Re: [Wikitech-l] Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

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Yaron Koren

3 Nov 2016 3 Nov '16

2:29 p.m.

Hi, I hit across this idea in the recent GSoC Mentors summit, and in the

...

discussion with Srishti and Sumit on the reducing usability and scope of GSoC/Outreachy projects[1] among the years.

...

*The problem* Students show up one or two weeks before GSoC or Outreachy, and propose a solution to existing ideas, and often end up completing it and leaving the project. Due to this, there is a decline in student-proposed ideas as well, given 1-2 weeks is not enough to understand Wikimedia from any direction.

I didn't really understand this. You seem to be talking about some or all of the following issues: 1) Fewer students doing projects for the Wikimedia Foundation as part of the Google Summer of Code and, I guess, Outreachy, than in previous years - 2013 being the high point. 2) Students doing projects that are less useful than in previous years. 3) Students not staying with the Wikimedia/MediaWiki after the conclusion of their project. 4) Students doing projects proposed by existing MediaWiki developers, rather than projects they proposed themselves. I see these as four unrelated issues, and actually I see only two of them as real issues: #2 I don't think is true (though I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "usability"), while #4 I don't see as an issue at all. Personally, I think only projects proposed by potential mentors should be considered at all, and that the documentation should state that clearly. I'm not aware of any GSoC projects where the student came up with the idea on their own and then executed on it successfully - with the exception of projects where the student is an established MediaWiki developer who happens to currently be in college, but that's obviously a special case. It's just not reasonable to expect that someone from outside the WMF/MediaWiki community would be able to come up with a project that (a) makes sense, (b) fits within the current development roadmap, and (c) is of the right scope for a GSoC/Outreachy project. More generally, I don't think there's anything less rewarding about doing a project that someone else came up with. In software development, as in most things, the difficult part - and the most rewarding part - is the execution, not the original idea. (There are various inspirational quotes to this effect.) That leaves #1 and #3 - fewer students participating, fewer students staying on afterwards. I think #1 is just a function of fewer potential mentors getting involved. Retaining students, on the other hand, is a real problem. I can think of various ways to try to improve this, though creating a new outreach/funding program seems extreme - it would take a lot of work, and you would presumably run into the same problem of a limited number of mentors. If there's money to pay for these kinds of things, why not just put more money into, say, hiring more developers from out of the GSoC pool? It's one idea. -Yaron -- WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting · http://wikiworks.com

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Tony Thomas

3 Nov 3 Nov

2:55 p.m.

New subject: Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

Wow. Thank you Dinu, Sumit and Yaron for the comments. Let me try commenting inline, without making a mess out of it. On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 3:29 PM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote:

...

I see these as four unrelated issues, and actually I see only two of them as real issues: #2 I don't think is true (though I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "usability"), while #4 I don't see as an issue at all. Personally, I think only projects proposed by potential mentors should be considered at all, and that the documentation should state that clearly. I'm not aware of any GSoC projects where the student came up with the idea on their own and then executed on it successfully - with the exception of projects where the student is an established MediaWiki developer who happens to currently be in college, but that's obviously a special case. It's just not reasonable to expect that someone from outside the WMF/MediaWiki community would be able to come up with a project that (a) makes sense, (b) fits within the current development roadmap, and (c) is of the right scope for a GSoC/Outreachy project.

You are right, and a student proposing a project few days before the GSoC project cannot make (a) sense and (b) fit anywhere. This is exactly why we are trying to solve. With such a program, the student gets in cool with the community a bit (as having a few months headstart), and we might even end up having students who might be able to understand the community to propose something that makes sense ? I know there is whole lot of optimism in there, but there can be chance. Like in my case, my GSoC 14 project on VERP was not a featured project, and strangely one day Nemo Bis talked to me about this while roamin around in #wikimedia-dev. I just think better connections and understanding of the community might even bring in better projects (too much opitmism there).

...

More generally, I don't think there's anything less rewarding about doing a project that someone else came up with. In software development, as in most things, the difficult part - and the most rewarding part - is the execution, not the original idea. (There are various inspirational quotes to this effect.)

Agreed.

...

That leaves #1 and #3 - fewer students participating, fewer students staying on afterwards. I think #1 is just a function of fewer potential mentors getting involved. Retaining students, on the other hand, is a real problem. I can think of various ways to try to improve this, though creating a new outreach/funding program seems extreme - it would take a lot of work, and you would presumably run into the same problem of a limited number of mentors. If there's money to pay for these kinds of things, why not just put more money into, say, hiring more developers from out of the GSoC pool? It's one idea.

