On 12/07/2010 16:20, Upayavira wrote:
I am now working for Sourcesense UK, who have made contact with a
prominent London based university. The university has a group of five or
six third year computer science students (on a four year joint
honours/masters course), and their tutor is looking for a project for
them for the October-March timeframe.
He wants it to be open source, and he wants it to be engaging with an
existing community, rather than producing something self-contained.
We have ideas about which communities to approach. As a part of my role
at Sourcesense, I will be available to assist with this project -
talking to the students directly, guiding them with how to engage well
with the community, etc. However, as I am not a member of or committer
on any of the projects that we are likely to approach, I will not be
able to be a formal Mentor.
Before sending my (already written) introductory mail to our chosen
project(s), I wanted to see whether there was anything I should bear in
mind when doing so.
Yes there is, thanks for checking with us.
I'm a part of an EU project that is going to bring anything from 20-200
students from across Europe looking for mentors. This will happen in a
similar timeframe (dates were set today at a meeting I was unable to
attend, I should get the minutes soon).
I am keen to avoid making work for potential mentors. If we end up with
the top end of that number coming it would create a great deal of
traffic for the projects to have to cope with.
Therefore, I want to encourage projects to mark issues that are
available for mentoring in their issue tracker, and then have the
students write a GSoC style application so that potential mentors can
quickly evaluate proposals.
In fact, there are already a load of issues marked up as such as a
result of the way we did the GSoC issues. See [2]
I certainly want to avoid go back to the PMCs multiple times about
overlapping processes. Perhaps we could announce both activities in a
single announcement of new mentoring opportunities and you could follow
that up quickly for your selected PMCs.
In terms of logistics of our programme, as with your work we will have a
number of staff providing first line support in the first language of
the students. We will have a lecturer and a teaching assistant for every
20-30 students. It is hoped that this will take the load of the
technical mentors in the projects themselves.
Exactly how this will all work out is still being defined. Once I have
the minutes from this weeks project meetings, together with the report
from my day job representative there (who is currently lurking on this
list) we plan to start discussions here about how best to work with the
ComDev project.
I think it would be wise for yourself and myself to work together,
preferably here at comdev, to make sure that we are following the same
processes and therefore minimising impact on the mentors here. When I
talk here I am, as you would expect, representing my ASF interests. The
day job project knows this and will be defined by what we decide here.
Do you have a timetable that you are working to? I don't yet, but will
have once I have those reports.
I did want to mention that your page [1] on mentoring in formal
education was a very useful read. Do you, as yet, have any students
following this process, or could this be the first?
No, this next run will be our first. I'm planning on expanding this
documentation over the next few weeks.
[1] http://community.apache.org/mentorprogrammeformaleducation.html
[2]
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?mode=hide&requestId=12314079
