Now that things seem to be settling down a little bit, I can send out a big thank you to all the mentors that jumped right in and started responding to students! This is perfect. In the first hour, there were more than 100 notifications, nearly 2 per minute. There will probably be another rush over the next two hours as students in the other side of the planet get out of school.
Please do not wait for me or anyone else to review/respond to a task if you are the assigned mentor. Remember the priority is to respond to 1) claim requests, 2) review requested, and then 3) comments/questions. We’re only three hours in and there are already completed tasks awaiting review by pandrei, H.S. Rai, Kesha Shah, Ishwerdas, and Dishank. :) Even if it’s not your task, any mentor can respond to tasks awaiting evaluation. If you have time available, please just jump in and engage the students or help define more tasks. For what it’s worth, I generally use a “three strikes” rule when reviewing tasks. It’s useful when there is room for improvement and the student has clearly spent less than 4 hours on the task. If they’ve clearly put forth effort and it’s just not very good, I’ll return it to the student with detailed specific feedback three times. If they don’t improve by then, they’re not likely going to and it’s usually best to just thank them for their efforts and accept the work so we can move on. This helps give some encouragement while giving them ample opportunity to improve. It’s a learning exercise, but it’s not meant to be torture. You don’t have to follow that same rule, but it might help some of you decide when to reject or accept a task that is less than impressive. That said, if the submission is impressive (and some WILL be), you should accept it and work to integrate it. ;) Cheers! Sean On Dec 1, 2014, at 6:22 AM, Christopher Sean Morrison <brl...@mac.com> wrote: > If you’re not a GCI mentor, you can stop reading now. > > If you’re a veteran GCI mentor, there’s not much different this year other > than what we’re doing to manage tasks. You can jump to TASKS below. For new > mentors, please read this in full. > > GCI is about to begin in just a few hours so be prepared for a huge influx of > requests, comments, and task reviews! This first week is always the busiest. > For those of you new to GCI mentoring, what will happen is that students > will claim a task and it is our job to assign all claim requests as quickly > as possible. They can ask questions right on the google-melange website, and > we respond there. The most dedicated tend to join IRC too, so it’s helpful > if you could be there too. When students think they’ve completed a task, > they upload their file(s). Mentors review the files and mark the task as > either complete or not. > > DON’T just accept their work! The participants are young and very > inexperienced. Be constructive but critical if there are ways their work can > be improved, especially the design tasks. Accept it when they’ve put in good > effort or they fully comply with the task description. If it’s code, don’t > worry about style but make sure it compiles and at least seems to be > functionally correct. If you test a patch / pull request and it looks good, > document the contributor in our AUTHORS file, add a note if it’s a > user-visible feature in our NEWS file, and leave a comment in Melange letting > them know that their patch was accepted and (if relevant) that they’re > credited in our project’s authorship documentation. > > You’ll become familiar with > https://www.google-melange.com/gci/dashboard/google/gci2014#all_org_tasks — > see the Columns button at the bottom to turn additional columns on (e.g. > Modified on) or useless ones off (e.g., Organization). > > Melange sends out notifications for all GCI activity via e-mail to our > brlcad-tracker mailing list. Note that it will be a LOT of e-mail (approx > 50-100 per day), so I suggest filtering into a mailbox that you can keep > separate from your regular mail. You can and should join our mailing list so > you can be responsive to the students: > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brlcad-tracker > > Note that this is a timed contest. We WANT to assign all claim requests as > quickly as possible. The faster we assign, the more work gets completed. > There are very few reason to not assign a task immediately — one being if > that student already completed that exact same design task already. > Similarly, tasks submitted for review need to be evaluated as quickly as > possible, within 24 hours at a minimum. You’re welcome to extend their > deadline if anyone asks for extra time, or ask them if they’d like more time. > If they’ve genuinely spent a lot more time and effort working on a task than > we anticipated, let me know so we can consider subtasks for them to claim. > > Remember that these are very young participants. That means you will all be > held to a very high standard of behavior. Please be courteous and helpful at > all times. Never ask them personal information nor discriminate. If you are > unable to uphold the standard expected for whatever reason, let me know and > we can discuss. > > TASKS: Huge thank you goes out to Jacob for creating a task management > system that is more efficient than melange. You’re all welcome to add > additional tasks or additional detail to existing tasks there. It doesn’t do > much input validation, so be careful (i.e., don’t delete anything you didn’t > add and don’t input bad data). The site HERE: http://brlcad.org/gci-dev/tasks > > Two random mentors get assigned to all tasks. At a minimum, please make sure > you respond to your tasks. You might not know the answer to the task, but > you should know how to get their question answered (and that shouldn’t be to > ask me). GCI tasks are engineered towards newbies, so this is a great > opportunity for new contributing mentors to get a lot of breadth and > experience. You can certainly respond to more tasks than those that have > your name on them too. Last year, Harmanpreet did a fantastic job keeping on > top of responses! Other mentors did great sticking to a schedule and > responding to everything in their time window. With even more mentors this > year, it should be even easier to respond without there being a huge burden > on any single person. > > Right now, we have about 150 tasks published and I have about 100 more tasks > to write up this week. We’ll need a few more (especially OGV, benchmark, and > modeling tasks). Remember to scope tasks so that they’d take someone > familiar and set up about 2 hours to complete. Single functions and features > work well. > > We need someone to go through our Deuces page and add any task ideas that are > not in the gci-dev task tracker. Note that tasks need to be defined one at a > time when there’s a primitive involved (e.g., implement curvature function). > For all tasks, the more detail you can provide, the better, and that includes > links to files and download/compile/setup/install instructions. This is a > somewhat decent example: http://brlcad.org/gci-dev/tasks/edit/72 > > If you have questions, please don’t hesitate! Thank you everyone for your > efforts. This is looking to be our biggest GCI year to date. We didn’t get > everything done like I’d hoped, but we have a lot of good momentum started. > Hopefully we’ll get those straggler issues sorted out this week (website, > patches, style sync, web tasks defined, VM updated). > > Cheers! > Sean > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! 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