This was indeed our concern, but considering the way FOSSASIA or KDE runs it, I dont think it might cost us that much (possibly underestimating). We might have a bit of trouble finding out enough projects which are of different levels, but once we find out that, assigning and a lose structure in mentoring might turn out to make things easy for mentors and students. Like we are not supervised by Google or Gnome for the same, and the program can run without hardly too much of regulations, and minimum rewards. Thanks, Tony Thomas <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:01tonythomas> Home <http://www.thomastony.me> | Blog <https://tttwrites.wordpress.com/> | ThinkFOSS <http://www.thinkfoss.com>

Yaron Koren

4:34 p.m.

New subject: Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

Hi Tony, Personally, I think only projects proposed by potential mentors should be

...

considered at all, and that the documentation should state that clearly. I'm not aware of any GSoC projects where the student came up with the idea on their own and then executed on it successfully - with the exception of projects where the student is an established MediaWiki developer who happens to currently be in college, but that's obviously a special case. It's just not reasonable to expect that someone from outside the WMF/MediaWiki community would be able to come up with a project that (a) makes sense, (b) fits within the current development roadmap, and (c) is of the right scope for a GSoC/Outreachy project.

I still think coming up with project ideas should basically be left to potential mentors. In your case, it's not that you actually came up with the project on your own, as in you saw a need for better email bounce handling or whatever it was; it's that this was a known problem, but no one thought to make it a GSoC project until you talked to a developer. Which is a problem, and I think it stems from the same apathy that has led to not enough WMF mentors. But I hope that there's a better solution for it other than essentially requiring potential students to become detectives, trying to find interesting coding challenges that no one has proposed for GSoC etc. Maybe the solution is for you and others to do this work yourself - talking to MW/WMF developers to find more tasks and drum up enthusiasm among potential mentors - essentially what you did before, but now as an administrator and not a potential student. -Yaron

Tony Thomas

4 Nov 4 Nov

2:59 p.m.

New subject: Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

Hey Yaron, On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote:

...

But I hope that there's a better solution for it other than essentially requiring potential students to become detectives, trying to find interesting coding challenges that no one has proposed for GSoC etc. Maybe the solution is for you and others to do this work yourself - talking to MW/WMF developers to find more tasks and drum up enthusiasm among potential mentors - essentially what you did before, but now as an administrator and not a potential student.

Thank you for the trust Yaron, but here we are talking not only about new tasks being up in Phabricator for students to charge upon, but to increase the quality of students itself before they start working on the project. Performance report of a student in that kind of a program even can make it easy for a mentor to better evaluate his/her proposal (considering past contributions matter). More than that, this would be one good option for post-GSoC students to still stick with the community too - as they can either participate, or even be mentors again. Yeah - we are trying to solve actually two problems here - (a) better community code review and codebase aware students before GSoC (b) making students stick back with Wikimedia after they complete their project. Thanks, Tony Thomas <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:01tonythomas> Home <http://www.thomastony.me> | Blog <https://tttwrites.wordpress.com/> | ThinkFOSS <http://www.thinkfoss.com>

Yaron Koren

7 Nov 7 Nov

1:31 a.m.

New subject: Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

Hi Tony, Well, I still think there might be easier ways of getting students to stick with Wikimedia/MediaWiki over the long term - one obvious idea is to pay students who had useful projects to maintain or complete those projects, post-GSoC - but nevertheless, if you're willing to put in the work to create a WMF outreach/mentorship program, I support you; I'm sure any such effort is better than nothing. -Yaron On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Tony Thomas <01tonythomas(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hey Yaron, On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote:

-- WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting · http://wikiworks.com

Nischay Nahata

3:43 a.m.

New subject: Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

Hi all, My 2 cents. I think GSoC or Wikimedia and schools/colleges don't reach out to each other in a proper manner. This leads to late and limited discovery of GSoC (only some students will know mostly when they stalk their seniors profile). So I think there has to be an effort to reach out to students early on, let them know about this programme, etc. This can be done by approaching through the current/past students and maybe the faculty. Secondly, I agree with Yaron that projects should be proposed by mentors. So we need more time from mentors for sure. I was lucky to have mentors who had enough time to discuss the project with me and help me while executing it. On the other hand when I was working for WMF as a contract developer, WMF engineers didn't have enough time to review my code (not blaming them though). Lastly, I will talk about sticking with a project or the community. Most of these college students will go for a full-time job and it can be difficult to contribute. If they are still not in the final college year you can have them as contract developers (as was in my case) and maybe full-time developers later on. Regards, Nischay Nahata On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 7:01 AM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote:

...

