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(a)gmail.com On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 9:31 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org

On 10/22/2012 10:53 PM, Tyler Romeo wrote: 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. -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation

On 10/22/2012 06:31 PM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote: 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, -- Mark Holmquist Software Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org http://marktraceur.info

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.

2012/10/25 Niklas Laxström <niklas.laxstrom(a)gmail.com>om>: 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

2012/10/25 Bartosz Dziewoński <matma.rex(a)gmail.com>om>: 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(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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 -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Community Communications for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Obentrautstr. 72 10963 Berlin www.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

On 10/25/2012 03:48 AM, Mark Holmquist wrote: 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. :-) -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation