On 09/02/2010 16:43, Luciano Resende wrote:
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 12:19 AM, Ross Gardler<rgard...@apache.org> wrote:
How are we to collect mentor projects for GSoC?
In the past we have used a wiki page and had the mentors add their projects
to that page. This has worked well and is close to zero overhead on our the
admins part. However, it requires a duplication of effort for the mentors
and is not useful beyond the GSoC period.
Wiki page is simple and flexible, and the project template could have
a flag which says GSoC, ASF, etc
I'm not opposing to use JIRA, but I would like to understand why Wiki
would not be useful beyond the GSoC period.... is it mainly because of
the workflow ?
JIRA is already in use by most of the projects here so there is minimal
effort for a project to indicate that an issue is appropriate for a mentee.
If we get people into the habit of marking things up for mentees now
then that data will be available for future issues too. The wiki does
not get updated from one year to the next, so there are no new ideas and
no way of tracking those that have been completed.
Furthermore, we can expose data from JIRA to third parties much more
easily. Exposing data from the wiki is completely unstructured and
therefore difficult for third parties to work with. For example I am
working on a project in the EU that will trial mentoring in open source
projects as part of formal education. If we can easily expose our
student project data to them then we will get tutors to look after the
students in return for the project specific mentoring. That is, there
will be less cleaning up work expected of admins and mentees.
So there is less work in reaching mentees, less work on managing those
mentees, and less work for mentors in recording their projects of interest.
The less we expect mentors to do the more mentors we will get. The
easier we make it for mentees the more mentees we will get.
There is also a workflow advantage since projects use JIRA for issue
tracking we automatically get tracking against student work. I took a
look at Kathey's mentees issue in our JIRA today and immediately
discovered that he is progressing well since some of the issues have now
been closed. SO it's less work for the admin too.
Would it help if we happen to have a instance GSoC APP
for our mentoring project ?
That serves a difference purpose, it handles student application and
administration, it does not handle project definitions. We would still
need a wiki or JIRA page. Longer term an instance of the Melange would
probably be helpful but I'm focussing on GSoC now and how we might move
on to our planned mentor programme immediately afterwards.
Ross
