Last year we decided not to participate in Google Code-In https://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci2012/... , an outreach program to help us get more 13-to-17-year-old contributors. I outlined the reasons here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-October/055937.html
This year, we are again eligible to apply to participate. I estimate that we'd need about 2 organizational administrators and 21 mentors to do it well. So I've opened signups at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In and explained what those people would be committing to. If you want us to apply to participate in GCI this winter, please comment on that page by November 1st. Thanks.
I think it's a cool idea, especially considering I'm still kicking myself for not getting involved in open-source earlier. The real problem is deciding what to have them work on. *--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 9:31 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Last year we decided not to participate in Google Code-In
https://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci2012/... , an outreach program to help us get more 13-to-17-year-old contributors. I outlined the reasons here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-October/055937.html
This year, we are again eligible to apply to participate. I estimate that we'd need about 2 organizational administrators and 21 mentors to do it well. So I've opened signups at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In and explained what those people would be committing to. If you want us to apply to participate in GCI this winter, please comment on that page by November 1st. Thanks.
-- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Monday, October 22, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Tyler Romeo wrote:
I think it's a cool idea, especially considering I'm still kicking myself for not getting involved in open-source earlier. The real problem is deciding what to have them work on.
Lua templates?
It's Real Programming™; there's plenty of creativity involved; and even amateurish Lua code will be heaps better (heh) than the corresponding wikitext. There are also quite a lot of templates to convert, so the task could be easily divided among a large group of participants.
-- Ori Livneh ori@wikimedia.org
On 23/10/12 08:35, Ori Livneh wrote:
On Monday, October 22, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Tyler Romeo wrote:
I think it's a cool idea, especially considering I'm still kicking myself for not getting involved in open-source earlier. The real problem is deciding what to have them work on.
Lua templates?
It's Real Programming™; there's plenty of creativity involved; and even amateurish Lua code will be heaps better (heh) than the corresponding wikitext. There are also quite a lot of templates to convert, so the task could be easily divided among a large group of participants.
Do we know enough about propper Lua template coding *ourselves* ?
We can probably pick up that new language faster than them, but I wouldn't feel too comfortable mentoring something I don't really know about.
I have in the past impressed some people where I was figuring out things on the fly (“try this”, “write len()”, “maybe it's called length?”...) yet it's not the ideal situation, special with random participants.
An issue I haven't clarified is the size of each task. There's a mention on how tasks have deadlines attached, but not what's the normal deadline for each task. A certificate for one task and a T-shirt for three tasks make it look like they would be “big”, even though my first impression was that they would be small. Also, we must have enough tasks for during 1.5 months. I don't know how many people would sign up for our tasks, but we shouldn't get out of tasks in the first week (or we may, and finish the mentors labour...). We can always reuse tasks in some hackaton, if they were too much. My concern is in making up many tasks.
I looked at randmly at some tasks from last year: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2011
Some were given 4h, 24h, 48h or 96h. I guess that tasks of 24h would be a good estimate to plan for 24h (without assuming they will be programming non-stop, of course :).
Some tasks were quite open, such as "Find and report a bug in $product" or "Find a security vulnerability (a file that crashes the program)". I'm not sure if asking for something we don't know if it's doable is appropiate, though. OTOH they allow multiple instances of the same task. Others like update $PROGRAM to use this new API doesn't seem to have been successful. I don't think tasks of that level are appropiate (we could place a few, but without an expectation of being solved by the average teenager).
A good thing is that I don't think that reviewing a task will take longer than 5-10 minutes. So it shouldn't be a burden on the mentors. Seems a workflow like the one used on OTRS. The key is having a big pool of developers so a few ones don't need to review all of them.
An easy way to get articles would be in the documentation front, asking for a couple of wiki pages documenting something, a tutorial (with screenshots) on installing MediaWiki... Creating X new translations for MediaWiki or its extensions on translatewiki would also be an easy way of producing tasks.
On 25 October 2012 19:55, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
An easy way to get articles would be in the documentation front, asking for a couple of wiki pages documenting something, a tutorial (with screenshots) on installing MediaWiki... Creating X new translations for MediaWiki or its extensions on translatewiki would also be an easy way of producing tasks.
Translation tasks are not allowed as far as I remember, but some open support tasks at translatewiki.net could be suitable.
Perhaps 'document X messages' would be allowed. That could include taking screenshots and stuff. -Niklas
2012/10/25 Niklas Laxström niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com:
Translation tasks are not allowed as far as I remember, but some open support tasks at translatewiki.net could be suitable.
They were allowed last year; did it change? (I took part in GCI last year as a student, but I'm too old now :( )
-- Matma Rex
On Thu, 2012-10-25 at 20:29 +0200, Bartosz Dziewoński wrote:
2012/10/25 Niklas Laxström niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com:
Translation tasks are not allowed as far as I remember, but some open support tasks at translatewiki.net could be suitable.
They were allowed last year; did it change?
