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.