Hey Yaron, On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote: > But I hope that there's a better solution for it other than essentially > requiring potential students to become detectives, trying to find > interesting coding challenges that no one has proposed for GSoC etc.

Maybe

> the solution is for you and others to do this work yourself - talking to > MW/WMF developers to find more tasks and drum up enthusiasm among

potential

> mentors - essentially what you did before, but now as an administrator

and

not a potential student.

Thank you for the trust Yaron, but here we are talking not only about new tasks being up in Phabricator for students to charge upon, but to

increase

the quality of students itself before they start working on the project. Performance report of a student in that kind of a program even can make

easy for a mentor to better evaluate his/her proposal (considering past contributions matter). More than that, this would be one good option for post-GSoC students to still stick with the community too - as they can either participate, or even be mentors again. Yeah - we are trying to solve actually two problems here - (a) better community code review and codebase aware students before GSoC (b) making students stick back with Wikimedia after they complete their project. Thanks, Tony Thomas <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:01tonythomas> Home <http://www.thomastony.me> | Blog <https://tttwrites.wordpress.com/ | ThinkFOSS <http://www.thinkfoss.com>

-- WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting · http://wikiworks.com _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Cyken Zeraux

4:30 a.m.

New subject: Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

Nischay makes a good point with the disconnect between education and Mediawiki. A contributing factor to this disconnect is that Mediawiki isn't at all convenient for educators to get up and running. Thats just the software stack. Add ontop of that knowing how to install good extensions, such as Visual Editor and the Math extension, and you end up with a pile of sysop work that most educators just can't spend the time on. Commercial wiki hosters aren't particularly profitable and don't offer these features, either. I was working on a project that could resolve some of these problems, but Mediawiki is not made in a fashion that would make this maintainable between versions, and in the end would still require a decent amount of sysop work. This would be outside of getting students to code, but if Wikimedia wants to help solve the disconnect, hosting a wiki farm that is pre-loaded with features educators want, and allowing them to easily create wiki's for free (with an .edu email), would certainly do it. Add ontop of that a documentation wiki that is a lot more focused on those features, and how to properly use them, and you've got a two in one punch. On Sun, Nov 6, 2016 at 9:43 PM, Nischay Nahata <nischayn22(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hi Tony, Well, I still think there might be easier ways of getting students to

stick

with Wikimedia/MediaWiki over the long term - one obvious idea is to pay students who had useful projects to maintain or complete those projects, post-GSoC - but nevertheless, if you're willing to put in the work to create a WMF outreach/mentorship program, I support you; I'm sure any

such

effort is better than nothing. -Yaron On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Tony Thomas <01tonythomas(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Hey Yaron, > > On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com>

wrote:

> >> But I hope that there's a better solution for it other than

essentially

> requiring potential students to become detectives, trying to find > interesting coding challenges that no one has proposed for GSoC etc.

Maybe >> the solution is for you and others to do this work yourself - talking

> MW/WMF developers to find more tasks and drum up enthusiasm among

potential

> mentors - essentially what you did before, but now as an administrator

and >> not a potential student. > > > Thank you for the trust Yaron, but here we are talking not only about

new

tasks being up in Phabricator for students to charge upon, but to

increase > the quality of students itself before they start working on the

project.

Performance report of a student in that kind of a program even can make

it > easy for a mentor to better evaluate his/her proposal (considering past > contributions matter). More than that, this would be one good option

for

> post-GSoC students to still stick with the community too - as they can > either participate, or even be mentors again. > > Yeah - we are trying to solve actually two problems here - (a) better > community code review and codebase aware students before GSoC (b)

making

> students stick back with Wikimedia after they complete their project. > > Thanks, > Tony Thomas <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:01tonythomas> > Home <http://www.thomastony.me> | Blog <https://tttwrites.wordpress.

com/

| ThinkFOSS <http://www.thinkfoss.com>

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John Mark Vandenberg

8:45 a.m.

