Thanks a million, Pim!
You forgot to mention that a paper describing the language pair made it
to the EAMT 2011 conference, which I co-chaired, and you were the
youngest presenter we have ever had at this international conference.
And now, a request. If we cooked up GCI tasks to test and improve
apertium-af-nl, would you be willing to mentor?
All the best
Mikel
On Sat, 25 de Oct 2014 a les 10:06 PM, Pim Otte <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hello everyone,
Most of you probably don't know me. Those who do might recall I
worked on apertium-af-nl during the Code-In 2010. I thought I would
just send a mail to tell you about the impact you can make by
mentoring in this contest.
Before november 2010, I was kind of aware open source existed as a
thing. I used Firefox and had learned Python. I was aware that anyone
technically could contribute, but I had no idea how that worked, let
alone did I think I actually had the skill to do so.
Enter the Code-In. After doing some translation work for other
projects, I found something mentioning Dutch in the Apertium task
list. More or less by accident and Francis' tendency to think up new
tasks all the time, I rolled into creating the entire dutch half of
apertium-af-nl. I did not last too long on Windows, so I was
introduced to Linux. Again,
I was aware that there was something else out there, but how and
what, no idea.
Honestly, I had gotten started because "why not" and "wow, Google
pays money" (this was scrapped in later iterations). I continued,
because I really enjoyed building something and learning new things.
I ended up doing so many tasks, that at some point I realized I might
be a grand prize winner. This ended up being the case and it was huge
for me. However, I did not imagine at the time that getting a trip to
Google HQ actually was not the biggest payoff of the Code-In.
During the Code-In I had Ubuntu 10.10 installed on a VM. Some time
after, I got my first laptop, which has been running Linux for over 3
years now. I got hooked by the practicality and stayed for the
freedom and am still enjoying it every day. While I am no longer
active in apertium, I have found another open source project that I
contribute to when my hours are not being eaten by university.
What I want to say is: Not only is the GCI a nice opportunity to get
some assistance from eager young minds, but you can also win one of
them for the open source community as a whole. That's what you did
for me and I cannot thank all the mentors, but Francis in particular,
enough for that.
Kind regards and keep up the good work,
Pim
On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 8:12 PM, Ilnar Salimzyan
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hello,
I am going to be a mentor and plan to spend 1-2 consecutive hours a
day mentoring tasks/hanging around on irc.
Best,
Ilnar Salimzianov (selimcan)
2014-10-23 18:57 GMT+02:00 Mikel L. Forcada <[email protected]>:
Dear all,
as you know, "Google Code-In is a contest for pre-university
students (e.g., high school and secondary school students) with the
goal of encouraging young people to participate in open source.".
Google Code-In works "with open source organizations", such as
Apertium, "each of whom will provide a list of tasks to be
completed by student contestants. Tasks can be anything an
organization needs help with, from bug fixes, to writing code, to
user experience research, to writing documentation. The contest
takes place entirely online."
Apertium has been part one of the Google Code-In organizations
every year since its inception in 2010. Note that only about 10
organizations are part of it every year: it's a very exclusive club.
We need more Apertium developers to become involved. If we succeed
in our application, which has to go in before November 10, there
will be hundreds of tasks and hundreds of participants, eager to
get feedback on their work by email or on IRC. GCI 2014 [1] will
run between December 1 and January 18.
We need you to:
Propose tasks that you can mentor. We have hundreds of unfinished
tasks left over from other GCIs. You could easily mentor some of
these. But you can propose tasks of a similar size that may help
our project. Think of teenager-level, a-few-days tasks that can
help that part of Apertium where you are working. You can look at
task descriptions (and the interaction with students) in previous
editions [2,5] by typing Apertium in the Organization field. We
also keep task descriptions in the Apertium wiki [6], and this is
where you could propose new tasks. When proposing a task, think
about how long the tasks take to be reviewed or explained, and how
easy it will be for other people to review work. Note that having a
good task page at application time increases our chances of being
part of GCI this year.
Actually mentor tasks: this means being available to discuss tasks
with student, evaluate the results, and make sure results are made
available in our repository. This means you have to read your email
often for notifications and ideally hang around on our IRC channel,
although this is not entirely necesssary. Tasks can have more than
one mentor.
Volunteer to administer: there is some work involved in making
tasks available through the Mélange site: importing them,
classifying them, making sure they have a description.
I hope I haven't forgotten anything: past mentors and admins,
please add or correct.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Mikel L. Forcada
interim president of the Apertium Project Management Committee
[1] http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014
[2] http://www.google-melange.com/gci/tasks/google/gci2010
[3] http://www.google-melange.com/gci/tasks/google/gci2011
[4] http://www.google-melange.com/gci/tasks/google/gci2012
[5] http://www.google-melange.com/gci/tasks/google/gci2013
[6] http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Task_ideas_for_Google_Code-in
--
Mikel L. Forcada E-mail: [email protected]
Departament de Llenguatges Phone: +34-96-590-9776
i Sistemes Informàtics also +34-96-590-3772.
UNIVERSITAT D'ALACANT Fax: +34-96-590-9326, -3464
E-03071 ALACANT, Spain.
URL: http://www.dlsi.ua.es/~mlf
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Apertium-stuff mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Apertium-stuff mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Apertium-stuff mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff
