OpenSUTD

tags: SUTD

What is this? We're documenting our journey for future users and builders of this movement. Take this chance to record not only case studies, design decisions or strategy, but our hopes and ideals for the future.

Visit OpenSUTD here.

Origin story (2018)

Foreword

We wanted to be different. We all joined SUTD excited to be part of a world-class, collaborative community of learners, innovators, and explorers. As the University grew, it became more organizational, more hierarchical. Somewhere along the way, I'd seen even the best and brightest lose their spark; jaded, exhausted, and tired for a number of reasons. We lost some of the best people.

I sat on these thoughts for months; what could a mere undergraduate do? The urge to do something about it was growing, perhaps only suppressed by curriculum deliverables (ha!). In April 2018, I started a simple repository on GitHub. The idea was for students to collaborate and share knowledge with each other on a public platform.

What started as a humble attempt to try and cope with this dissonance, soon rallied other members of the community - a #metoo movement of sorts that allowed these undercurrents to surface en masse.

Around that time, a group of students (now known as Working Title) had gathered (independently!) to make the discourse on policy and culture public. We started conversations with members of the community - students, faculty, staff and management - with the vision of developing a collaborative, familial culture. Strategy wasn't everything - we wanted to grow this culture authentically and for the community to own it.

Now things are picking up speed, and there's much to get acquainted with in terms of community building and culture formation. If we just hold on (preciously!) to the idea of SUTD that we all fell in love with, then I think there'll always be sparks to re-ignite, flames to be re-kindled.

@joel
ISTD Class of '19

The Github repo (Apr '18)

  • Started with Joel's GitHub prototype.
  • Got students to contribute (and they did!).
  • Motivating example that people can definitely work together.

Prof Max's Muddy Notes idea (Apr '18)

  • Max Colla remembers stacks of lecture notes that students edited, photocopied, and passed on, back in the day.
  • Managed to get some funding from pedagogy day.

Initial pitch to Freshmore Teaching Team (May '18)

We pitched this pedagogy deck which conceptualised what OpenSUTD would be.

Create4Good Gitlab (Sept '18)

  • Create4Good was looking for a project management platform.
  • Maybe we could be that. Set up a GitLab instance on GCP.
  • Idea was to hold a hackathon on the GitLab and take the chance to build up OpenSUTD on it.
  • Didn't work out due to SMU not agreeing on hosting protocol.

Github organisation (Sept '18)

  • Linked up with alumni, who echoed sentiments.
  • We discovered the alumni were thinking of applying as a nonprofit to be able to use Github organisation - turns out it's now free (thank you Microsoft).
  • Chosen as our primary platform as it:
    • Allows team formation
    • Models that of a loosely aligned organisation, we simply fork repositories and maintain them with 'fork bot'. people can continue working on their own repositories separately and it will be updated automatically.
    • GitHub provides several functionalities that greatly lowered the technical debt. eg. static site hosting, apps.

Second pitch to Prof Pey (Oct '18)

Now this warrants it's own section because it gave us a direction as to what SUTD would support.

We pitched this platform deck. The meeting went really well as it turned out that the conceptual alignment was excellent. In fact, he was basically pitching to us a version of OpenSUTD before we managed to finish presenting our slides.

Now what? (2019)

Here's a link to our latest meeting minutes.

We need to get everyone acquainted with what we're doing - no point creating a culture without people. Broad sketches are in this release planning deck by Joel, it sets forth the direction we hope to take based on what we have learned so far.

How do we move forward? We did some research.

"Open and incomplete systems often require facilitation,
a highly unintuitive method to strategists working in pre-
dictable and closed systems, but a routine task for designers.
In strategy, planning is kept short and based on optimization
and full knowledge of the problem space. Facilitation for
change instead demands clarity on the personal motivations
of stakeholders, while never fixing on a goal definitely. If
open source culture is indeed a possible direction for existing
closed hierarchies, perhaps a new evolutionary line of the
institution will emerge in the foreseeable future, one that
places the community and the ideals of change and design
at the center of its development and progress."

In short, the idea is to have several projects grow organically and front the OpenSUTD movement:

  1. Open regulation (how open source can be used for law and policy)
  2. Democracy of knowledge (processes, fifth row guides, and course materials)

Open regulation

Here's our initial drafts for the SAC Student Rules.

Our inspiration:

  1. How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
  2. Iceland's crowd sourced constitution

Fifth Row guides

We keep getting feedback that there is trouble ensuring continuity between batches of Fifth Row leaders.

So here's an effort to document the pulsecheck process and finance guidelines.

Course notes

After evaluating the initial draft by Joel, Yustynnn volunteered to build the initial folder architecture for notes on SUTD's modules.

But we also have student contributed material:

  1. Pengfei's programming, machine learning notes
  2. Brandon's linux, opencv, coding notes

Open processes

Over Winter '18-'19, IAP courses were conducted under the OpenSUTD banner. Having the processes documented and open gives anyone who wants to conduct a course a point of reference on which to fall back on!

  1. Deep Learning course by ISTD Juniors (Class of '20)
  2. Code4GreaterGood by Tenzin (Class of '18')

Discovery week '19

OpenSUTD as the one-stop conduit into all activities for Discovery Week.
Current concept is in development. You can watch the progress here.

Finally, a web platform

@tlkh and team are in the process of building a web platform to act as a frontend for the current GitHub-based OpenSUTD. Watch, or contribute to their progress here.

Build with us

Tara: "Ultimately, you can make it about the reason you came here in the first place. I mean that's really all you can do, right? You just have to say to yourselves: I came here for this, and I'm gonna make it this thing, and no matter how many obstacles they put in my way, I'm just gonna keep trying to make it this thing."

If reading this resonated with you at all, join us. Drop us an e-mail at {joel_huang, qingze_hum, timothy_liu}@mymail.sutd.edu.sg, speak to us personally, or raise issues here!

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