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.
https://www.facebook.com/OpenAcademyProgram
I'm not sure how we would get involved in this program, but I'm sure people would agree it might be a good thing to become a mentor organization and have students contribute to MediaWiki as part of a college credit program.
Any thoughts? *-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science
On 11/13/2013 04:21 PM, 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.
https://www.facebook.com/OpenAcademyProgram
I'm not sure how we would get involved in this program, but I'm sure people would agree it might be a good thing to become a mentor organization and have students contribute to MediaWiki as part of a college credit program.
Any thoughts?
Interesting. Thank you!
After reading https://www.facebook.com/notes/open-academy/welcome-to-the-open-academy-prog... and liking the second comment (in the Facebook sense of the word), I sent an email to Jamie Lockwood CCing Tyler requesting more information:
Hello Jamie,
I'm the coordinator of mentorship programs at Wikimedia, including Google Summer of Code and FOSS Outreach Program for Women. I just learned about Open Academy Program thanks to Tyler, one of our veteran community contributors, and a mentor as well.
I just read https://www.facebook.com/notes/open-academy/welcome-to-the-open-academy-prog... and I wonder if you think it makes sense for Wikimedia to get involved.
As you will know, participating properly in mentorship programs requires a lot of energy from anybody. We are about to start our first Google Code-in, at the same time than our third FOSS OPW. Still, we want to be open to any proposals and initiatives, and get involved as much as our possibilities permit.
Thank you very much for promoting free software to new contributors!
Best regards,
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.
The lack of buzz around other official fora makes me worry that the organizing software will be Facebook itself.
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
I am having a call with them on Friday morning PST and I will ask them these questions. Let me know if you have further questions or you want to join the chat.
On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
I am having a call with them on Friday morning PST and I will ask them these questions. Let me know if you have further questions or you want to join the chat.
I'm sure you've thought of most of these, but some obvious questions:
- Would the students be using our existing code review infrastructure or is something Facebook specific required? - Would Facebook be the mentors for the program, with MediaWiki simply providing basic support? Or maybe each student would have a MediaWiki mentor as well as somebody from Facebook? - What is the syllabus for the class? What are the requirements for passing and getting college credit? - Do students work on multiple open source projects during the class? Or would they devote most of their effort to one project, and only contribute to others as an optional thing? - The document mentions teams. Are students put together in teams to work on stuff? If so how large are the teams, and how does this interact with the previous question?
This is literally everything I could think of, so if a question seems inappropriate feel free to leave it out. Thanks in advance.
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science
Long email, hopefully informative.
Summary: looking good!
On 11/19/2013 04:23 PM, Tyler Romeo wrote:
On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
I am having a call with them on Friday morning PST and I will ask them these questions.
The call was interesting.
* This is an initiative to enroll teams of university students in actual open source projects during "school project" hours and in exchange of credits. * It was started by a teacher in Stanford. Facebook arrived a year later with support to scale up the program to involve more universities and open source projects. * The program organizes the general schedule and the matching between OSS projects and students selected by the universities. * Teams may have 4-15 students, depending on the requirements set by the mentors. Each student dedicates 5-8 hours / week + optionally extra own time. Students of a team might we located in the same university or not. * Each university provides a technical contact to select students and oversee their involvement during the project. * However, the mentors are the ones setting the requirements, driving the project and reviewing its results. * The calendar allows Dec-Jan to define proposals between OSS projects and universities, official start in February (all participants invited to a kickoff in Facebook HQ) and end dates according to end of course at each university involved. The whole setup is a lot more flexible than GSoC. * Mentors define the project setup, channels of communication, reporting... everything. No Facebook or University X infrastructure is required for any project work. Their interest is that students learn how to the OSS community projects work in reality.
Compared to GSoC, I guess for the mentors this setup involved more project management (since you have teams instead of individuals) and less "teaching" and chasing. Since they have been preselected, the average level of students is supposed to high, and their skills aligned with the requirements of the project. Since they are in a team, there is more peer support and pressure.
We agreed to talk more next Tuesday. Basically, Wikimedia needs to decide asap whether we want to participate. ARGH! But... on the other hand we would have more time to fine tune the details.
On Monday the FOSS OPW selected participants will be announced, and we will know which Featured Projects at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects#Feature... are still ready for a gig.
We might start with one project with 4 students to try this program out. If you are interested, please reply and create / update your entry at the Possible Projects page.
- Would the students be using our existing code review infrastructure or
is something Facebook specific required?
They would use the same infrastructure we use. No Facebook requirements.
- Would Facebook be the mentors for the program, with MediaWiki simply
providing basic support? Or maybe each student would have a MediaWiki mentor as well as somebody from Facebook?
We mentor students. University tech contacts help us organizing teams and reaching out to their students if extra support is needed. Facebook sponsors and resources the program but doesn't provide any technical mentorship or support.
- What is the syllabus for the class? What are the requirements for
passing and getting college credit?
All participants in this program are Computer Science students. Mentors define the specializations required based on the requirements of the project proposed. Facebook and the universities find the best matches available for the project.
