(What follows is MediaWiki community stuff, not technical discussion,
offered in the interests of transparency and collaborative planning.)
TL;DR version: I don't think we can do Google Code-In well, so I don't
think we should apply to participate this year.
Since MediaWiki has participated in the Google Summer of Code mentorship
program, we have also received an offer to apply to participate in
Google Code-In, which runs Nov. 21 2011-Jan. 16 2011.
"Google Code-in is a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high
school and secondary school students) with the aim of encouraging young
people to participate in open source. We work with open source
organizations, each of whom will provide a list of tasks to be completed
by student contestants. Tasks can be anything a project needs help with,
from bug fixes to writing documentation to user experience research."
http://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci2011/…
https://code.google.com/p/google-code-in/wiki/GCIAdminMentorInformation
I have now gotten more information about what it's like to participate
in GCI, from organizations that have taken part in the past. And it
sounds like we just do not have the community capacity to do GCI this year.
* I can't take the time to develop the task lists or wrangle others to
do so by the deadlines (applying by 1 November, creating big task lists
by 21 November), due to other commitments (another volunteer
development/mentoring program, India hackathon 18-19 November, mentoring
existing new contributors). And I do not believe anyone else in the
MediaWiki community has the capacity to administer our participation
between now and mid-January, either. Tell me if I'm wrong!
* We'd need enough mentors on call to review the teenagers' assignments
as soon as they're submitted, so they aren't stuck waiting around before
they can grab a new task. This is for the whole two-month period,
including any winter holidays. Right now I do not think we can
satisfactorily guarantee that. We all have too much other work that
takes priority.
So: it's a cool idea, but I don't think we can do it well in the given
time period, so I'm turning it down. (Unless you want to run it, and
can guarantee some mentors' attention! In which case, tell me ASAP so
we can get an application in by 1 November.)
BUT: the number of participants we're getting in our Coding Challenge
(thanks, Greg!) means that if we want to do something like this
*ourselves* next year, on our timeline, we could probably get some
pretty good participation rates -- especially if we partner with
Wikimedia Foundation's Global Education Program. So let's come back to
this idea, perhaps sometime in the spring.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation