Re: [Wikitech-l] GSoC mentors: selection process
Hi, a little detail I just learned. On 05/06/2013 11:42 AM, Quim Gil wrote: * But you do need to specify which student you select for the 1-2 projects you are co-mentoring. Agree the names with your co-mentors. You can't be in more than 2 projects, and ideally in just one. Google's Melange only allows to define one mentor per project (even if their docs recommend to have two...) This means that for the formal Melange part there will be one mentor appointed, but for all the rest we will consider both co-mentors officially. In any case it is good to make clear who is the primary mentor and this will be the way to reflect it. I will assign mentors in Melange accordingly, asking when it isn't clear who is the primary mentor. Sorry for the glitch, out of our control. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] GSoC mentors: selection process
On 05/06/2013 01:12 PM, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) wrote: I would like to provide some feedback, too: The whole process of GSoC was very confusing to me. Students communicated on melange, mediawiki.org http://mediawiki.org, and mailing lists. Some also emailed me and others privately. This scattered communication made me feel I was not able to properly inform myself of the feedback cycles a proposal went through. Melange not having any capabilities to show differences between versions of proposals, does not help - that's unfortunately not something we can directly information. I hope that the number of communication platforms for GSoC communication and documentation can be reduced in the next iteration, to make the process easier to follow to those that are supposed to comment on, evaluate and rank the proposals. You may be interested in this script http://people.freedesktop.org/~cbosdo/melange-mails-to-git It converts melange emails to git, so that should be able to give you a history of the proposal (I haven't tried it). If you miss something on it, try dropping a line to Cedric. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] GSoC mentors: selection process
Hi, long email but only for GSoC mentors and curious minds alike. WARNING: GSoC common sense requires absolute confidentiality about discussions or resolutions of candidates. You can't share any confidential information, no matter how evident it looks to you or how well you get along with a student or anybody without mentor / org admin access to Wikimedia GSoC. Google forbids explicitly any leakage of information before they publish officially the results on May 27. We can and we must discuss publicly our selection process, though. Ideally GSoC mentors would have a private call and discuss until deciding on a ranking of candidates. But with 38 people in different timezones, 47 proposals and ? slots this clearly won't work. Some organizations resolve this situation with votes, but I don't think this is a good solution in our context and the Wikimedia community favors consensus over voting anyway. Your distributed feedback on essential/desirable features has been very useful to make a first decision. Let's try a second round of distributed feedback to solve the clear cases: If you would be the only one deciding, how would you rank the proposals received (see the list below)? Please send me a PRIVATE email (not to this list!) with your ranking of features, ideally before the end of tomorrow Tuesday. * Read https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Selection_process (just updated) and act accordingly. * Rank at least the projects you would prioritize before the one(s) you want to mentor. All the better if you rank more. Don't rank based on the title alone. All proposals have mentors feedback by now. * No need to decide on specific candidates for the features you are not mentoring. It is enough to rank Feature X, without you having to decide which of the students proposing Feature X should be selected. * But you do need to specify which student you select for the 1-2 projects you are co-mentoring. Agree the names with your co-mentors. You can't be in more than 2 projects, and ideally in just one. Mentors are free to skip the ranking game and go directly for the call. In that case their proposals will be ranked based on the feedback from the rest of us. I will consolidate sensibly all this feedback on Wednesday, in a private document shared with the mentors. Hopefully some proposals will be clear candidates to be accepted or declined. Then we will also know how many slots we are getting from Google, and we can focus the discussion in one call or more with the mentors of the unclear cases. Should work. We'll see. The list of projects to rank: * Android app for MediaWiki translation * Auto suggestion of categories * Automatic category redirects * Bayesan Spam Filter * Centralized Search Engine * Contribute to Wikimedia * Curriculum Wiki * Entity Suggester for Wikidata * Improve support for book structures * Improvement of glossary tools * Incremental data dumps * Incremental updates for Kiwix * Internationalization and Right-To-Left Support in VisualEditor * jQuery.IME extensions for Firefox and Chrome * jQuery.IME next big release improvements * Language Coverage Matrix Dashboard * MediaWiki API 2.0 * MediaWiki-Moodle extension * Mobilize Wikidata * Pronunciation Recording Extension * Prototyping inline comments * Refactoring of Proofread Page extension * Section handling in Semantic Forms * UploadWizard: Book upload customization * VisualEditor Math Equation Plugin * VisualEditor plugin for source code editing * VisualEditor plugins * Wikidata features * Wikidata language fallback and conversion * Wikipedia - My Encyclopedia -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] GSoC mentors: selection process
Hi Siebrand, moving your feedback about process to the list. On 05/06/2013 01:12 PM, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) wrote: Here is my ranking (snip, thank you!) I would like to provide some feedback, too: The whole process of GSoC was very confusing to me. Students communicated on melange, mediawiki.org http://mediawiki.org, and mailing lists. Some also emailed me and others privately. This scattered communication made me feel I was not able to properly inform myself of the feedback cycles a proposal went through. Melange not having any capabilities to show differences between versions of proposals, does not help - that's unfortunately not something we can directly information. I hope that the number of communication platforms for GSoC communication and documentation can be reduced in the next iteration, to make the process easier to follow to those that are supposed to comment on, evaluate and rank the proposals. Yes, I agree. If it was confusing for you we can imagine how confusing it has been for many students. In the next iteration we will still have the same community channels + imperfect Google Melange, but we can do better at focusing the discussion I was very able and willing to follow all of your instructions from the below email and the ones on linked page, until I truly understood what following them would mean for me time wise. If I understand your request well, you are basically asking us to read all proposals, take 15 criteria and all comments into account, and then rate all *subjects*, not the individual proposals. I estimate this is about a day of work to do well. I'm sorry, but this is too much effort for me with this short notice. I've done the best I can with the time available to me. Mmm well, no. And I'm glad you invested maybe 1 hour instead of one day. Saying the project I mentor should go first! is easy. I'm asking mentors to tell what proposals they think should be considered before the ones they are willing to mentor. We have a pool of 38 smart people directly involved in Wikimdia GSoC mentoring and I believe your personal rankings will answer directly most of the questions. Of course you could spend a whole day assessing each proposal in detail. I believe you can go through the list pretty fast through, double-checking a few proposals that sound interesting but you are not familiar with. This quicker method has more room for personal mistakes, but if there are 37 other people playing the game I bet the consolidated list cannot go too wrong. Thank you for the participation and the feedback! We are trying many things here as we go. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
