[Foundation-l] "wiki (usability) summer" - like google summer of code?

[Michael Dale]

I see Summer of Code is kind like gambling or a long term investment...

The metavid.org project was partially inspired by my SOC participation 
as a student for mediaWiki in SOC 06. While metavid efforts will likely 
not directly benefit Wikipedia until 2009. Metavid pioneered a lot of 
the technologies that are making their way into the software. For 
example archive.org shipping oggz_chop:
http://metavid.org/blog/2008/12/08/archiveorg-ogg-support/ and or the 
sequencer efforts currently under way with kaltura.

I mentored two students this summer, one for metavid under wikimedia's 
SOC. While its true as students coming fresh to the code they do need a 
lot of hand holding and it would have been more productive and easier to 
just "do it myself".  I see it as more an effort for community building 
and a future investment in getting people to think about participating 
in open source.
The other project mentored for xiph was mostly a failure.. but the 
project concept has been picked up by a community member and is now 
ready for integration testing with mediawiki upload system :) 
http://www.firefogg.org/

I think its fine to have SOC projects "fail" in getting code onto 
production servers while succeed in testing the waters for high risk 
areas and plant seeds for improving the free software ecosystem.

I think wikimedia should continue to participate and maybe avoid high 
risk by not committing core developers to be mentors. This should be 
more possible now that technical staff is expanding beyond a few 
stretched extremely thin people.

peace,
--michael

Chad wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com
>   
>> wrote:
>>     
>
>   
>> Hoi,
>> Last year Nikerabbit was enrolled in a Finnish Summer of Code project. He
>> did a ton of great work for Betawiki as part of this project. The Liquid
>> Threads project was a GSOC project. It is used by the WikiEducator project
>> and as such I would rate it successful.
>>
>>     
>
> That's great, but neither Betawiki nor WikiEducator are the WMF, nor
> are those functionalities being used (beyond the localizations provided
> from BW) within the WMF. That's precisely what this is about, making
> use of the GSOC-style of development for MediaWiki itself.
>
> When you look at our own bigger projects, SUL took a crazy amount of time to
>   
>> materialise, we are still not able to produce predictable data dumps. When
>> you look at commercial projects, at least 50% of such projects fail to meet
>> expectations. The notion that classical "in the office" projects do better
>> is not one I share.
>>     
>
>
> SUL required a massive amount of work to coordinate, not to mention the
> task of coming up with a model that not only works, but is scalable to the
> WMF's needs and also actually make sense. Good data models are essential.
> Dumps are another thing that requires careful work and coordination. Poor
> execution leads to poor results. It's bad enough having someone e-mail the
> list(s) once every month or two saying "new dumps please," but imagine if
> we provided dumps that were just inherently bad.
>
> I fail to see where you get this 50% of commercial projects fail. Without a
> reliable source, I have to assume you've just made up this number and have
> never worked in software development.
>
> When we are to do a proper job for summer of code projects, obviously all
>   
>> our existing developers are most likely to do the better job. Nikerabbit's
>> project is a case in point. If there are observations why such a project
>> does not work out as well as we hope, we should address those issues. The
>> most important thing achieved with a summer of code project is not only the
>> software but also the experience given to what we hope will be a developer
>> who stays with our project after his project.
>> Thanks,
>>       GerardM
>>
>>     
>
> Tim never said that GSOC is a bad model. Nor did he say that it produces bad
> results. He simply said that based on previous experiences, it hasn't worked
> _for us_. And it's true. Looking at last summer's projects, I don't see a
> lot of
> results:
>
> 1) HTMLDiff - ended up as a highly experimental, still somewhat buggy,
> disabled-
> by-default feature that was an i18n mess (and still might not be 100% fixed)
> 2) Category Redirects - what ever happened to this? Was this ever merged
> from
> branch to core? The branch hasn't been touched since August, at the least.
>
> A model failing in one use case doesn't indicate a failed model overall; it
> simply
> means it doesn't work in this situation. :)
>
> -Chad
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