My Contribution

For my contribution to the open source community, I decided to join the campuspulse.access site at RIT with the incentive to help out with catalogueing accesibility for handicapped students across campus

As someone whose grandfather is disabled, I know how inconvenient it can be to get to places that aren’t accomodating for those with physical disabilities. A site dedicated to documenting accesbility on campus fits with something im interested in pursuing.

Why Campuspulse.access?

Since the CommArch presentation, I’ve felt like the Campuspulse access project would be a good idea for three main reasons:

User turnover: The site is hosted by RIT FOSS club, which is constantly in need of fresh contributors due to graduating students.
Easy accessibility: The site is hosted directly by RIT, and already has a lot of people I am familiar with.
Smaller scale project: The idea of joining a larger scale project, such as Red Hat contributions is daunting, and I would need extra time to learn the infrastructure I’d be working on, as well as the commit guidelines.

Despite the lack of clear commit guidelines, and somewhat low activity, the easy accessibility and locality made this project sound perfect for contributions, so I texted Adrian on Discord to get in contact about commitments. The main issue with the project was a lack of a licensing for the repository itself, which has not been changed, though that is partially due to the fact that the pulse access site is a fork of Tunnelvision, a different site dedicated to documenting the defunct RIT train stations, which did not have a license either. The site also has plenty of smaller pull requests that are great for new users to break into the project with. The low volumes means that the two head maintainers: Adrian Edwards and Maria Weir are able to dedicate time to expanding and commenting on commits and changes. I saw Adrian go through helping another student troubleshoot getting a fork of the site working in a discord Voice chat so that they could help with debugging. The lack of community documentation or explicit commit guidelines is a minute issue in comparison to the personalized experience you can get.

Picture of Discord Correspondence where I text Adrian about how I join the campuspulse access forums

Contribution History

When I first joined onto the project, I ended up doing crowdsourcing of accessibility data rather than programming contributions. This was done entirely out of my own volition.

Picture of me committing to crowdsourcing because it was "The most monotonous thing available"

I ended up taking photos of all of the automated door buttons I could find around James E.Booth, from the A floor to the 4th floor. Surprisingly, there wasn’t many, and a few of the doors were intentionally propped open due to free-accesibility during certain hours of the day.

Immediately there were issues with contribution, as the free storage on the forms they were using to submit elevators was cut off, and contributions to button accessibility were also limited.

Picture of Discord chat about why the elevator submissions weren't working Discord chat about how the google drive compresses button photos too poorly to use

Eventually, I was told to just dump all of pictures into a zip file and post it to discord, but without nitro I can’t submit files that large, so I ended up putting all of the photos I took into a google drive and posting that as a link to the server. I haven’t received any confirmation of if my contribution is in a correct format or not, so I will likely continue adding button and elevator photos to this google doc until something changes or the button crowdsourcing gets fixed. Since I haven’t had any experience contributing to GitHub repositories outside of committing to my own personal work this has been a very interesting experience. Is what I wish I could say! Though it was interesting, I really only ended up assisting with crowdsourcing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.