On 20/08/14 11:48, Quim Gil wrote:
For those interested in the process of proposing and accepting internship projects, here you have a post mortem of this specific case:
On Tuesday, August 19, 2014, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
This sounds like a serious miscommunication before the GSoC project begun. Something for the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Lessons_learned page, perhaps?
Perhaps, but what is the lesson we need to learn?
The lesson to be learned here is not unlike what many teams could learn.
When someone creates a product specifically for a certain group of users (in this case folks installing extensions) without actually knowing what is useful to them (never even mind 'important' at this stage), there is something seriously wrong with that process. This, however, doesn't particularly reflect on Aditya, who simply did the project as it was layed out; it was the folks guiding the project who should have started the process of actually talking to the users about this well before GSoC began, and continued it as part of the project itself.
So here, the GSoC project needs to have been set up better. Simply put, you cannot reasonably expect random community members to carefully review every single proposal or new feature, so where feedback is needed, you need to go out and get it. The student is there to learn, and probably will not know that, and that's fine because it's supposed to be the sort of thing they're learning. The mentors may not know that either, if product design and engineering aren't their things, so that's not necessarily an issue either. But for projects that will affect people outside the project itself, for projects facing specific groups of users, someone along the line needs to know the importance of discussion, of determining the user/developer/whatever needs before engineering the product, and someone needs to give the guidance needed to make sure the relevant discussions happen.
That's what needs to be addressed moving forward.
-I