On 11/14/2013 12:57 PM, Mark Holmquist wrote:
On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 07:21:01PM -0500, Tyler Romeo wrote:
MediaWiki participates in a number of student competitions and programs as an open source mentor (such as GSoC, Code-In, etc.). Today I ran into another one: Facebook's Open Academy Program.
Where is this being actually organized? The only thing I see is a page and a half at that URL, a blog post from Facebook engineering, and one email address.
I don't know what software they use. However, they explicitly mention "participating in online forum and mailing list discussions, conducting or participating in online meetings through video conferencing and chat, helping developers find and understand tasks, reviewing code contributions and helping to coordinate work through issue tracking systems".
In other words it sounds like once the student is in the thick of it, they would use MediaWiki's normal technical tools (Gerrit, Bugzilla, IRC, mailing lists, etc.).
This seems pretty similar to GSOC (which I was a mentor for this past summer). They have their own system, Melange. That is open source, but I don't think there are a significant number of third party users outside of Google. More importantly, as a mentor, Melange had 0 impact on me and my mentees once the work started. We worked in Gerrit, Bugzilla, and IRC.
If Facebook expects us to do code review or something in their proprietary system, that should be a non-starter. But if it's only used for student application and registration, it may not be a deal breaker.
The lack of buzz around other official fora makes me worry that the organizing software will be Facebook itself.
That may be because they are gradually ramping it up. They mention only a dozen universities for 2013 and 9 open source projects. The fact that it only applies to certain universities definitely makes it different in nature from e.g. GSOC.
Matt Flaschen