New subject: Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

This is probably a good thread to introduce a program we have been running in Indonesia called Besut Kode, funded by Ford Foundation. We noticed there were not many GCI/GSOC participants from Indonesia, and also not many Wikimedia devs from Indonesia, and are trying to fix that. We are using a competitive training program format, with eliminations and prizes, to ensure that we spend more time mentoring the participants with the most potential to succeed in the OSS world. The project has two halves, the first targeting high school (called SMA) students preparing them for GCI, and then the second targeting University students preparing them for GSOC. Between them we have had almost 1000 registrations. The participant list for both is at: https://github.com/BesutKode/BesutKode.github.io The high school program is entirely in private repositories, allowing the students to make all kinds of mistakes, and learn from them, with the goal being to submit a real significant patch an to OSS project. Six have finished the program, with merged contributions to real OSS projects, and a few more are likely to finish it before GCI starts, but have struggled to fit it in with their other activities. The program for university students is more public. The English version of the program is at http://wikimedia-id.github.io/besutkode/university-modules-en.html One of the features is that we eliminate participants if they are not active on GitHub every three days, requiring that they complete a small patch to a pre-selected set of repositories that have increasing difficulty and slowly moving them more towards GSOC relevant repositories. http://wikimedia-id.github.io/besutkode/university-activity-repositories-en… You can see their ongoing activity at http://tinyurl.com/bku-other-repos . In addition, they have to work on some quite difficult tasks, which they can work on together but must have distinct solutions. The first of these large tasks is public at https://github.com/BesutKode/uni-task-1 So far, nine participants have completed that task and are now working on the second task. https://github.com/orgs/BesutKode/teams/peserta-universitas-task-2 All of the program materials will be public and CC-BY after the competition is over, as is required by all Ford grants. -- John Vandenberg

Nischay Nahata

4:20 p.m.

New subject: Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 10:00 AM, Cyken Zeraux <cykenzeraux(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Nischay makes a good point with the disconnect between education and Mediawiki.

What I meant was: getting to know about GSoC and WMF is hard, compared to a summer internship at a company which comes to campus. I think GSoC is a good (in my case was better) alternative to interning at a corporate.

...

A contributing factor to this disconnect is that Mediawiki isn't at all convenient for educators to get up and running. Thats just the software stack. Add ontop of that knowing how to install good extensions, such as Visual Editor and the Math extension, and you end up with a pile of sysop work that most educators just can't spend the time on. Commercial wiki hosters aren't particularly profitable and don't offer these features, either. I was working on a project that could resolve some of these problems, but Mediawiki is not made in a fashion that would make this maintainable between versions, and in the end would still require a decent amount of sysop work. This would be outside of getting students to code, but if Wikimedia wants to help solve the disconnect, hosting a wiki farm that is pre-loaded with features educators want, and allowing them to easily create wiki's for free (with an .edu email), would certainly do it. Add ontop of that a documentation wiki that is a lot more focused on those features, and how to properly use them, and you've got a two in one punch.

I like this idea. This would actually help Wikimedia's mission of generating more knowledge available to all and also add more editors (Profs currently author lot of content on their self managed sites, which could be instead be a wiki on this farm).

...

On Sun, Nov 6, 2016 at 9:43 PM, Nischay Nahata <nischayn22(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all, My 2 cents. I think GSoC or Wikimedia and schools/colleges don't reach out to each other in a proper manner. This leads to late and limited discovery of

GSoC

(only some students will know mostly when they stalk their seniors profile). So I think there has to be an effort to reach out to students early on, let them know about this programme, etc. This can be done by approaching through the current/past students and maybe the faculty. Secondly, I agree with Yaron that projects should be proposed by mentors. So we need more time from mentors for sure. I was lucky to have mentors

who

had enough time to discuss the project with me and help me while

executing

it. On the other hand when I was working for WMF as a contract developer, WMF engineers didn't have enough time to review my code (not blaming them though). Lastly, I will talk about sticking with a project or the community. Most

these college students will go for a full-time job and it can be

difficult

to contribute. If they are still not in the final college year you can

have

them as contract developers (as was in my case) and maybe full-time developers later on. Regards, Nischay Nahata On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 7:01 AM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote:

Hi Tony, Well, I still think there might be easier ways of getting students to

stick > with Wikimedia/MediaWiki over the long term - one obvious idea is to

pay

> students who had useful projects to maintain or complete those

projects,

post-GSoC - but nevertheless, if you're willing to put in the work to create a WMF outreach/mentorship program, I support you; I'm sure any

such

wrote:

