Re: [Wikitech-l] Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

[Yaron Koren]

Hi,

bawolff wrote:

I actually disagree somewhat - I think it can be very rewarding to fix
> a problem that you yourself have, as opposed to fixing somebody else's
> problem. This is a traditional ideology about open source - that it is
> all about scratching your own itch.


> Although arguably most gsoc students coming up with their own projects
> aren't actually scratching their own itch but desperately trying to
> come up with an idea. However, if someone happens to be a preexisting
> user of MediaWiki, and finds something they find super annoying, I
> think that can make for a very good project.


In theory this is true. In practice, I'm not sure if there has ever been a
successful WMF GSoC project where the idea was the student's own - other
than in cases where the student was already part of the MediaWiki
community. Which makes sense: if a student's only experience with MediaWiki
is, say, reading and writing wiki articles, then chances are good that
whatever they find annoying is something that many other people also find
annoying, and thus would have been fixed already if it were easy to fix.

bawolff also wrote:

As for users sticking around - I think the communication around gsoc
> has shifted from "Here's some money so you can work on MediaWiki
> without starving to death" to "Here's a little money and a job so you
> can put something cool on your resume". If students are being
> attracted to the program principally to have something on their resume
> or for the money (To be clear, I'm not saying there is anything wrong
> with that), its not surprising that they leave afterwards when the
> money goes away. If we want to attract people in the long term, we
> should probably come up with a better carrot.


Yes, this is absolutely the issue. I don't know if there's a lower
"conversion" percentage now than there used to be, but certainly to
convince people to do free labor for you, especially if their first
experience with you involved payment, seems difficult. That's assuming that
free labor is the ultimate goal, as opposed to, say, finding more people
for the WMF to hire. More on that below.

Tony Thomas wrote:

I would want to agree to disagree at places like - 'hiring everyone of
> them' or things like that. If we are talking about making people stick,
> the model I am talking about would be a *cheaper *option ?


I assume that's a reference to what I wrote, although I certainly didn't
say to hire everyone - I said "students who had useful projects". I don't
know which option would be cheaper - hiring some of the students or setting
up a new mentorship program - but the main question is really what the goal
is. Is it to get more free labor over the long term? If so, I don't know if
either option is that effective. Personally, I think it's great if such
projects result in actually useful software, and it's a shame if that
software goes uncompleted or abandoned at the end of the program.

-Yaron

-- 
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[Wikitech-l] Shared localized maps data demo

[Yuri Astrakhan]

I would like to show one of the projects that Interactive team has been
hacking on: localizable maps data (GeoJSON), stored on Commons, and usable
from multiple wikis. I hope we can get it polished and enabled in
production soon enough - so far, lab's beta cluster only:

https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Maplink-page
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Phabricator access

[Andre Klapper]

On Mon, 2016-11-07 at 21:28 +, Dora Winterstorm wrote:
> Your Phabricator email can be changed at https://phabricator.wikimedi
> a.org/settings/user//page/email/

That is correct but will only work for accounts that already got
verified by their owners. I'm afraid that's not the case here.

(For future reference, problems with Phabricator settings are welcome
at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Phabricator/Help )

andre

> -Original Message-
> From: Wikitech-l [mailto:wikitech-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Denny Vrandecic
> Sent: 11/7/16 12:24 PM
> To: Wikimedia developers 
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Phabricator access
> 
> Phabricator still has my wikimedia.de Email-Address and tries to confirm
> it's me by sending an Email to that address.
> 
> Is there a way to reset the email?
> 
> (The weird thing is that I seem to receive those Emails on my regular gmail
> account, but for logging in it still requires that I verify the wikimedia.de
> address? I am a bit confused)
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Phabricator access

[Dora Winterstorm]

Your Phabricator email can be changed at 
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/user//page/email/

-Original Message-
From: Wikitech-l [mailto:wikitech-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Denny Vrandecic
Sent: 11/7/16 12:24 PM
To: Wikimedia developers 
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Phabricator access

Phabricator still has my wikimedia.de Email-Address and tries to confirm
it's me by sending an Email to that address.

