Hi all,
I was very happy to be able to attend this year's GSoC Reunion, as I
could learn about a lot of other open source projects that I otherwise
probably would never have heard of.
It was also nice to meet Stefano, as I had never met any LyXer in person
before!
At the reunion, I could learn a bit more about Google Code In while
talking to Stephanie, who runs that program. To recap, to join we have
to provide 100-150 tasks to high school students in the following
categories:
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
The major differences to GSoC are:
* Each task should be "bite-sized", about 2 - 3 hours per student.
* We *cannot* choose students: whoever applies is eligible to work on
tasks (hence the need for so many tasks).
* Stephanie recommended 5 - 7 available mentors, although there are some
orgs where one mentor covers nearly all bases.
* It is possible to add more tasks later, but at least 100 are
recommended so an org does not run out of tasks too soon.
* Now it is too late to gather 100 high-quality tasks within just two
weeks; but we can take it slowly and collect those tasks over a year!
I also talked a bit to Joel, who works on a project that is of roughly
similar size as ours, in terms of mentoring power. He also confirmed
that collection tasks over a year makes it very easy to have 100 tasks
in total.
I think we could probably get some tasks for categories 1 (Code) and 4
(QA) from our bug database. Do you think it would be good to have a new
tag "GCI" for that? This would mean that the task is not urgent and
should be solvable by someone with little prior experience with LyX.
(Some experience can be provided by "beginner tasks", which any student
who wants to work on actual tasks has to do first to become familiar
with the project).
Other categories, especially 2 (documentation) and 3 (outreach) would
not suit the approach of tagging bugs. For this, we would need a new
wiki page.
I am not very familiar with that aspect of LyX; but I think that we
could also benefit from screen captures and videos being updated, or
from how-to solutions for specific tasks (such as how to import a table
from a spreadsheet, mark it up nicely with LyX' GUI, and then produce a
.tex file that can be included in an existing .tex document).
Do you think we could get about 20 small-ish tasks collected by next
November that way?
If so, please discuss if
(1) you agree with a new bug tag to mark small bugs that we'd like to
get fixed (or if existing tags suffice);
(2) you think we should put up a few wiki pages to cover all five
categories (for entries in the bug tracker, we can just provide a link).
I personally think it's a worthwhile task. We could even ask students to
help with integrating existing GSoC project code, which has not made it
into the main repository yet. If we maybe don't have enough manpower to
run GSoC again next year, we can perhaps try to join GCI instead?
--
Regards,
Cyrille Artho - http://artho.com/
Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot,
are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.
-- George Gordon Noel Byron
