On Saturday I was at an event run by the Graduate Developer Community in
London. I'm dropping this here so that concom/comdev are aware of some
of the activities that are taking place.
The event was designed to introduce graduates to open source and was
hosted at IBMs offices (nice place for a BarCamp).
There were about 40 students and 7 or 8 projects (5 ASF projects and 3
non-asf). From what I could tell most ASF projects were represented by
IBM staffers (Tomcat and Wookie being the exception).
There was a quick intro to open source in the morning, followed by a
three minute intro from each project. After this the students provided
three prioritised choices of projects they wanted to work on and were
allocated to a mentor from one of their project selections.
The rest of the morning was spent getting the students PCs setup with
the appropriate code.
Lunch was provided.
After lunch each mentor helped their students find a bug they could work
on, or helped them find som documentation to improve or something
similar. The goal was that by the end of the day all students would have
submitted a patch.
As you might expect this was not fully successful. Students are often
less able than we would hope and some needed lots of hand holding.
Nevertheless, over the course of the day 15 patches were submitted to
the projects. I'm not too sure what kinds of patches the other projects
had but for my project (Wookie) we had some Javadocs and a bug fix to
some C# code. In other words reasonably simple but everything counts.
As a mentoring exercise it was pretty successful. It remains to be seen
if any of these students continue to contribute to open source projects.
What is certain is that the students seemed to get a great deal from the
day.
Ross
- London graduate events Ross Gardler
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