Is there a way to reset the email?

(The weird thing is that I seem to receive those Emails on my regular gmail
account, but for logging in it still requires that I verify the wikimedia.de
address? I am a bit confused)
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[Wikitech-l] Phabricator access

[Denny Vrandečić]

Phabricator still has my wikimedia.de Email-Address and tries to confirm
it's me by sending an Email to that address.

Is there a way to reset the email?

(The weird thing is that I seem to receive those Emails on my regular gmail
account, but for logging in it still requires that I verify the wikimedia.de
address? I am a bit confused)
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Re: [Wikitech-l] [MediaWiki-l] SecurePoll project needs your help

[Greg Grossmeier]

Looping in wikitech-l as well.


> Dear all,
> 
> SecurePoll is an important extension for the WMF community, yet not a whole
> lot of attention has been given to it over the years. I recently became the
> owner of the project, and would like to remind you that with the EN WP
> ARBCOM elections coming up, it would be great if you could help the
> SecurePoll project in the following ways:
> 
> 1) Review patches: we have a few outstanding patches that address key
> issues with SecurPoll. They await reviews, especially by those holding +2
> rights. Please spare a moment and review them.
> 
> 2) Submit patches: we have quiet a few open tasks for which no patch has
> been submitted. Please spare a moment on this as well.
> 
> For your convenience, here are patches awaiting review [1] and here are
> open tasks awaiting a patch. [2]
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Huji
> 
> [1]
> https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/project:mediawiki/extensions/SecurePoll+status:open
> [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/search/query/xlYokZ6kvoMd/
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| Greg GrossmeierGPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
| Release Team ManagerA18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

[Tony Thomas]

Thank you Brian, Nischay, John, Cyken and Yaron for the words. You people
are doing a great job by keeping this thread and idea alive. I would want
to agree to disagree at places like - 'hiring everyone of them' or things
like that. If we are talking about making people stick, the model I am
talking about would be a *cheaper *option ?

I just want to reply to something over here.

On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 4:43 AM, Nischay Nahata  wrote:

> I think GSoC or Wikimedia and schools/colleges don't reach out to each
> other in a proper manner. This leads to late and limited discovery of GSoC
> (only some students will know mostly when they stalk their seniors
> profile). So I think there has to be an effort to reach out to students
> early on, let them know about this programme, etc. This can be done by
> approaching through the current/past students and maybe the faculty.
>

We are talking about the participation for an international event, and I
dont think reaching out to every University and department would scale.
Like, what can we talk - even if we have this hypothetical awareness camp
to all profs and students ? It would be something like - If you want to
contribute to Mediawiki, please do, and we have this shiny thing called
GSoC, which can give you something cool on your resume etc. Better than
this, if we have in event in hand, this thing can go really well -
specially I am talking about the wide reach of it. People can just share
links, sign up and participate.

I really liked what John is doing in Indonesia - that program, when planned
at the right time before GSoC or GCI, can have a huge boost to the number
of applications and more than that, the quality of the applications. The
number of spam proposals which we recieve each year, might even reduce.

Thinking practical, if with little support, I feel that this program might
be able to be a huge hit, specially in my home country - India, and if
there is enough support, I might be able to even run a sample of it over
there and see how the results change. I would need little help like, maybe
few goodies for people who can show exceptional peformance and something
for the grand prize.

Thanks,
Tony Thomas 
Home  | Blog  |
ThinkFOSS 
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[Wikitech-l] 2016 Community Wishlist Survey

[Danny Horn]

Hi everyone,

The second annual Community Wishlist Survey starts today, and you're
invited to post proposals for projects that you'd like WMF's Community Tech
team to work on:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey

The Community Tech team builds features and makes changes that active
Wikimedia contributors want, and the Wishlist Survey sets the team's agenda
for the year.

The Wishlist Survey starts with a two-week proposal period, when
contributors from all Wikimedia projects are invited to post, discuss and
improve propsals. After that, there's a two-week voting period, when
everyone can post support-votes on the proposals that they think are
worthwhile. We end up with a ranked list of wishes, measured by the
participants' enthusiasm for each idea.