> >> But I hope that there's a better solution for it other than

essentially > >> requiring potential students to become detectives, trying to find > >> interesting coding challenges that no one has proposed for GSoC etc. > Maybe > >> the solution is for you and others to do this work yourself -

talking

to > >> MW/WMF developers to find more tasks and drum up enthusiasm among > potential > >> mentors - essentially what you did before, but now as an

administrator

and >> not a potential student. > > > Thank you for the trust Yaron, but here we are talking not only about

new

tasks being up in Phabricator for students to charge upon, but to

increase > the quality of students itself before they start working on the

project. > > Performance report of a student in that kind of a program even can

make

> it > > easy for a mentor to better evaluate his/her proposal (considering

past

> contributions matter). More than that, this would be one good option

for > > post-GSoC students to still stick with the community too - as they

can

> either participate, or even be mentors again. > > Yeah - we are trying to solve actually two problems here - (a) better > community code review and codebase aware students before GSoC (b)

making

com/

| ThinkFOSS <http://www.thinkfoss.com>

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Tony Thomas

7:01 p.m.

New subject: Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

Thank you Brian, Nischay, John, Cyken and Yaron for the words. You people are doing a great job by keeping this thread and idea alive. I would want to agree to disagree at places like - 'hiring everyone of them' or things like that. If we are talking about making people stick, the model I am talking about would be a *cheaper *option ? I just want to reply to something over here. On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 4:43 AM, Nischay Nahata <nischayn22(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

I think GSoC or Wikimedia and schools/colleges don't reach out to each other in a proper manner. This leads to late and limited discovery of GSoC (only some students will know mostly when they stalk their seniors profile). So I think there has to be an effort to reach out to students early on, let them know about this programme, etc. This can be done by approaching through the current/past students and maybe the faculty.

We are talking about the participation for an international event, and I dont think reaching out to every University and department would scale. Like, what can we talk - even if we have this hypothetical awareness camp to all profs and students ? It would be something like - If you want to contribute to Mediawiki, please do, and we have this shiny thing called GSoC, which can give you something cool on your resume etc. Better than this, if we have in event in hand, this thing can go really well - specially I am talking about the wide reach of it. People can just share links, sign up and participate. I really liked what John is doing in Indonesia - that program, when planned at the right time before GSoC or GCI, can have a huge boost to the number of applications and more than that, the quality of the applications. The number of spam proposals which we recieve each year, might even reduce. Thinking practical, if with little support, I feel that this program might be able to be a huge hit, specially in my home country - India, and if there is enough support, I might be able to even run a sample of it over there and see how the results change. I would need little help like, maybe few goodies for people who can show exceptional peformance and something for the grand prize. Thanks, Tony Thomas <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:01tonythomas> Home <http://www.thomastony.me> | Blog <https://tttwrites.wordpress.com/> | ThinkFOSS <http://www.thinkfoss.com>

bawolff

3:39 p.m.

New subject: Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 2:29 PM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote:

...

Hi, I hit across this idea in the recent GSoC Mentors summit, and in the

discussion with Srishti and Sumit on the reducing usability and scope of GSoC/Outreachy projects[1] among the years.

I actually disagree somewhat - I think it can be very rewarding to fix a problem that you yourself have, as opposed to fixing somebody else's problem. This is a traditional ideology about open source - that it is all about scratching your own itch. Although arguably most gsoc students coming up with their own projects aren't actually scratching their own itch but desperately trying to come up with an idea. However, if someone happens to be a preexisting user of MediaWiki, and finds something they find super annoying, I think that can make for a very good project. As for #2 - I think in recent years there has been more effort to make sure projects are scoped appropriately. This makes it more likely for projects to be finished, at the expense of making the projects perhaps less "useful" than in older years. I think choosing the lower risk lower reward path is entirely appropriate for a program like gsoc, so I don't think this is a bad thing. As for users sticking around - I think the communication around gsoc has shifted from "Here's some money so you can work on MediaWiki without starving to death" to "Here's a little money and a job so you can put something cool on your resume". If students are being attracted to the program principally to have something on their resume or for the money (To be clear, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that), its not surprising that they leave afterwards when the money goes away. If we want to attract people in the long term, we should probably come up with a better carrot. -- bawolff

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bawolff
Cyken Zeraux
John Mark Vandenberg
Nischay Nahata
Tony Thomas
Yaron Koren