On 29/10/2011 02:38, Sumana Harihareswara wrote: > (What follows is MediaWiki community stuff, not technical discussion, > offered in the interests of transparency and collaborative planning.) > > TL;DR version: I don't think we can do Google Code-In well, so I don't > think we should apply to participate this year. > > Since MediaWiki has participated in the Google Summer of Code mentorship > program, we have also received an offer to apply to participate in > Google Code-In, which runs Nov. 21 2011-Jan. 16 2011. > > "Google Code-in is a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high > school and secondary school students) with the aim of encouraging young > people to participate in open source. We work with open source > organizations, each of whom will provide a list of tasks to be completed > by student contestants. Tasks can be anything a project needs help with, > from bug fixes to writing documentation to user experience research." > > http://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci2011/faq > > https://code.google.com/p/google-code-in/wiki/GCIAdminMentorInformation > > I have now gotten more information about what it's like to participate > in GCI, from organizations that have taken part in the past. And it > sounds like we just do not have the community capacity to do GCI this year. > > * I can't take the time to develop the task lists or wrangle others to > do so by the deadlines (applying by 1 November, creating big task lists > by 21 November), due to other commitments (another volunteer > development/mentoring program, India hackathon 18-19 November, mentoring > existing new contributors). And I do not believe anyone else in the > MediaWiki community has the capacity to administer our participation > between now and mid-January, either. Tell me if I'm wrong! > > * We'd need enough mentors on call to review the teenagers' assignments > as soon as they're submitted, so they aren't stuck waiting around before > they can grab a new task. This is for the whole two-month period, > including any winter holidays. Right now I do not think we can > satisfactorily guarantee that. We all have too much other work that > takes priority. > > So: it's a cool idea, but I don't think we can do it well in the given > time period, so I'm turning it down. (Unless you want to run it, and > can guarantee some mentors' attention! In which case, tell me ASAP so > we can get an application in by 1 November.) > > BUT: the number of participants we're getting in our Coding Challenge > (thanks, Greg!) means that if we want to do something like this > *ourselves* next year, on our timeline, we could probably get some > pretty good participation rates -- especially if we partner with > Wikimedia Foundation's Global Education Program. So let's come back to > this idea, perhaps sometime in the spring. > This upsets me, but I totally understand the reasoning for it... I was wondering when it'd next come around, and I was hoping MediaWiki/WMF would be in it...
I'd be interested to participate in something like it, providing of course that the Brighton Hackathon attendees have a heart attack at my newbieness (which could well happen of course)... -- Lewis Cawte 1 of 2 Registered Teenagers attending Brighton Hackathon _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