Community Tech is responsible for addressing the top 10 wishes on the list,
as well as some top wishes from smaller groups and projects that are doing
important work, but don't have the numbers to get their proposal into the
top 10. The Wishlist is also used by volunteer developers and other teams,
who want to find projects to work on that the community really wants.

So I hope that everybody comes and participates; it's an opportunity to set
the agenda for a Wikimedia Foundation product team.

We would also ask that you help us spread the word. Please do post on your
wikis and tell others this is happening, and that if they don't feel
comfortable writing in English, proposals are welcome in any language.

Danny Horn
Wikimedia Foundation
Senior Product Manager, Community Tech
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[Wikitech-l] Wikimedia takes part in Google Code-in. Which small tasks do you plan to mentor?

[Andre Klapper]

Wikimedia is among the 17 organizations in Google Code-in (GCI) 2016! 
GCI starts on November 28th. It's a contest for 13-17 year old students
working on small tasks and a great opportunity to let new contributors
make progress and help with smaller tasks on your To-Do list!

What we want you to do:

BECOME A MENTOR:

1. Go to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in_2016 and add
yourself to the mentor's table.
2. Get an invitation email to register on the contest site.

PROVIDE SMALL TASKS:

* Do your docs on your wiki need some improvements?
* Does your template or gadget code needs some updates?
* Do you have small and self-contained bugs you'd love to get fixed?
* Does your UI have small design issues?
* Do your old bugs welcome some testing?

We want your tasks in the following areas: code, outreach/research,
documentation/training, quality assurance, user interface/design.

1. Create a Phabricator task (which would take you 2-3h to complete) or
pick an existing Phabricator task you'd mentor.
2. Add the "Google-Code-In-2016" project tag.
3. Add a comment "I will mentor this in #GCI2016".

Looking for task ideas? Check the "easy" tasks in Phabricator:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Annoying_little_bugs offers links. 
Make sure to cover expectations and deliverables in your task.
And once the contest starts on Nov 28, be ready to answer and review
contributions quickly. 

Any questions? Just ask, we're happy to help.

Thank you for your help broadening our contributor base!
andre

-- 
Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler
http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

[Nischay Nahata]

On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 10:00 AM, Cyken Zeraux  wrote:

> Nischay makes a good point with the disconnect between education and
> Mediawiki.
>
>
What I meant was: getting to know about GSoC and WMF is hard, compared to a
summer internship at a company which comes to campus. I think GSoC is a
good (in my case was better) alternative to interning at a corporate.



> A contributing factor to this disconnect is that Mediawiki isn't at all
> convenient for educators to get up and running. Thats just the software
> stack. Add ontop of that knowing how to install good extensions, such as
> Visual Editor and the Math extension, and you end up with a pile of sysop
> work that most educators just can't spend the time on. Commercial wiki
> hosters aren't particularly profitable and don't offer these features,
> either.
>
> I was working on a project that could resolve some of these problems, but
> Mediawiki is not made in a fashion that would make this maintainable
> between versions, and in the end would still require a decent amount of
> sysop work.
>
> This would be outside of getting students to code, but if Wikimedia wants
> to help solve the disconnect, hosting a wiki farm that is pre-loaded with
> features educators want, and allowing them to easily create wiki's for free
> (with an .edu email), would certainly do it. Add ontop of that a
> documentation wiki that is a lot more focused on those features, and how to
> properly use them, and you've got a two in one punch.
>
>
>
I like this idea. This would actually help Wikimedia's mission of
generating more knowledge available to all and also add more editors (Profs
currently author lot of content on their self managed sites, which could be
instead be a wiki on this farm).