Yes, see http://code.google.com/p/google-code-in/wiki/GCIMentorInformation2012
andre
2012/10/25 Bartosz Dziewoński matma.rex@gmail.com:
2012/10/25 Niklas Laxström niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com:
Translation tasks are not allowed as far as I remember, but some open support tasks at translatewiki.net could be suitable.
They were allowed last year; did it change? (I took part in GCI last year as a student, but I'm too old now :( )
I mentored for openSUSE last year and we had some translation tasks, so they should be OK if rules haven't changed.
Strainu
On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 8:47 PM, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
I mentored for openSUSE last year and we had some translation tasks, so they should be OK if rules haven't changed.
The rules changed. Translation tasks are not allowed because there was basically too much cheating last time with people just using Google Translate.
Cheers Lydia
2012/10/25 Lydia Pintscher lydia.pintscher@wikimedia.de:
On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 8:47 PM, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
I mentored for openSUSE last year and we had some translation tasks, so they should be OK if rules haven't changed.
The rules changed. Translation tasks are not allowed because there was basically too much cheating last time with people just using Google Translate.
Yeah, Andre's mail arrived just after sending mine :) It's a shame though, we had some good translations last year (some Google translate too, but I rejected those versions).
Strainu
On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 6:44 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
An issue I haven't clarified is the size of each task. There's a mention on how tasks have deadlines attached, but not what's the normal deadline for each task. A certificate for one task and a T-shirt for three tasks make it look like they would be “big”, even though my first impression was that they would be small. Also, we must have enough tasks for during 1.5 months. I don't know how many people would sign up for our tasks, but we shouldn't get out of tasks in the first week (or we may, and finish the mentors labour...). We can always reuse tasks in some hackaton, if they were too much. My concern is in making up many tasks.
The tasks should take a "normal" contributor of the project about 2 hours. The kids can of course take more than that. It's not a hard rule but a guideline to give you some idea of what Google would like to see.
Cheers Lydia
On 10/22/2012 10:53 PM, Tyler Romeo wrote:
I think it's a cool idea, especially considering I'm still kicking myself for not getting involved in open-source earlier. The real problem is deciding what to have them work on.
In my experience, it's pretty easy to find small tasks that new volunteers can work on, and GCI allows organizations to offer a variety of tasks of different types. The much harder problem is getting enough committed mentors. Google demands "less than a 36 hour turnaround for review of each completed task submitted by a student" - see https://code.google.com/p/google-code-in/wiki/GCIMentorInformation2012 . Other projects participating in GCI have reported that this can be burdensome.
Also: if you want to help teenagers get involved in open source, we have teenagers *in the Wikimedia community already* whom you can mentor and ask to do tasks. And if outreach is the goal, you can make a huge long-term difference to teenagers in your city by teaching tutorials or leading hackathons at local schools and community centers. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Tutorials has materials you can pick up and use. And if you need funding to create events or attend them, check out https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Support and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index . Google Code-In is NOT our only way to get teens into open source and nurture them.
On 10/22/2012 10:53 PM, Tyler Romeo wrote:
I think it's a cool idea, especially considering I'm still kicking myself for not getting involved in open-source earlier. The real problem is deciding what to have them work on.
Features they can see running in their mobile devices? We have all the buzzwords there: Android, iOS, HTML5, Javascript, PhoneGap, web app...
-- Quim
On 10/22/2012 06:31 PM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
Last year we decided not to participate in Google Code-In https://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci2012/... , an outreach program to help us get more 13-to-17-year-old contributors. I outlined the reasons here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-October/055937.html
This year, we are again eligible to apply to participate. I estimate that we'd need about 2 organizational administrators and 21 mentors to do it well. So I've opened signups at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In and explained what those people would be committing to. If you want us to apply to participate in GCI this winter, please comment on that page by November 1st. Thanks.
I wanted to ping the list again about this....our project and others will really benefit from having new contributors, and the tech community at large will benefit from the education we can help provide these students. And of course, it means new community members and a generally more informed public.
Please consider signing the list before the deadline, I'd really love to see this program happen. I'm willing to help a lot, but I can't do it all!
Thanks,
On 10/25/2012 03:48 AM, Mark Holmquist wrote:
On 10/22/2012 06:31 PM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
Last year we decided not to participate in Google Code-In https://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci2012/...
, an outreach program to help us get more 13-to-17-year-old contributors. I outlined the reasons here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-October/055937.html
This year, we are again eligible to apply to participate. I estimate that we'd need about 2 organizational administrators and 21 mentors to do it well. So I've opened signups at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In and explained what those people would be committing to. If you want us to apply to participate in GCI this winter, please comment on that page by November 1st. Thanks.
I wanted to ping the list again about this....our project and others will really benefit from having new contributors, and the tech community at large will benefit from the education we can help provide these students. And of course, it means new community members and a generally more informed public.
Please consider signing the list before the deadline, I'd really love to see this program happen. I'm willing to help a lot, but I can't do it all!
Thanks,
We weren't able to get enough mentors to sign up to do Google Code-In, so we will not be participating. I know this disappoints some of you; we do want to encourage new participants, and we want some structured mentorship that isn't just Google Summer of Code. I will start a new thread about a more suitable program for us to participate in. :-)
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org