GSoC Students,
As everyone should have noticed by now, there’s currently a service outage [1]
with our Sourceforge hosting provider where our mailing lists have been offline
since Thursday. (If you didn’t notice, that’s an indication you absolutely
should focus on communicating more…) Their issues are reportedly fixed and
services are slowly being restored, but I suspect it’ll be a couple more days
before everything is back to normal. Coincidentally, the reason I’m e-mailing
everyone is to make a change for the remainder of GSoC regarding
communications.
The short summary is to please, make yourself available via IRC while you are
working on your GSoC project [2]. Again, this reinstated requirement is for
the remainder of GSoC. If you’re not on IRC, it now implies you are not
working. Please e-mail me back directly (and as soon as possible) to confirm
you understand and to ask me any questions.
Note that this is a minimum. You are strongly encouraged to learn how to
leverage IRC properly so that you remain connected all the time (24/7 … 24
hours, 7 days a week), to use the backlog, to set keyword highlights that catch
your attention, to discuss while you work, to find other channels of interest;
to effectively collaborate, share knowledge, and help others. Our wiki page
[3] is a basic starting point, but you’ll want to get a real IRC client.
So you may be wondering, why this change now? Every year is different and
we’re constantly reviewing and adjusting our participation. In computer
science terms, it's run-time testing combined with incremental optimization.
We tried something different and it didn’t work.
This year, we did not start off emphasizing the importance of IRC, nor made it
a critical requirement as we have in the past. There were a variety of
reasons, but suffice it to say that the results have not been good and issues
really came to a head during evaluations. This has been a disservice.
Basically, we need to collectively and individually do better at communicating
(a social issue) and IRC (a technical means) helps enable dialog when used
effectively. To date, many of you that have joined the IRC channel have been
using IRC quite wrong. Connecting to IRC will not solve our communication
issues, it’s just a tool. However, just getting everyone to remain connected
so we can interact more frequently will make a difference.
IRC communications are the cornerstone of many open source communities. I
challenge each of you to learn how to use IRC more, to follow proper etiquette,
and embrace this GSoC requirement [4] as compelling motivation. Please do
confirm your understanding (via e-mail) and let me know if you have questions.
Cheers!
Sean
[1]
http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-infrastructure-and-service-restoration/
[2] Basically, if you add up your hours, you should be connected to IRC 40+
hours per week.
[3] http://brlcad.org/wiki/IRC
[4] This requirement is in addition to any communication arrangements you have
made with your mentor(s).
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