[Wikimediaindia-l] Wikimedia's participation in Google Summer of Code

[Sumana Harihareswara]

On 11/28/2011 08:43 AM, wikimediaindia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:12:41 +0530
> From: Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] IEP Pilot - Preliminary Analysis
> To: Wikimedia India Community list
> 	<wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<CA+30aUMO65Zcp8wULpcu7KJBBZE6OLkEVze6J70i5KfomFcVFw at mail.gmail.com>
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> 
> Hi,
> 
> Apart from studying ourselves, It would also be interesting to do a case
> study of similar student participatory programs and take best practices and
> incorporate them. Google Summer of Code would be a classic example, though
> its a summer contract, but some of the aspects are worth comparing.
> 
> 1. GSoC has a steep(okay relatively much higher) barrier to entry to
> attract the cream of students inturn the number of students would be
> significantly less.
> 2. Many students continue to contribute to the organization / open source
> in general beyond the contract
> 3. Strong staging process to cross the gates(merging the codeline happens
> mostly post final evaluation) ensures impact of the student does not affect
> the community.
> 4. Many communities are largely happy to participate in GSoC since they
> usually get contributors to the community.
> 5. Communication models that exist in the program, typically there would be
> hardly anyone from the city / country for that matter to mentor. The
> communication happens online inspite of timezone differences.
> 6. GSoC gives a huge money as motivation, but most students join the
> program for reasons beyond money though they swipe the cards :D
> 
> There are few students on this list who took the same program with WMF,
> they could share some insights too!

I managed MediaWiki's participation in Google Summer of Code this year,
and could talk with anyone interested in participating, anyone
researching it, and anyone who is curious.  :-)  We try to document our
participation on mediawiki.org wiki pages.  Some useful resources:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code

For some quantitative analysis of our past participation, Max Semenik's
analysis page:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:MaxSem/GSoC_analysis

The four Indian students from this year's participation were Devayon
Das, Yuvi Panda, Akshay Agarwal, and Ankit Garg.  You can read more
about this year's participants at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2011

But of course there are about 170 other organizations that participated
in Google Summer of Code this year.  Our experience might differ from
some of theirs.

Any student who is interested in applying to GSoC next year: now is a
good time to start learning about MediaWiki so you'll have a good
proposal when the application time comes in the spring!  You can start
with this guide:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker .  And
of course I'm happy to give help.

-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation