Hoi, When a Google Summer of Code project is about aspects of usability, then we have on the one hand the cost of mentoring and on the other hand the benefit of three months of work done by typically really dedicated people. We have seen that people who started in a SoC program continued to be part of our community after their project. In my understanding the Stanton grant intends to improve our usability. Some people say that we "wiki people" make unusual decisions, have non traditionals approaches. I would applaud it when the Stanton grant allows us to do more then is traditional and consequently achieve more then is traditional. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/10 Ting Chen <wing.philopp(a)gmx.de> THURNER rupert wrote:

GSoC has never produced anything useful for us, so I don't know why you think it would be a good model.

The idea of a collection of remote workers paid by the line of code might sound nice to an online community member, but I'm beginning to think that it's risky at best. A software development team working in an office together might be old-school, but at least the management practices are established, with good results commonly produced.

THURNER rupert wrote: GSoC has never produced anything useful for us, so I don't know why you think it would be a good model. Our record with contract development has also been pretty poor. Our most active volunteers are adept at collaborating online in public forums. That's because they're self-selected for that trait and they're adequately motivated that they can perform useful projects without supervision. Remote workers brought in via GSoC and contracts seem to have difficulty integrating with this culture, and either perform their work in isolation or collaborate only with their designated mentor. The idea of a collection of remote workers paid by the line of code might sound nice to an online community member, but I'm beginning to think that it's risky at best. A software development team working in an office together might be old-school, but at least the management practices are established, with good results commonly produced. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com project That's great, but neither Betawiki nor WikiEducator are the WMF, nor are those functionalities being used (beyond the localizations provided from BW) within the WMF. That's precisely what this is about, making use of the GSOC-style of development for MediaWiki itself. When you look at our own bigger projects, SUL took a crazy amount of time to When meet better SUL required a massive amount of work to coordinate, not to mention the task of coming up with a model that not only works, but is scalable to the WMF's needs and also actually make sense. Good data models are essential. Dumps are another thing that requires careful work and coordination. Poor execution leads to poor results. It's bad enough having someone e-mail the list(s) once every month or two saying "new dumps please," but imagine if we provided dumps that were just inherently bad. I fail to see where you get this 50% of commercial projects fail. Without a reliable source, I have to assume you've just made up this number and have never worked in software development. When we are to do a proper job for summer of code projects, obviously all Nikerabbit's the developer Tim never said that GSOC is a bad model. Nor did he say that it produces bad results. He simply said that based on previous experiences, it hasn't worked _for us_. And it's true. Looking at last summer's projects, I don't see a lot of results: 1) HTMLDiff - ended up as a highly experimental, still somewhat buggy, disabled- by-default feature that was an i18n mess (and still might not be 100% fixed) 2) Category Redirects - what ever happened to this? Was this ever merged from branch to core? The branch hasn't been touched since August, at the least. A model failing in one use case doesn't indicate a failed model overall; it simply means it doesn't work in this situation. :) -Chad _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com That's great, but neither Betawiki nor WikiEducator are the WMF, nor are those functionalities being used (beyond the localizations provided from BW) within the WMF. That's precisely what this is about, making use of the GSOC-style of development for MediaWiki itself. When you look at our own bigger projects, SUL took a crazy amount of time to SUL required a massive amount of work to coordinate, not to mention the task of coming up with a model that not only works, but is scalable to the WMF's needs and also actually make sense. Good data models are essential. Dumps are another thing that requires careful work and coordination. Poor execution leads to poor results. It's bad enough having someone e-mail the list(s) once every month or two saying "new dumps please," but imagine if we provided dumps that were just inherently bad. I fail to see where you get this 50% of commercial projects fail. Without a reliable source, I have to assume you've just made up this number and have never worked in software development. When we are to do a proper job for summer of code projects, obviously all Tim never said that GSOC is a bad model. Nor did he say that it produces bad results. He simply said that based on previous experiences, it hasn't worked _for us_. And it's true. Looking at last summer's projects, I don't see a lot of results: 1) HTMLDiff - ended up as a highly experimental, still somewhat buggy, disabled- by-default feature that was an i18n mess (and still might not be 100% fixed) 2) Category Redirects - what ever happened to this? Was this ever merged from branch to core? The branch hasn't been touched since August, at the least. A model failing in one use case doesn't indicate a failed model overall; it simply means it doesn't work in this situation. :) -Chad _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l