Dear all,
When discussing the need to support HiDPI displays, I brought up the idea
of joining Google Code-In. This is a much smaller version of GSoC, aimed at
high school students. Students complete small tasks and can get T-shirts
and other promotional items; the main part of the program runs from Dec. 1
- Jan. 19 and has just been announced yesterday.
We would have to register soon (registration of organizations begins on
Oct. 27 and ends on Nov. 12). The following tasks are eligible:
1. Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents
and helping others learn more
3. Outreach/Research Tasks related to community management,
outreach/marketing or studying problems and recommending solutions
4. Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of
high quality
5. User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user
interface design and interaction
It seems to be necessary to have at least five tasks of each type, with
over 50 tasks in total; this may be a challenge for us. Note that a task is
quite small, though, something that would take us 1 - 2 hours to carry out,
so a high school student should take 3 - 5 hours.
Tasks should be independent of each other, and it may be difficult for us
to come up with 100+ tasks as requested. Also, translation tasks are not
eligible this year.
In short, we would need at least two mentors of each category (to ensure a
fast turn-around even during holidays), and 5 - 30 tasks per category (by
Dec. 1). This seems like a daunting challenge. For coding tasks, we
probably have enough open things on the to-do lists (such as the feature
polls on the LyX wiki), but not so many of these may be feasible within two
hours. Note that "beginner tasks" can be used to help students familiarize
themselves with the code base, so some tasks may assume prior knowledge of
the LyX codebase.
What do you think? To me it seems like a lot of people would have to get
involved to "scale up" to the numbers that Google expects here. Probably
large organizations can handle this more easily. Still, it is good to be
aware of this opportunity so we can at least consider it.
--
Regards,
Cyrille Artho - http://artho.com/
Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which
millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
-- Nero Wolfe
