorite readings "The Mythical Man-Month". I didn't fully read everything, but I did understand the lessons being taught.

Next step, full report...more to come soon!