- Do students work on multiple open source projects during the class? Or
would they devote most of their effort to one project, and only contribute to others as an optional thing?
Each student participating in this program is involved in one project only. Nobody requires them to volunteer in other OSS projects.
- The document mentions teams. Are students put together in teams to
work on stuff? If so how large are the teams, and how does this interact with the previous question?
Yes, teams of 4-15 students. Maybe all of them sitting in the same campus, maybe in different continents. Mentors specify, the program does its best to match requirements.
All in all it looks interesting. My only question is whether we can absorb more mentorship projects. Then again, if we (the whole community, not only the usual suspects) want, we can. The format and the timing is complementary to the other programs we are currently involved.
Please share your thoughts.
On 11/22/2013 07:50 PM, Quim Gil wrote:
We might start with one project with 4 students to try this program out. If you are interested, please reply and create / update your entry at the Possible Projects page.
Interestingly enough, I /do/ have a project I'd be happy to put forward that's quite in scope if we'd like to touch on something more system-level than our usual UX fare: there is a serious hole in reasonably self-contained distributed cron-like schedulers in the open source world, and I can see a number of valuable uses for one in Tool Labs (and probably some spots in prod!).
I've had that idea at the back of my mind for some time, and I was planning on starting it myself but for the lack of actual free time. This is a very well delineated project of sufficiently modest scope that a small team of students may well be able to tackle succesfully in that kind of timeframe, and it's sufficiently generally useful that it makes for a worthwhile open source project.
Thoughts? Is it worth suggesting and putting forward?
-- Marc
On 11/22/2013 05:03 PM, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
Interestingly enough, I /do/ have a project I'd be happy to put forward that's quite in scope if we'd like to touch on something more system-level than our usual UX fare: there is a serious hole in reasonably self-contained distributed cron-like schedulers in the open source world, and I can see a number of valuable uses for one in Tool Labs (and probably some spots in prod!).
I've had that idea at the back of my mind for some time, and I was planning on starting it myself but for the lack of actual free time. This is a very well delineated project of sufficiently modest scope that a small team of students may well be able to tackle succesfully in that kind of timeframe, and it's sufficiently generally useful that it makes for a worthwhile open source project.
Thoughts? Is it worth suggesting and putting forward?
If you ask me, yes, of course!
Please add it to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects
If community discussion is needed/useful then a good idea would be to file an enhancement request in Bugzilla linked to the project description at the wiki page. Anyway we create reports for all the projects we bring forward in order to track them.
Thank you for stepping in with a project you have the skills to mentor but don't have the time to depevol yourself. That's the attitude!
On 11/23/2013 01:26 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
Please add it to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects
{{done}}
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects#Distrib...
-- Marc
The Facebook Open Academy program is interested in this project. As potential org admin I want to be sure that this project has community support.
Please leave your feedback at
Bug 57613 - Distributed cron replacement https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57613
On 11/22/2013 10:26 PM, Quim Gil wrote:
On 11/22/2013 05:03 PM, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
Interestingly enough, I /do/ have a project I'd be happy to put forward that's quite in scope if we'd like to touch on something more system-level than our usual UX fare: there is a serious hole in reasonably self-contained distributed cron-like schedulers in the open source world, and I can see a number of valuable uses for one in Tool Labs (and probably some spots in prod!).
I've had that idea at the back of my mind for some time, and I was planning on starting it myself but for the lack of actual free time. This is a very well delineated project of sufficiently modest scope that a small team of students may well be able to tackle succesfully in that kind of timeframe, and it's sufficiently generally useful that it makes for a worthwhile open source project.
Thoughts? Is it worth suggesting and putting forward?
If you ask me, yes, of course!
Please add it to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects
If community discussion is needed/useful then a good idea would be to file an enhancement request in Bugzilla linked to the project description at the wiki page. Anyway we create reports for all the projects we bring forward in order to track them.
Thank you for stepping in with a project you have the skills to mentor but don't have the time to depevol yourself. That's the attitude!
We have a draft list of project candidates for the next edition of the Facebook Open Academy program starting... now (planning phase, development starts in February -- see the wiki page for details).
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Facebook_Open_Academy
If you want to propose a project in this round you will need to provide the name of 2 mentors and a short description by Friday 6.
On 23/11/13 02:03, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
Interestingly enough, I /do/ have a project I'd be happy to put forward that's quite in scope if we'd like to touch on something more system-level than our usual UX fare: there is a serious hole in reasonably self-contained distributed cron-like schedulers in the open source world, and I can see a number of valuable uses for one in Tool Labs (and probably some spots in prod!).
I've had that idea at the back of my mind for some time, and I was planning on starting it myself but for the lack of actual free time. This is a very well delineated project of sufficiently modest scope that a small team of students may well be able to tackle succesfully in that kind of timeframe, and it's sufficiently generally useful that it makes for a worthwhile open source project.
Thoughts? Is it worth suggesting and putting forward?
-- Marc
Looks very good.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org