Hello hive,
Greetings! It’s been amazing reading everyone's responses so far to this
thread! Thank you, Tony, for starting this discussion! :) I think the goals
that you are pointing to are important.
Although, I haven’t been part of the Wikimedia’s participation in GSOC in
the past, as an ex-GSOCer I am quite familiar with the program. Sharing a
few concerns/ additional thoughts below:
- I think that the beauty of the GSOC program is that it gives students the
autonomy (unlike any other academic/ non-academic program in developing
nations) to choose projects they are interested in working on, and that are
a good fit with their skill set. It is a unique program that I think
exposes students to a lot of the areas all at once: communication, software
development, research, documentation, etc. I feel that GSOC and similar
outreach programs, have played a vital role in students lives and to some
extent helped them in taking decisions about their next career steps. At
this year’s LinuxCon Karen Sandler tweeted: *“so fun seeing how many women
at #LinuxCon got their start with @outreachy!” *
From this email thread: it’s great to learn about the
initiatives/efforts
that are run before GSOC to reach out to diverse audiences and
spread more
awareness. But I am not sure how I feel about running competitive programs
and training and reaching out to students through the faculties in the
universities. I am worried that GSOC would become another milestone that
students are expected to serve as part of their academic curriculum in the
years to come. It would be great if we keep the participation in this
program a personal choice, and as interest-driven as possible :)
- A lot of former GSOCers run an outreach session ahead of the program in
their universities or their circles. Most of the times, the message which
by mistake gets delivered, set false expectations, motivations, and hopes
among prospective students. For example: "If you participate, you will get
money, will get to travel to conferences, or you might end up working for
the organization." It's a bit of a cultural issue. Still, we do not want
students to be joining us for the program with any false motivation. I
wonder if we could run a cultural orientation for our incoming students to
make them understand our community better, encourage the spirit of learning
more than anything else and help set the expectations right. :) So that
when they begin to do outreach after they finish, they are acutely aware of
the dos and the donts.
- I am sure we have some amazing mentors, who put a lot of effort all
throughout the program right from framing the GSOC project to mentoring
students. I understand that allowing beginners to propose an idea does not
make sense. But still, I wonder if while preparing a project idea, we as
mentors ask ourselves: "how would a project proposal look like such that
besides benefiting our community, would be interesting enough to keep a
student engaged and motivated all throughout?", "Will the student involved
in the project get something out of it?", and "What deliverables could
make a project deployable at the end so that it's a satisfying experience
for both the parties?".
- Codeheat is an interesting initiative, but I think running something
which requires almost the same level of efforts as GSOC would be hard to
coordinate.
*Here is a summary and a few action steps that we could consider:*
- Conduct cultural orientation for incoming GSOCers so that they understand
our communities and the values we share. So that when they begin to the
outreach after they finish, they convey the message right.
- Encourage awareness about our community/ projects among students much
ahead of GSOC so that students have enough understanding of the project,
have already contributed in advance of the contest, and this way we could
get better quality proposals.
- Encourage weekly check-ins, or updates through IRC/ online gatherings
where students could get an opportunity to share their GSOC work with each
other verbally.
- Invite recent GSOC students to be mentors for the GCI/ Outreachy. Some of
which we have been already doing and did very recently this year for GCI
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T148952>.
- Mentors frame proposals which are interesting enough to keep our students
motivated, ensure a student's work get deployed to the production. And,
our mentors ask: "What would a student get out of this? What will they
learn?".
- Lastly, we let the program more interest-driven, rather than making any
piece of it mandatory :)
Questions, feedback, most welcomed! :)
Cheers,
Srishti
--
Srishti Sethi
Developer Advocate
Technical Collaboration team
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:SSethi_(WMF)
On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 9:08 PM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote:
Hi,
bawolff wrote:
I actually disagree somewhat - I think it can be very rewarding to fix
a problem that you yourself have, as opposed to
fixing somebody else's
problem. This is a traditional ideology about open source - that it is
all about scratching your own itch.
Although arguably most gsoc students coming up
with their own projects
aren't actually scratching their own itch but desperately trying to
come up with an idea. However, if someone happens to be a preexisting
user of MediaWiki, and finds something they find super annoying, I
think that can make for a very good project.
In theory this is true. In practice, I'm not sure if there has ever been a
successful WMF GSoC project where the idea was the student's own - other
than in cases where the student was already part of the MediaWiki
community. Which makes sense: if a student's only experience with MediaWiki
is, say, reading and writing wiki articles, then chances are good that
whatever they find annoying is something that many other people also find
annoying, and thus would have been fixed already if it were easy to fix.
bawolff also wrote:
As for users sticking around - I think the communication around gsoc
has shifted from "Here's some money so
you can work on MediaWiki
without starving to death" to "Here's a little money and a job so you
can put something cool on your resume". If students are being
attracted to the program principally to have something on their resume
or for the money (To be clear, I'm not saying there is anything wrong
with that), its not surprising that they leave afterwards when the
money goes away. If we want to attract people in the long term, we
should probably come up with a better carrot.
Yes, this is absolutely the issue. I don't know if there's a lower
"conversion" percentage now than there used to be, but certainly to
convince people to do free labor for you, especially if their first
experience with you involved payment, seems difficult. That's assuming that
free labor is the ultimate goal, as opposed to, say, finding more people
for the WMF to hire. More on that below.
Tony Thomas wrote:
I would want to agree to disagree at places like - 'hiring everyone of
them' or things like that. If we are talking
about making people stick,
the model I am talking about would be a *cheaper *option ?
I assume that's a reference to what I wrote, although I certainly didn't
say to hire everyone - I said "students who had useful projects". I don't
know which option would be cheaper - hiring some of the students or setting
up a new mentorship program - but the main question is really what the goal
is. Is it to get more free labor over the long term? If so, I don't know if
either option is that effective. Personally, I think it's great if such
projects result in actually useful software, and it's a shame if that
software goes uncompleted or abandoned at the end of the program.
-Yaron
--
WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting ·
http://wikiworks.com
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