On Thu, 2013-10-10 at 11:11 -0700, Quim Gil wrote: > I'm pretty sure that there is a task that most of us could mentor. It > doesn't need to be related with the MediaWiki codebase. Come on, think > harder! ;)
I organized GNOME's participation in Google Code-In (and its predecessor GHOP) three times in the past. == Stuff that takes time when preparing / taking part == What takes most of the time for admins is 1) before contest starts, nag developers and community members to become mentors and to provide a large number of really well-defined and well-documented tasks which are not too small and not too big, and 2) when the contest is running, make sure mentors respond quickly. Students could come across as impatient due to Code-In's competition system (students get points for tasks, you cannot claim a new task until the old one has been reviewed and finished, and students with most points get a trip to Google HQ. Last time organizations had to agree that reviews must happen within 36 hours, also on weekends/holidays). This nagging often took me about an hour per day, every day. But maybe rules / ToS have changed again this year, don't know. == Aspects to consider whether to try or not == In 2012, GNOME did not apply for taking part. The reasons that I see are: 1) translation tasks were not allowed anymore, 2) Google reduced the number of orgs to 10 so preparation work might have not paid off in the end, 3) time spent mentoring students took often longer than if mentors did the task themselves, 4) tasks only take a few days (no creation of strong binding to mentor/org), 5) students often didn't stick with the org afterwards but maybe were more after t-shirt/money/Google invitation. These are the topics that I consider important to discuss before deciding. Of course, the setup and structure of Google Code-In might work totally well for other mentoring organizations, or communities that are less lazy and have more (wo)manpower than the GNOME one. ;-) andre PS: Lydia of WMDE organized GCI for KDE in 2012 who successfully took part, so her feedback on this thread could also be pretty helpful. -- Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/ _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
