On 24/08/12 15:15, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
Thanks for the wrapup, Platonides.
I decided to mentor this project because several engineers sounded enthusiastic about the idea and because Platonides had such a strong reputation as a past contributor. I tried to find a mentor with more domain knowledge, but no one accepted. I decided that all Platonides needed was project management, and that I could provide that. I was wrong.
I'd like to add that we discussed the suitability of Sumana at the beginning, and we agreed that I'd look for support with other community members when I found roadblocks during the project.
I now know that I can't mentor a GSoC student, especially not while I'm also the organizational administrator, and that if we can't find an enthusiastic, technically knowledgable mentor for a student then we simply shouldn't accept them at all.
You're being too harsh with yourself. I'm sure you *can* be a good GSoC mentor. But we haven't cloned a dozen Sumanas... yet :)
(In my defense, I did ping and email Platonides many times during the summer, but sometimes we both lagged, a lot, in our responses. I already knew it was best practice to have a weekly check-in call, and it's my fault that we didn't set this up first thing, in May.)
I'm sorry if someone understood from my mail that I was not contacted at all by my mentor. Albeit weak, there *was* some communication. The timing of your vacations was also unfortunate regarding GSoC.
On a more positive note, I'm glad the prototype is out, and I hope other folks will try out SUBE and that it, along with https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Up! and the new WLM Android app, will aid this and future mass-uploading to Commons. I also hope the localisation team can give Platonides pointers on what he needs to do to make this truly internationalized.
Another similar new project is https://github.com/yarl/vicuna, we seem to have a proliferation of uploaders recently.