>
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 6, 2016 at 9:43 PM, Nischay Nahata 
> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > My 2 cents.
> >
> > I think GSoC or Wikimedia and schools/colleges don't reach out to each
> > other in a proper manner. This leads to late and limited discovery of
> GSoC
> > (only some students will know mostly when they stalk their seniors
> > profile). So I think there has to be an effort to reach out to students
> > early on, let them know about this programme, etc. This can be done by
> > approaching through the current/past students and maybe the faculty.
> >
> >
> > Secondly, I agree with Yaron that projects should be proposed by mentors.
> > So we need more time from mentors for sure. I was lucky to have mentors
> who
> > had enough time to discuss the project with me and help me while
> executing
> > it. On the other hand when I was working for WMF as a contract developer,
> > WMF engineers didn't have enough time to review my code (not blaming them
> > though).
> >
> >
> > Lastly, I will talk about sticking with a project or the community. Most
> of
> > these college students will go for a full-time job and it can be
> difficult
> > to contribute. If they are still not in the final college year you can
> have
> > them as contract developers (as was in my case) and maybe full-time
> > developers later on.
> >
> >
> > Regards,
> > Nischay Nahata
> >
> > On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 7:01 AM, Yaron Koren  wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Tony,
> > >
> > > Well, I still think there might be easier ways of getting students to
> > stick
> > > with Wikimedia/MediaWiki over the long term - one obvious idea is to
> pay
> > > students who had useful projects to maintain or complete those
> projects,
> > > post-GSoC - but nevertheless, if you're willing to put in the work to
> > > create a WMF outreach/mentorship program, I support you; I'm sure any
> > such
> > > effort is better than nothing.
> > >
> > > -Yaron
> > >
> > > On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Tony Thomas <01tonytho...@gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hey Yaron,
> > > >
> > > > On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Yaron Koren 
> > wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> But I hope that there's a better solution for it other than
> > essentially
> > > >> requiring potential students to become detectives, trying to find
> > > >> interesting coding challenges that no one has proposed for GSoC etc.
> > > Maybe
> > > >> the solution is for you and others to do this work yourself -
> talking
> > to
> > > >> MW/WMF developers to find more tasks and drum up enthusiasm among
> > > potential
> > > >> mentors - essentially what you did before, but now as an
> administrator
> > > and
> > > >> not a potential student.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Thank you for the trust Yaron, but here we are talking not only about
> > new
> > > > tasks being up in Phabricator for students to charge upon, but to
> > > increase
> > > > the quality of students itself before they start working on the
> > project.
> > > > Performance report of a student in that kind of a program even can
> make
> > > it
> > > > easy for a mentor to better evaluate his/her proposal (considering
> past
> > > > contributions matter). More than that, 

Re: [Wikitech-l] Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

[bawolff]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 2:29 PM, Yaron Koren  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I hit across this idea in the recent GSoC Mentors summit, and in the
>> discussion with Srishti and Sumit on the reducing usability and scope of
>> GSoC/Outreachy projects[1] among the years.
>
>
>> *The problem*
>> Students show up one or two weeks before GSoC or Outreachy, and propose a
>> solution to existing ideas, and often end up completing it and leaving the
>> project. Due to this, there is a decline in student-proposed ideas as well,
>> given 1-2 weeks is not enough to understand Wikimedia from any direction.
>
>
> I didn't really understand this. You seem to be talking about some or all
> of the following issues:
>
> 1) Fewer students doing projects for the Wikimedia Foundation as part of
> the Google Summer of Code and, I guess, Outreachy, than in previous
> years - 2013
> being the high point.
>
> 2) Students doing projects that are less useful than in previous years.
>
> 3) Students not staying with the Wikimedia/MediaWiki after the conclusion
> of their project.
>
> 4) Students doing projects proposed by existing MediaWiki developers,
> rather than projects they proposed themselves.
>
> I see these as four unrelated issues, and actually I see only two of them
> as real issues: #2 I don't think is true (though I'm not sure if that's
> what you meant by "usability"), while #4 I don't see as an issue at all.
> Personally, I think only projects proposed by potential mentors should be
> considered at all, and that the documentation should state that clearly.
> I'm not aware of any GSoC projects where the student came up with the idea
> on their own and then executed on it successfully - with the exception of
> projects where the student is an established MediaWiki developer who
> happens to currently be in college, but that's obviously a special case.
> It's just not reasonable to expect that someone from outside the
> WMF/MediaWiki community would be able to come up with a project that (a)
> makes sense, (b) fits within the current development roadmap, and (c) is of
> the right scope for a GSoC/Outreachy project.
>
> More generally, I don't think there's anything less rewarding about doing a
> project that someone else came up with. In software development, as in most
> things, the difficult part - and the most rewarding part - is the
> execution, not the original idea. (There are various inspirational quotes
> to this effect.)
>
> That leaves #1 and #3 - fewer students participating, fewer students
> staying on afterwards. I think #1 is just a function of fewer potential
> mentors getting involved. Retaining students, on the other hand, is a real
> problem. I can think of various ways to try to improve this, though
> creating a new outreach/funding program seems extreme - it would take a lot
> of work, and you would presumably run into the same problem of a limited
> number of mentors. If there's money to pay for these kinds of things, why
> not just put more money into, say, hiring more developers from out of the
> GSoC pool? It's one idea.
>
> -Yaron
>

