COSE 2012 - Tutorials：Creative and Open Software Engineering Practices and Tools in Community Projects

In this tutorial, we explore software engineering practices and tools that are suitable for a growing number of amateur creators and artists. Although the software engineering discipline has mostly matured in the context of large-scale corporate projects and clients, there have always been small-scale ad-hoc efforts by communities of hobbyists (e.g., shareware, indy-games). As a matter of fact, the design of the most popular software tools has mostly regarded those corporate users, or only those hobbyists with strong engineering backgrounds (e.g., VisualStudio, Eclipse, XCode). More recently, the introduction of open-source tools such as Processing and Arduino has motivated a broader participation of non-technical users in the engineering of interactive systems. Maker communities meet regularly and they share resources and knowledge for various purposes (e.g., creative hacking, fun, social networking). In the context of maker communities, the understanding of the software creation practices (e.g., collaboration, sharing) and the design of the respective tools (e.g., end-user programming for artists, or children) are not well documented. As a remedy, we present a coherent overview of related work, as well as our own experiences in the organization and running of maker workshops. The final goal of the creative sessions is to inspire the participants to experience creative and open software engineering practices and tools. As a side effect, the participants will cooperate and get to know each other and learn examples of new media prototyping tools and sharing platforms.