On 11/28/2011 08:43 AM, wikimediaindia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:12:41 +0530 From: Srikanth Lakshmanan srik.lak@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] IEP Pilot - Preliminary Analysis To: Wikimedia India Community list wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: CA+30aUMO65Zcp8wULpcu7KJBBZE6OLkEVze6J70i5KfomFcVFw@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Hi,
Apart from studying ourselves, It would also be interesting to do a case study of similar student participatory programs and take best practices and incorporate them. Google Summer of Code would be a classic example, though its a summer contract, but some of the aspects are worth comparing.
- GSoC has a steep(okay relatively much higher) barrier to entry to
attract the cream of students inturn the number of students would be significantly less. 2. Many students continue to contribute to the organization / open source in general beyond the contract 3. Strong staging process to cross the gates(merging the codeline happens mostly post final evaluation) ensures impact of the student does not affect the community. 4. Many communities are largely happy to participate in GSoC since they usually get contributors to the community. 5. Communication models that exist in the program, typically there would be hardly anyone from the city / country for that matter to mentor. The communication happens online inspite of timezone differences. 6. GSoC gives a huge money as motivation, but most students join the program for reasons beyond money though they swipe the cards :D
There are few students on this list who took the same program with WMF, they could share some insights too!
I managed MediaWiki's participation in Google Summer of Code this year, and could talk with anyone interested in participating, anyone researching it, and anyone who is curious. :-) We try to document our participation on mediawiki.org wiki pages. Some useful resources:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code
For some quantitative analysis of our past participation, Max Semenik's analysis page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:MaxSem/GSoC_analysis
The four Indian students from this year's participation were Devayon Das, Yuvi Panda, Akshay Agarwal, and Ankit Garg. You can read more about this year's participants at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2011
But of course there are about 170 other organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code this year. Our experience might differ from some of theirs.
Any student who is interested in applying to GSoC next year: now is a good time to start learning about MediaWiki so you'll have a good proposal when the application time comes in the spring! You can start with this guide: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker . And of course I'm happy to give help.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 01:53, Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.orgwrote:
I managed MediaWiki's participation in Google Summer of Code this year, and could talk with anyone interested in participating, anyone researching it, and anyone who is curious. :-) We try to document our participation on mediawiki.org wiki pages.
Thanks Sumana for posting the summary voluntarily, was good to read them. At the risk of sounding foolish comparing content creation and software development, I have few questions. Feel free to ignore them if they are foolish ones :)
1. Do students come up with own project proposals / take up community's ideas and work on them. Whats the level of motivation / ownership between the two. I am asking this just to compare GEP's model of asking students to write on designated topics and if it has an impact on motivation.
2. What factors do you think make students to continue contributing to the opensource community?
3. How crucial is the role of mentors in it. Who are the mentors usually(WMF staff / community members?), how do they join as mentors?. I am asking this particularly since I see mentors' involvement among reasons for failure.
You need not restrict to mediawiki as org, can you share your experiences from opensource world too.
wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org