I actually disagree somewhat - I think it can be very rewarding to fix
a problem that you yourself have, as opposed to fixing somebody else's
problem. This is a traditional ideology about open source - that it is
all about scratching your own itch.

Although arguably most gsoc students coming up with their own projects
aren't actually scratching their own itch but desperately trying to
come up with an idea. However, if someone happens to be a preexisting
user of MediaWiki, and finds something they find super annoying, I
think that can make for a very good project.

As for #2 - I think in recent years there has been more effort to make
sure projects are scoped appropriately. This makes it more likely for
projects to be finished, at the expense of making the projects perhaps
less "useful" than in older years. I think choosing the lower risk
lower reward path is entirely appropriate for a program like gsoc, so
I don't think this is a bad thing.

As for users sticking around - I think the communication around gsoc
has shifted from "Here's some money so you can work on MediaWiki
without starving to death" to "Here's a little money and a job so you
can put something cool on your resume". If students are being
attracted to the program principally to have something on their resume
or for the money (To be clear, I'm not saying there is anything wrong
with that), its not surprising that they leave afterwards when the
money goes away. If we want to attract people in the long term, we
should probably come up with a better carrot.

--
bawolff

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Engaging student devs with another outreach event like GSoC, GCI

[John Mark Vandenberg]

This is probably a good thread to introduce a program we have been
running in Indonesia called Besut Kode, funded by Ford Foundation.

We noticed there were not many GCI/GSOC participants from Indonesia,
and also not many Wikimedia devs from Indonesia, and are trying to fix
that.

We are using a competitive training program format, with eliminations
and prizes, to ensure that we spend more time mentoring the
participants with the most potential to succeed in the OSS world.

The project has two halves, the first targeting high school (called
SMA) students preparing them for GCI, and then the second targeting
University students preparing them for GSOC.  Between them we have had
almost 1000 registrations.

The participant list for both is at:
https://github.com/BesutKode/BesutKode.github.io

The high school program is entirely in private repositories, allowing
the students to make all kinds of mistakes, and learn from them, with
the goal being to submit a real significant patch an to OSS project.
Six have finished the program, with merged contributions to real OSS
projects, and a few more are likely to finish it before GCI starts,
but have struggled to fit it in with their other activities.

The program for university students is more public.  The English
version of the program is at

http://wikimedia-id.github.io/besutkode/university-modules-en.html

One of the features is that we eliminate participants if they are not
active on GitHub every three days, requiring that they complete a
small patch to a pre-selected set of repositories that have increasing
difficulty and slowly moving them more towards GSOC relevant
repositories.

http://wikimedia-id.github.io/besutkode/university-activity-repositories-en.html

You can see their ongoing activity at http://tinyurl.com/bku-other-repos .

In addition, they have to work on some quite difficult tasks, which
they can work on together but must have distinct solutions.

The first of these large tasks is public at
https://github.com/BesutKode/uni-task-1

So far, nine participants have completed that task and are now working
on the second task.

https://github.com/orgs/BesutKode/teams/peserta-universitas-task-2

All of the program materials will be public and CC-BY after the
competition is over, as is required by all Ford grants.

-- 
John Vandenberg

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